Monday, 30th November 2020
And now the end is near, and so I face the final…Zoom call. Not something Frank Sinatra had to envisage but such are the times we live in!
I was asked weeks ago to write a reflection of my time at Trade for this lovely newsletter and of course, here I am writing it at the very last minute because it has not been something I’ve relished doing.
An old friend of mine, knowing I’d just returned to the UK after a few years living in Africa, rang to ask if I could come to the charity he worked for and sort out the accounts. He had been running the agency on his own for a few months and was feeling a little out of his depth with the financial stuff. We agreed that I would come in for four weeks and sort out the paperwork in November 2002 and here I am, 18 years later!
Over the years it has been a roller coaster but I couldn’t even begin to talk about that journey without mentioning my partner in all of it, Salim Khalifa. He started working at Trade at 6 months after me in June 2003 and we have been a working partnership, like no other, I’ve ever had, since then. He has been simultaneously my best friend, confidante and office hours husband and we now find ourselves finishing each other’s sentences, emails and biscuits (well not during the pandemic obviously).
In fact, let us talk pandemics because at Trade we have been working with the HIV pandemic since our creation in the late ’90s, so its nothing new to us, just amazing to see what can be achieved when it suddenly affects everyone, not just a few minority groups. (Well I couldn’t do this without getting on my soapbox a little bit, could I). It is true though, when I started at Trade, HIV was a death sentence and now it’s a long term illness that has to be managed and looked after but providing you know you’ve got it and have all of the regular health checks, it needn’t shorten your life at all. Now we have PrEP and PEP, it's even easier to stop being infected, so things have come a long way. It has been inspirational to work at Trade and work with the staff, trustees, volunteers and most of all the service users and I will miss it, of that, there is no doubt.
My proudest moments have been many but would include qualifying as a counsellor in 2007 and setting up the Approach Counselling Service within Trade and since then witnessing real transformations in the mental health of some of our most vulnerable service users. I think one of the other things I’m very proud of is that we have faced a lot of uncertainty in those 18 years, usually as a result of funding cuts, and ridiculous tendering process that small charities have to go through, using resource and energy that takes away from the work we should be doing. When that process fails, it is even more costly and soul-destroying! Again I’m on my soapbox but why wouldn’t I be, its been 18 amazingly fulfilling, utterly frustrating, totally enlightening, hopeful, helpless, empowering, stressful and frightening years but mostly I absolutely loved it!
So thanks for reading this if you haven’t fallen asleep, I’m surprised and grateful. It is high time for a new team to take on Trade, love it and care for it please, it has been my baby (and Salim’s) for a long time and I will miss it, and I will miss our friends, allies, partners and “everyone that knows me” 😊
And so to end with more Sinatra: “To think I did all that; And may I say - not in a shy way, "No, oh no not me, I did it my way".
