Unemployed Once Again

After five months with Villes en Transition here in Viet Nam, I am once again unemployed. The organization had installed a new Head of Mission to take over the organization in October and fortunately (or unfortunately depending on where you stand) she was quite good at her job and through an initial audit, found that the organization had be overspending and spending money it didn't have, leaving us in a situation where we had projects planned, but no funds to fund them.
After months of scrambling to obtain funding, restructure the organization to make it more presentable to future donor and wrapping up current projects in anticipation of a suspension in activities until more funding could be obtained, the head office in France realized that the problem was bigger than they had anticipated and the most responsible thing to do would be to close the office in Viet Nam and eventually dissolve the organization. So after 15 years of successful projects in Viet Nam, and five months of my involvement, VeT Viet Nam, closed it's doors.

We were all sad to see the organization close, not only for the beneficiaries of the projects and for our own impending unemployment, but also because our small team had really worked well together over the past five months and we all enjoyed working together and would miss being able to get together on a regular basis. On our last day, we went out for a staff lunch at a fancy seafood restaurant, courtesy of the VeT head office and drowned our sorrows in flaming coconut shrimp, seafood spring rolls, tamarind crab, baked scallops with cheese and grilled squid. It was all delicious and bittersweet and we parted with promises to stay in touch and meet up again soon.