Why I Moved Halfway Across The Globe At 22
And what happens when you say yes to absolutely everything at work.
When Relief Work Global offered me a job right out of college, I was very excited. I had interned with them when I was a junior, studying abroad for a semester in Amman, Jordan. I had really loved my internship, loved the organization and the people and the mission.
Besides that, they hadn’t offered me just any job. They had offered me a Really Interesting Job. I would be part of their six-person team that worked in Zaatari Camp in northern Jordan, the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp. RWG was launching a youth center in the camp and I would be part of the team that would help manage and grow it over time.
I accepted immediately.
I had misgivings about moving back to Amman after college. I’d only spent six months there the year prior as a study abroad student. That had been a stressful experience. Did I really want to move there? What would my parents say about me moving so far away (again)? How long would I stay? Did I want to leave behind my beloved friends and community, many of whom were staying in Boston, so soon after graduation?
But the job was too enticing. I also had no other job offers. My misgivings were overruled.
I spent one sweet summer with friends in Boston after we graduated from Tufts in May, then packed up my life and moved to Amman in August. I landed on a Sunday evening, crashed into sleep in my new apartment, and by Monday morning, I was at my new office for my first day.
I was as new, green, and inexperienced as they come.
Speaking Arabic semi-fluently was the one skill I had that qualified me for this job. It was the reason they’d hired me and the skill I’d need every day I worked there. RWG’s working language was Arabic and I worked mostly with Jordanians in Amman and Syrians in the camp.
Besides Arabic I had no qualifications for this job. I did not know much about the camp when I started. I knew nothing about how the humanitarian system worked. I had never worked with refugees. I was ill-prepared for the onslaught of case work I would take on.
Case work: by this I mean that refugees would come to our center with Problems. They would tell me about these Problems, and I would attempt to get them support through our own center or by referring them to another organization, school, or hospital in the camp. The Problems ranged from “I am undocumented because I never registered with UNHCR when I came here from Syria” to “my husband and I had a fight last night and I am afraid to go home today” to “the District 6 school is saying they won’t enroll my son because it’s too late in the school year.”
In many of these cases, it would take weeks or months to have a successful referral and resolve the Problem, the humanitarian bureaucracy not being a fast-moving one. In the meantime, I’d play a go-between role between refugees and my counterparts at other organizations in the camp until the issue was resolved — or, as often happened, was determined to be unresolvable, in which case everyone just went about their day.
But I was not — am still not — a social worker. I have a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations.¹
My reaction to being so ill-prepared for this job was to say yes to absolutely everything they asked me to do.
“Georgie, can you be the translator for the US embassy delegation that is coming to visit the Zaatari center on Thursday?”
Yes.
“Can you review the monthly budget vs. actual that the finance team will send over today?”
Why, yes I can.
“Can you attend the camp coordination meeting for us? With all the other organizations working in the camp. It’s every other week on Tuesdays at 11.”
Sure!
I would say yes to everything and then google it.
The result of this over time was that I took on more and more and more. I don’t think that, even once during my three and a half years with RWG, I said “No, I won’t be able to do that.” Or even, “I can do that, but not until next Wednesday which is when I finish the quarterly report and dealing with the upcoming donor visits.”
In the beginning my Yes’s were my armor, meant to hide the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to project an image of confidence and competence. But then I succeeded.
I succeeded so, well, successfully. I was both confident and competent, and learned quickly how to do what I needed to do. Then I kept saying yes because I was used to it and my managers were used to it; we were all used to it. I had contributed to a system that was set up to burn me out, and later, did just that.
So it was that several months in to my new job, my colleagues and superiors all the way up the chain to the top were used to me taking on every task they floated my way. And not only taking it on but then also hamster-wheeling like mad to complete it: working late nights, early mornings, whatever it took to get it done. And this, in an under-resourced, under-staffed and struggling NGO, is magic. It’s music to their ears.
I don’t think there was ever a huddle between RWG’s leaders about whether I should be in this role, and what I could or could not do. But if there had been, it would have gone like this:
“I don’t know. She doesn’t really have the experience… I don’t think she knows what she’s doing.”
“She’ll figure it out. She’ll make some mistakes, she’ll google it. She’ll be fine. And think about it: she said she could do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F and G tasks by Tuesday. Think about that.”
“By Tuesday? That can’t be right.”
“That’s what she told Baher.”
“Still doesn’t seem…well, let’s see what she can do.”
And, dear reader, I did not disappoint.
They gained their yes-person. They paid me $25k a year to do the work of three people. And I gained a ton of skills, fluency in Arabic, and a sense of belonging in a community I loved, as my colleagues became my friends. Later, I gained a mess of burnout and anxiety that would take me many months to wade and flail through.
I didn’t know at the time all that I would gain, hold, and carry from this work. I just thought I was killing it at my first job out of college. And I was hooked on the dopamine hit I got, day after day, from “helping”.
What did this actually look like?
This story is continued in my next post:
¹ There is a lot more to be said here about the (questionable) ethics of hiring an under-qualified 22-year-old woman to take on such work. Refugees deserve really qualified, experienced and hardworking staff at the organizations operating where they happen to live — a camp, a city, a tiny village — and I checked only one of those boxes. I will be writing more about this later.
I am using a fake organization name. I also changed the names of colleagues to protect their identities.
Thank you so much for reading! I publish all my stories here and on my own site, GeorgieNink.com. I also have a weekly email list: sign up here to get my latest writing straight to your inbox.
Originally published at http://georgienink.com on August 21, 2022.
