XUNICEF News and Views

When I retired and settled in Malaysia, we got busy with renovating the house, with developing a garden and with consultancy work. By the time the house and garden were in reasonable shape and after I decided to stop with consultancies, I turned to my hobbies for which there was never enough time, such as pursuing my skills as a flute player (classical European), history and literature, fine carpentry and the building of a sailboat.   ------------------------- Editor's note: We published an earlier article by Ronald in our Quarterly of September 2019, in which he detailed the construction process as it stood at that time and before its launching.  Click here. ------------------------- The sailboat that I selected to build is the “Jewell” designed by the French naval architect, François Vivier. It is a two-masts gaff rigged yawl, lap strake built, constructed with a combination of plywood and solid wood using epoxy to put it all together. The length over deck is 18 feet ...

01  Haendel Hallenser sonata 3 flute and basso continuo 02  Bach JS BWV 244 aria Aus Liebe 03 Stanley flute and guitar 04 Bach Arioso cantata 156 flute and guitar 05 Boismortier, 1st movement from 3rd sonata 06 Beriot, Adagio from duet 2, opus 87 07 Faure, Sicilienne 08 Villa Lobos Bachinas Brasileiros no 5

This article appeared in the September 2019 Quarterly Edition of News and Views  Life After Unicef Ronald Van Dijk   It all began with moving to our new house in Malaysia straight from my last duty station Kinshasa, the DRC, where I had served since 2008. During the first years after retiring in 2012 I did a number of consultancy jobs of which some were very interesting. This was “retirement life”, … or was it? It took some time to work out what “retirement” meant, especially with consultancy and other job offers continuing to come in. Flattering though it was, I began to realize that if I wanted to do something else than social research and analysis, program planning and management as I had done for many years, I had to step out of that kind of work entirely and focus on something new.  It was not easy to do after a successful career in social anthropological research in the Arab world and health program management followed by over two decades in UNICEF in Africa and Asi...