“I’m mad like hell and I am not going to take this anymore”
I remember it very well. Must have been somewhere mid 1991. I arrived home late from work one evening. I had a well paid management function in a respectable firm. I lived with Tine, my loving girl friend. We had two cars, two dogs, a flock of sheep, chickens and geese, on our villa-farm on the Belgian country side. The future looked bright. Nevertheless, that evening, as I sat in the car on the drive way, I did not feel happy. Some things were missing. It felt like at the age of 30, I had just finished my life. The plans for the future were all laid out so well. Autopilot from now on. But deep down inside, I hated corporate life and corporate politics that go with it. I hated wasting two hours of my life in traffic jams every day. And getting up every day at the same time, seeing the same faces every day, and dancing to the tunes of the people at work. Working my butt off until I could retire. I hated the limitations my job and life put on me.
African music played on the tape recorder, that night, as I sat in the car for what seemed like hours. I remember it very well. Just looking into the dark night. Listening to the exotic sounds, dreaming of exotic places. It suddenly darned on me: “This is not my life. Actually it is not a life at all”. Life is supposed to be creative. Variable. Free. Filled with the laughter of children, working with people one likes, working when one likes, doing what one likes. Going to places one likes. I wanted to do things so once, old and ready to die, I could take my grand children on my knee, and close my eyes, and look back on a life I could be proud of. A life that was filled with landmarks of what I had achieved, things I had done and seen. Things that would have an impact on the people around me, a positive impact.
As I got out of the car, I had made up my mind. “Something’s got to change around here”. I felt like on the movie “Network”, where a journalist encouraged people to throw open their windows and to shout “I am mad like hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!”. Well, I was not going to take this crap anymore!
Breaking the chains.
The first sign of madness was my spontaneous decision to participate in an expedition to Clipperton, a deserted island in the Pacific. Decided one day, gone on expedition three weeks later. It was a spiritual experience. For the first time since very very long, I felt deeply happy. I sat laid back, in the middle of the night, looking at the Milky Way in the middle of the Pacific, with palm trees waving in the moon light, listening to the music of Enya playing in my head over and over again. Completely sun burned to the second degree, dizzy because of the lack of sleep. But happy. I was doing what I wanted to do. I found part of my destiny, it seemed.
Once I got back to Belgium after the expedition, my job looked even more dull than ever. I
needed another shot of adrenaline. The shot came one year later. Another expedition to the Pacific. This time, it was to an island called Howland. Guess you never heard of that one. Well, I did not neither. And what an adrenaline shot it was. A team of great people, each one still being a close friend today. A trip where I almost drowned in a stormy see. A trip during which I learned to love the Pacific. A trip where we lived on survival mode, using the very limited food and water provisions we had for almost a week waiting out the storm which made it impossible for us to leave the island with the small rubber dinghies we had. What more can one do to lead an intense life?
As we had trouble getting off the island, I arrived back at work one week too late. My boss schmuttered some remarks like “that is typical you again, is it not? Always trying to do the unconventional.”. Well he was right. And almost on the spot, I asked for 2 months leave without pay, for the next year, as I wanted to go to the Antarctic. He said no. I did the only sensible thing to do: I quit my job. That was June 1993. Since then, things have only been improving. Ha!
For one year, I did not have a paid job. But I enjoyed working home. I wrote a book. About past expeditions. Mostly for myself. And worked on the preparations for our expedition to an Antarctic island called Peter I (rather appropriate name, don’t you think?). Only then, I started to feel what the word ‘freedom’ meant.
We did the “Peter I expedition”. When I left home for the Falklands, where a Russian icebreaker would pick us up, I told Tine: ‘I do not know when I will be back. Might be in two or three months, but do not worry!”.
I still carry the memories of the Falklands and the Antarctic deep inside me. You had to be there to believe it. Life on Peter I was so intense you could almost touch it. The beauty of bright white icebergs floating in a dark blue see, with colours so intense that you have to wear sun glasses. And storms that wipe you off your feet. Talking about living your life!
Making a living
Many a time, life is determined by coincidences. The art of living, I think, is often to catch those coincidences, those signs and to use them as opportunities. One time such a coincidence happened. I am a ham, a radio amateur. At that time, I was a
fanatic ham. One weekend, we were operating a ham radio competition from a friend’s home. Paul, one of the other radio operators, was a friend from the Howland expedition. During the contest, he received a phone call from someone offering him a job working for the United Nations as telecom specialist. I had never even heard the UN took civilian telecom people. I thought it was all military. Little did I know. I talked to Paul about it, that weekend. It looked interesting. Was this the road to take? I could put my skills as radio amateur and professional IT expert, to a good use. Travelling, working with people, and at the same time work for the humanitarian cause sparked off a lot of day dreaming in me.
So a few weeks later, I also applied for a telecom job in the relief work. That was April 1994. Three months after our Antarctic expedition, one year after I quit my corporate job, the Red Cross sent me to Angola. I started the ideal job: doing radio stuff, travelling and working with and for people, was all I ever wanted to do. Earning a living out of it made me feel I turned my hobby into my job. It never felt like a job, though. Not even up to today. It became a passion.
Angola was my first trip to Africa. And it was an eye opener. I had expected a hot and humid savannah, with loads of wild life, and villages made of clay huts. Quiet nights with stars overhead. Instead of all that romantic stuff, I got an flat in the middle of Luanda, with plenty of noise from hundreds of television sets and radios, each one tuned to shout over the other. And machine gunshots blasting in the city the whole night.
But the job was exactly as I expected it to be. Telecommunications. Loads of freedom to plan my job as I wanted. Loads of independent work, with improvisations every day. Meeting lovely people. One day, I was driving off to a town in the middle of the bush, another day I was flown into a shelled and deserted town given a few hours to install a complete radio station from scratch, training people in Portuguese how to operate a radio. And no, I do not speak Portuguese. Talking about challenges... I remember one night I was climbing a tree in the pitch dark to hang up a dipole antenna, thinking how much I enjoyed this work.
Fifteen years later
We are now fifteen years following that one night when I took my decision to quit my well protected life and to go on a totally different route, Since then, I have done several missions for the IFRC - International Red Cross: twice in Angola, twice in Malawi and one in Ivory Coast. Later on, I took over Paul’s job in Goma, Zaire –now DRC-, working for UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The first two years I worked as a consultant, spending half of my time in Belgium, with Tine and Lana, our first born.
Early 1996 I was offered a job by one of the UN humanitarian agencies in Kampala, Uganda. Kampala became my base for four years. First I worked as a telecommunications officer in the regional office of our organisation. Later I was promoted as the head of the regional Technical Support Unit. We looked after a vaste area covering Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Congo-Brazzaville.
After a second expedition to the Antarctic in 1997, Tine and Lana joined me in Uganda. Hannah, our second daughter joined us too. Two weeks old and already in Africa, probably marked her as a life long traveller.
Mats, another fellow radio amateur, joined our team, and together we founded FITTEST, which over the years grew to be the UN’s fast intervention support team. Side by side we have assisted in most of the humanitarian crisises in the world since 1997.
In 1999, I moved to Kosovo, and then to Islamabad, Pakistan. Tine said ‘she would rather be alone in Belgium than alone in some remote country’ and moved back to our home base. I started to work two months on and one month off, shuttling between home and work. A good decision it seemed afterwards, as with its global coverage, the work with FITTEST took me to well over a hundred countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, South and Central America. The funny thing was that once I got home, my ‘girls’ wanted to travel, so I was never really ‘home’ in Belgium for the past ten odd years.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we started our office in Dubai, where I worked until 2006.
The office grew into one of the main UN humanitarian fast response facilities. Be in the midst of the Balkan’s crisis, the 9/11 fall out in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the tsunami, the refugee crisis in Darfur, or the Pakistan earthquake, we were always on the frontline of the activities, calling ourselves the ‘special forces’ of the humanitarians. ‘Fast is good, First is better’, was our motto. Work was always presenting new challenges and had many sudden twists and turns giving us sleepless nights and exciting days, to say the least.
In 2006, I decided to take a thirteen months' sabbatical, so I could spend more time with my family, and do a bit of sailing. Taking that distance, I realized that as years flew by, my path crossed that of many people. Many situations came up unexpectedly, leading to funny, sad, moving or weird stories. I started to write them down. Some were published in magazines, some I wrote as Emails to friends, some I just jotted down for myself and some stuck in my memory.
During my sabbatical, I started this blog as an eBook, as a string of these stories.
Mid 2007, I started my new job, still as a humanitarian, but this time working in our Rome headquarters. But the blog continued. I added some stories of the travels I did with the family, sailing stories, and later on expanded with news items. All of them form "the tales while travelling The Road", my "Road of Life", my "Road to the Horizon".
Early 2010, after almost three years in Rome, I went to the Dominican Republic to head the support office for the Haiti Earthquake for six month. It was my first emergency deployment since three years, and I felt like a fish in the water. A great team, a massive workload, and an opportunity to put things into perspective.
In June 2010, I decided to take another sabbatical. Needed to spend more time with the family, and wanted to try out projects I had in mind since a long time: expanding on my experience in social media I ventured into a new world stimulating the use of social media for different non-profit organisations. All while shuttling between the family in Belgium, my base in Rome and several field based assignments.
Eventually, I quit the UN, and for eight years, became a full-time freelance online media consultant for a wide range of non-profit organisations.
And then, in 2018, I got bored. I missed the thrill of working in the deeper field, missed running projects which were more critical. So I came back to the UN, starting up a new project to re-standardize the telecommunications safety/security tools used by UN and NGO staff world wide. What initially started as an adhoc try-out, rapidly grew to a solid (but small) hardcore team of specialists which, within a year or so, moved from "a try-out" to a permanent institutionalized service (and a "critical life-saving service", if I may say so myself).
It was a nice way to wrap up my professional path (some call it "career"): We had created a great team, ran a great project, with excellent support and buy-in from our partners,... But in July 2023, it was time to retire from professional life...
By then, I had been sailing for 20 years. Had already 40,000 nautical miles under my keel, with 8 open ocean passages, and for years, I had been training/instructing/mentoring people (for free), into the art of sailing and cruising... And a new door opened
Since the day I retired (well actually, I started a bit before that, as with any previous "career" moves, the changes came gradually, and I kinda slided into a new era in my life). I had sailed on many different boats. With many different crews. In many places across the globe. I have been lucky, to crew on some of the world's fastest competition boats at speeds any sailor can only dream of. But I have also been able to share my experience with new boat owners: people new to yachting, or cruising, or skippers who have never done open-ocean passages before, either as mentor, or even just as "experienced crew".
If I were 10 years younger, I probably would have turned this hobby -yet again- into a job - as I did with "IT" in the 1980'ies, "telecoms" in the 1990ies, and "social media" around 2010. But.. this time, it will not become "my job". Now is time "to give back" to society: I provide all my services, training and time, for free. As a way to pay back for the good fortune life has given me. But also because I fully believe that this will bring good karma my way: helping people discovering the true joy, art and science of sailing. The smile on their faces, after a rough passage, or a fast sail, being my true reward.
Once more, I don't know where I will end up, but I trust destiny to show me the right way.
A sincere thanks to Els and Ekram for the work they have done on the short stories, for their relentless editing, their encouragement and tips.
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
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