Partnership

Some of the singles having a night of Indian food and dress ups

The mass of single women in this organisation each find their own way to manage alone in a foreign place. At Ukarumpa it is easier, as you can choose to share a house or to have one to yourself. You can choose to join in group events or to spend quiet evenings at home. Your work as part of a department and together you form a team. You end up being adopted into families so that you are not alone.

For those of us who are translators working in villages the challenges are different. Although we enjoy the support of Ukarumpa between village visits, our work situation is very different. It is distant, intense and isolated. Some choose to work as the only expat in a language project, most try to find another single woman to form a work partnership with. Some establish a partnership, then end up working alone as health, life and home situations…and sometimes marriage… cause the other woman to leave the project.

Traditionally, translators assigned to one language for life, working twenty years in a single place. The partnerships these women formed were intense, forged through decades of trials. How translation happens has been changing and so have work partnerships. Increasingly, languages are brought together in cluster projects and nationals given the training to carry the bulk of the translation work. Ex-pats have taken on more of an advisor role and although they ideally still ‘anchor’ in a single language community, they spend less time there in the long term than the ‘classic’ teams. This takes a lot of the pressure off their partnership.

Talking about partnership is hard. In a world where marriage is being redefined, people easily make wrong assumptions. The partnership I am talking about is a work relationship plus a friendship. Sure, it often becomes a very close friendship, but it is not a relationship in the marriage sense.

Working out who to partner with is hard. Firstly I have had to get my head around the fact that it is not as intense as it used to be. I can partner with someone for a term (2-4 years) and then review afterwards if the relationship still works and where the language programme is at. Previously, village teams were very isolated, with HF radio their only outside contact. Now, teams can get email via HF radio and mobile coverage is swiftly spreading across the country, bringing internet access with it.

Still, even with the pressure taken off, I want to partner with someone I can both work well with and be friends with. Maybe it is not as full on as previously, but working together in a team can still be an intense and isolated situation which you want to enter into with someone you trust. All my years of house sharing on land and cabin sharing at sea have given me a skill set to live with people I don’t necessarily consider myself close to, as well as the skills to quickly assess who I will enjoy living and working with, as well as who I’ll be happy to farewell.

These skills, along with discussion with friends and plenty of prayer see me on the path to establishing a work partnership, but it is something that still needs field testing before we allocate to a project. This testing will probably be in the form of pre-allocation trips and workshops in places we are looking at for the lone term. As I narrow down the partner-list to a likely option, the allocation list is wide open and I find myself yet again looking at the future and having to decide which one of many good paths to walk.