Colleagues

There are those from North London incapable of finishing word without adding -o to the end.

All this of course makes us question why we are here, and if we too are marked on a VSO file crackpot, send them to Bangladesh. Luckily there are enough normal people to suggest that this is not necessarily the case.

Added to VSO s cohort, there are of course my new work colleagues. And they are a fascinating bunch. There is the ED, who is a member of the Bangladesh Communist Party and who met Ortega in Cuba in 2000 on a delegation visit (or so he claims).

His CV is a list of student activism, including the save 110,000 trees movement . He pent 10 years at university and lists his occupation as activist and facilitator. He also seems to be leaving for Thailand to do a PhD.

There is the administrator, who is engaged to a Bangladeshi woman eight years his elder who lives in Calgary. They met on the Internet and have yet to meet in person. He spends a lot of time on yahoo messenger to her, and then made me speak to her also through it.

Her family apparently do not want her to marry him because they think he just wants a Canadian passport. Quite.

One researcher is quite old and unmarried.

As he says: a bachelor lives like a king but dies like a dog . He lives like a dirty king because he never washes his shirts. He keeps asking me to find him some Japanese fish importers because he is setting up a business with his brother to sell fish in Japan.

But he says that he cannot get fish big enough. He also responds to those spam emails that ask you to help out a rich African. I have tried to stop this, because it is not good practice, as the VSOB director would say.