First of all, I’m grateful to be alive. This year is somewhat my busiest work year and I hope I hadn’t stretched myself so hard that I am compromising my health. I fully accept my middle aged momentum to now enter the latter half part of my life at 45. I will be 46 in a couple of weeks and quite grateful with the kind of life I have lived as ecomaray that I started in my 20s.
In the early 2000s, my family barely understood the career path I am taking. 20 years later, there is just so much work, so much opportunities, so much things to do in fighting climate change and so much stress in everything that is happening that it is more practical to focus on something specific and specialized.
I have been the country’s F-gas control national expert during the NDC 3.0 update but I think it somewhat burned me out, I’m struggling with my identity as a technical expert on F-gases and doing the leg work in sustaining the funding for the work we do based on donor priorities. I am hoping more younger people would go into this field with very limited people and most people are still struggling with the technicalities related to the work we do, as if advocacy is enough.
Will I see the phase-out of fossil fuels in my lifetime?
Looking in one of the courtyards in Vienna, it seems the heat pump is necessary for survival for both the cold and the heat. I even suggested in our acquisition workshop that this technology has the potential for climate change adaptation. I don’t know how this will turn out in the future, but I am sure that I know what I am doing in terms of my job.
I am the kind of person who is not really into cold weather, I always end up in chills while in the cold. I have given up opportunities to migrate in North America not because of the cold weather but due to how dysfunctional the circumstances are. Yes, the dysfunction always happen if you are not fully conscious and fully honest with yourself or with others. Often it is sad that I barely could talk heat pump to anyone, and most men are just perverts and would not take me seriously in the fight against climate change as if they are better experts and they are better at everything. It is just exhausting as if I would be happy giving up something.
Honestly, I have been quite miserable as I slowly drift away from my family’s expectations and requirements, from what I thought are my source of comfort and care. At times, I would ask myself if I am truly the problem or I just have to deal with their shadows and unconsciousness. I know I am a good person but I am not perfect, I just found things that I really love that no one within my circle of family and friends truly understood. Everything is just perceived and assumed. Nobody really cares about heat pumps or the F-gases inside but in my travels, research and exploration, I know I am doing something worthwhile.
Up until now, now one is talking climate change. For God’s sake you are against nature. Just like we did for these three bulbs of fresh fennel I found in a tropical country which seems to be flown in from a temperate country. It was possible through the cold chain. I just got feedback that Clean Cooling Collaborative, a funder for one of our projects that compared to Vietnam, they are more likely to finance projects with us in the Philippines. I guess my years in conformity assessment was something valuable for them.
I need to write our paper. I need to write a lot of papers now but the procrastination is attacking, actually no, the overwhelm of too much on my plate again. Most test laboratories don’t consider the safety specifications in the standards because they fail to consider that R32 is slightly flammable but it is descriptive and it is not worth publishing at a scientific level. It just feels pathetic that I can’t work with people who truly understood what we are truly working on.
Marai, buying stuff, having trainings, organizing events and study tours… to South Korea, does feel empty and superficial. I guess that is my role, not really being the scientist but being the one who manage the budget, procurement and expenditure. Is this my future even if I get a PhD? Looking at the PhDs around me, that’s what they are doing, cash count and get people assigned to have their jobs continue, get more projects, get more funding, get more stuff. So what now?
The highly technical studies are usually contracted out to the experts who are sometimes playing games, negotiating the fees in their tenders, going into the details of their deliverables, receiving their complaints, and sometimes filling the gaps. I have managed consultants who totally did not deliver and I exerted the effort to fill their gaps which I now see as bad practice. Yes, I became an expert on something but it puts so much work on me.
That kind of work could not be sustained. I had the experience of working with global consultants who need local counterparts that I could not find. I guess that’s what happened in my previous assignment, the only person the ministry could recommend was me and I have to take a leave to really work on the technical stuff that I totally enjoyed. Now I’m back with a stable salary and medical benefits but a bit frustrated.
I guess that is why I have relied on ISO standards to provide guidance on my work, it simplifies everything, straightforward and direct to the point. I love technical committee meetings. I love the intellectual stimulation and I love that something good comes out of it like a standard, a regulation and transformational change.
This green space surrounds a golf course, often we don’t really get into the heart or core of things, our perceptions only look at what is seen, often it is superficial. Getting a view of Manila with my German boss during a free day after her mission in June. There seems to be more people working on gender issues than on the core mitigation processes of industrial decarbonization but they could not get to the core of gender issues inside the places where you are exposed to the hazard of heavy industry. They called it GEDSI now, Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion to be more inclusive. I look at the “irony” of the iron and steel industry in the Philippines, the upstream people in ore processing does not fully agree with the downstream people in steelmaking. Is that a social inclusion issue?
The mining sector has been somewhat demonized in the last decade because of a former environment minister but the production and operating cost of intermediate processing is expensive given the high energy cost of blast furnace operations. But with the rapid urbanization of the country, demand for steel products is high. The option is to import from China, Vietnam or Indonesia. It just brought back memories when I was working on the Yamal LNG project at the AG&P yard in Batangas. The LNG modules were pulled out and distributed to China and Indonesia because they are more efficient with lower raw material and operating cost. They even re-assigned the Filipino workers with the modules to ensure technical continuity and knowledge management. Labor is mobile and they bring with them their technical qualification. We were doing second party QA/QC of the LNG modules before they could be shipped to Siberia.
My experience with Yamal highlighted the gender gap in working with heavy industry. That was after my maternity leave. My French boss re-assigned me to oversee the QHSE of the project because I just got back from my maternity leave and I could not do site audits because I was breastfeeding. AG&P has no lactation facilities in 2015, I just carry with me a breast pump covered inside what seem to be a lunch bag and a pink cashmere scarf to cover my chest while pumping. I also noted the same situation with one of the participants from the DENR-EMB pumping during our learning session in TESDA Korphil Regional Training Center (RTC), we don’t even have a female restroom nearby and the restrooms were not sanitary enough to collect breast milk.
I have to admit, I had rare and unusual experiences in my work and I struggle with being understood. I thought that working with climate policy would reduce my risk from hazard exposure, but people could not relate to my past experiences. Everyone is talking industrial decarbonization like its the next “in” thing. Well, try breastfeeding in a steel fabrication yard where everyone is male, working at height and exposed to heavy equipment and safety hazards and can kill you at one single powerful blow. It is not minimizing my experience but I guess I have come a long way in reaching those places.
I still talk exposure assessment and occupational safety which is easily understood in the GEDSI discussion. Hazards are innate in workplaces and in hard to abate industries, the risk in terms of frequency and severity is higher, that is why they are paid more with a hazard pay premium. Is hazard pay something that women should aim for? Some are driving the discussion that gender equality is getting the same pay and the same hazard exposure risk. Everything is just getting complicated, just get published OK.
The academic temptation is kicking in again. I can’t concentrate on finishing my current tasks, I’m practicing R coding everyday with the types of analysis I need to learn from the data I have from my masters thesis. At 45, am I too old for this? The PhD journey is still uncertain, the program that I have applied with has limited number of qualified professors to supervise a PhD student. They need to be full professors and specialized to the topic I was proposing. Regardless, I truly believe that the opportunity for my doctorate is now here. I had an amazing recommendation letter from my former boss who has a PhD himself.
The truth is, I’m quite disillusioned with the work life right now. Everyone is just focused on the administrative and the financial that the technical details, quality, depth and breadth is just not the focus, it makes me feel dumb. Maybe another dose of graduate school would do the trick like I did in 2016 or in 2002. Strangely, I don’t feel old, I even feel giddy buying school supplies like new gel pens and a new AI Machine Learning laptop, the highest specification of a laptop that I have ever had. Multi-core processor and 32GB RAM, still a Windows after the lack of productivity and inefficiency I have experienced using excel in my Macbook which will eventually be handed down to my children.
Is this even expected or a total surprise for my family? After years of struggling with my relationships, I believe I deserve this. I always end up in a great job and I always get into a good school giving me amazing opportunities. I guess some of my relationships are so toxic that they try to create the narrative of my extreme selfishness and self-centeredness as if my standards and the kind of life I am living is scaring everyone. No, it has threatened my ex because it hurts his ego and as destructive as everything had turned out, they will all blame it on me, despising my giddiness and excitement of going back to graduate school and learn AI and machine learning which is now relevant to my work.
It reminded me of the time when my ex formatted my hard drive after I completed my masters in 2007 not allowing me to pursue my research publications. He innocently claimed that he doesn’t know how important it was to me. I guess he doesn’t want to know me well enough because he doesn’t love me, it was all power and control and maintaining lies and deception. It doesn’t matter, the motivation is here. The goal, the vision and the purpose of what I am supposed to do is clear to me regardless of the false narrative people create about you.
There is nothing wrong with having a concrete vision about who you are and what your authentic self is. Not everyone can know you even if they are your close kin. I was a the youngest and the only girl, the expectations have always been low strangely when I churn out success, it feels threatening to them. The world is truly strange.
During the early days of my career, I worked with geologists and metallurgists who kind of guided me where I am today. It had been a while since I reconnected with them but it feels great to take some time to visit the mines and geosciences bureau to check out the collection of rocks and minerals now that I am older and I can acknowledge some level of success at what I do.
One geologist gave me a pyrite as a paper weight from way back in 2006 and told me its fools gold because it does look like gold but it is not. He also told me he doesn’t like that I am dating my ex-husband who was my boyfriend back then as a concern. Now, I know he was right, time series data does give you more depth and breadth in knowing people, I realized I was quite naive with men. I only had brothers growing up and I was practically raised by my father and they were unable to protect me from that bad marriage without being straightforward that they don’t like my ex. I thought my ex was someone who would understand what I do but I guess he just pretended and as the years go by it had become complex and difficult to pretend given the kind of work I do.
What I really do is quite complex and my current scope of work is somehow a bit too much as well. I got really really depressed for the past two weeks and it made me so unproductive. I am seeing the details, the granularity of technical details, and the ground work seems immense. There is still a need for me to study and understand how CO2 emissions are generated from processes and how control measures can be implemented to reduce emissions. Did I bite more than I could chew?
I had a hard time with iron and steel because I have no experience on its core process even from my audit and project management experiences. The methodologies are complicated. I have to admit, I am not that familiar with this sector. F-gases and minerals were easy and straightforward and I am comfortable to say that I do know what I am doing with them. Here, I seem to be treading deep waters that I am not familiar with. I am about to finish this five month crazy assignment that pushed my limits in terms of knowledge on industry and new technologies.
But I believe, they chose the right person for the job because I know what to do but very much willing to learn, getting harder in these hard-to-abate sectors for industrial decarbonization…still loving what I do. Mwah!
ecomaray 