Despite having known each other for many years, I did refuse to get married right after finishing college (university aka getting our bachelor's degree, his only 1 year after mine) until he got himself a job.
And I did help him, still on boyfriend status then, to find a suitable job, a great girlfriend that I was, and still is. I have to say that I found it so much easier to 'sell' him rather than to 'sell' myself through CVs and cover letters. In any case, I did find an opening that really suited him to a T and proceeded to process his application.
The job was for a research co-ordinator for a multinational
commodities company, and it required some traveling to remote areas in Indonesia and Vietnam as the commodities producing area. I remembered emphasizing in both his CV and cover letter his years as boy scout (useful for traveling to remote areas) as well as his being an Indonesian as valuable assets.
Of course, I hit the nail on the head, he got the job, and everything that I mentioned in the CV indeed became very useful asset.
Speaking the local lingo, he managed to coordinate his travels well, communicating with ease with the local farmers and various authorities, plumbing the depth of available resources in the local government offices (information sources that was utilized by neither his predecessor nor his successor, as it was), and so on, and so on.
Well, his status got changed to be my husband before he went for his first trip (cos with the job in hand, his application for marriage finally got my approval), but through his years in the company doing the job (not very many years, but still), I really felt like a proud mummy.
Silly, isn't it?
But I guess I'm just happy to really recognize his good points, sell them to his employers, and see them really being utilized. My husband being happy with the challenges and bringing home the bacon are perfect icing on the cake.
But back to the 2 articles mentioned at the beginning of the post, I guess the point that I am trying to make is that if you were ever to organize any kind of venture abroad, it's good to have someone with local knowledge firmly on your side. You can hire a translator, but... that's a huge minefield in itself, isn't it? Just take the example from the Economist article, what if the translator is not as good as he claim to be? How do you check for credibility? And then of course you are only as good as your translator. You might have a good idea of which government agency you want to go to, but if the translator never heard of such an agency, you're kind of fried.
I don't think I am explaining things very clearly. Hmm.. yeah, improving my writing skills falls under the category of reasons why I want to keep a blog.
In any case, from comparison between my husband's experience and stories of his predecessor (who was quite a foreigner in Indonesia), I think the amount resources that my husband managed to gather was remarkably more than what his predecessor had to do with. There might also be the difference in capabilities, but I like to think that my husband's local knowledge did help.
What do you think?
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