April 8

This is the name of this blog entry since I have so much to write about that no other title would make sense. This is a publication to take stock on what's been up in my life recently, and that I have been postponing writing just because. In fact, I should be postponing again today as I got an abscess removed yesterday on my left arm that got me on sick leave for the week but hey - you can always find excuses not to do stuff.

I haven't written yet about my trip to Ivory Coast, and thus I think I'll start with that. It was on the last week of January to visit irmão Nick in Abidjan, and my first time in Africa. I gotta say, first of all, I was really pop-eyed by the level of colonization of this country. For starters: what the fuck is *the* ivory coast? What kind of independent country calls itself the name the colonizer gave them because it saw them as no more than a place to steal ivory from the locals and to make money out of it? Burkina Faso, up north and the country of Thomas Sankara - the leftist, feminist leader barbarously killed because he wouldn't bend to the French and the Americans - changed their name from Haute Volta to "Land of Incorruptible People" after independence. But I mean, obviously, the locals know better how they want to be called so this is just my (very limited) understanding.

In Ivory Coast, the independentist leader and first president took the notion of representing to the next level. Do you know how rappers go like "yeah this is Queen's motherfucker" or "I'm from Compton, California"? Anti-communist Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who following Wikipedia is a "suspect" of having played a role in the coup that took down Sankara right across the border, was born in Yamoussoukro and was like "everybody should think my hometown is as dope as I think it is". That's why, even today, almost 30 years since his death, every national and international organisation may be in Abidjan but "Yakro" - as the locals call it - is still the capital, with its slightly-bigger-than-the-Vatican cathedral.

We were in Yakro on the day Ivory Coast played Egypt for the quarters of CAN, a competition that taught me two things about 1) the mentality of, at least, the Ivorians in general and 2) football in Africa. First, we watched it together with locals on this terrace, everybody having fun and was passionate about the match, calling us "les blancs"... And then, the match goes to penalties, everybody is stressed, then "we" unfortunately lose and they stay 5 seconds (if that many) sad-ish only to then be like "whatever, life goes on". In Portugal, people would be minimum the rest of the day upset and sad and depressed.

The second thing I learned was the role that, indeed, football plays in being more than just a game. I never liked this mentality back in Europe because, in the end, if football is not just a game nowadays it's because it became all about the money. However, seeing Nick's neighbourhood celebrating in the streets, with fireworks in the skies, "only" because Burkina Faso qualified for the semis was staggering really. In Portugal, we would never, ever, celebrate Spain qualifying for anything. It really is more than just a game.

There's a lot I can talk about from the trip, however, I'll limit this first part of the story to when I got a positive test for malaria. I say it like that because I did a second one two days later and then another back in Lisbon and both were negative, however, I had the symptoms while in Yakro: nausea, shivers, hot-and-colds, a bit of a fever, walking in the street and start puking, not being able to sleep unless with my belly turning up and, overall, just feeling like I'd rather die. Luckily I had good insurance (one time for IATI) and Nick was there being a true homie. About this, in particular, we had quite a friction some days later when we went to a College of Europe (CoE) alumni meeting at... the Belgian Embassy to the Ivory Coast, in Abidjan. The Ambassador is a former CoE alumnus from 20 years ago and invited us and others in town to have this meeting at his place, which was yet another first experience for me. And it was great because I took it as it was: an informal meeting between people that studied at the same place. I treated the Ambassador as "vous" because, and obviously, he's an Ambassador and we are at his place, but I'm neither Belgian nor Ivorian: therefore, I'm there to meet a CoE alumnus, not an ambassador. I understand, however, that this isn't everyone's opinion and that the diplomatic world relies on protocol and untold rules. This is why we had an argument over that, but in the end, I think that I at least, learned from it. And I guess it's different when you see somewhere as your workplace instead of your holiday place as I did.

I then had huge stress about needing to have a negative covid-19 PCR test to return home - likely because they are afraid the West will unfairly close borders again with an African country that is honest about its numbers -, first because it took ages to arrive, then because it was positive, in the meantime my insurance put me in a hotel where I met this very nice receptionist and we still had time to go for a date, and then, at last, I managed to return to Portugal already in February. Then, I took the CAST exam in the middle of the month - the competency-based exam you need to join the EU institutions with a contract and I passed, which is something I'll come up to in a bit. This is just to say that, in the meantime, I moved to Brussels to work as intérimaire (for now) at DG Energy, being really at the center of the European energy policy - which is at the center of the EU's foreign policy overall, given the barbaric and criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Now that I'm back living in Brussels, a place I already knew very well from my Erasmus, it feels like home really. Still trying to solve some things, both here and back in Portugal, but overall it's going pretty great. I took a CAST exam again almost three weeks ago, for another competence, which I passed again and this is the first thing I wanna share: following an already-visible trend on my blog, I tend to refer to Kendrick's song often and on FAITH. he talks about how he's afraid he will lose his creativity, which is his breadwinning. I think I can relate to it in the sense that, sometimes, and given my path at the CoE, and now my career at the institutions, all of these evaluations that I have been nailing - somehow I feel like one day I may wake up and just not know these things anymore, for some reason (amnesia, whatever). This is clearly a very first-world problem, but it's thoughts I sometimes have that makes me really value more and more what I have.

Also, if being in Brussels as an engineering student had already triggered me to be politically stimulated, now that I am working in policy it definitely does it even more. Having become a climate activist for the past months (although I often do not like to call myself that way as my actions are not as "hands-on" as, say, Greta Thunberg or Xiye Bastida), there are things that I currently reflect on more, and especially for being close to really interesting and awesome people that think alike. And it is very hypocritical, for example, how we have been spending almost a decade arguing we have "no space" for war refugees and now, suddenly we do for Ukrainians. We have job offers specifically for Ukrainians. And I don't even want to consider the possibility of being misinterpreted but, in case it happens, my point is that, and clearly, we have space, work possibilities, everything for every human being in the world. What we didn't have before was empathy, and it would be good if we critically look at our leaders now. It's not right to blatantly say "now they look like us so we'll help us". First, it's borderline eugenia. Second, even in the parallel dimension of psychopathy where that's a valid argument, I personally even look more Syrian than Ukrainian. So no, refugees welcome, no human being is illegal, war must end everywhere and Slava Ukraina.

Finally, just a reflection I have been having for a while but that I never put into words on this blog: as late-stage capitalism evolves, we are reaching a period in a society where we become even more and more unequal, and even more and more having a big chunk of the population serving a small portion of it. I'm talking about the growth of Uber (Eats) jobs, where literally these people work in very shitty conditions and their job is to satisfy the whims of some of us. But this is also visible on a bigger scale, for example how I see most of my former engineering colleagues graduating and then going to work in IT. I am, naturally, not talking about those who did Informatics, but instead Chemical, Physics, Biomedical, Mechanical engineers that see the market as forcing them to follow the path that the market always does: the one that maximises wealth for those who control the means of production. I'll write more and better about this in the future, I hope.

Be safe,