If I had known this was a path, I would've walked it long ago

Some weeks ago, I met a lady whom I used to work with at the telephone company. She's always shown me interest and supported my ambitions and dreams in the world. I in return always admired her for her perserverance in the business, and for her leadership skills.

I met her on the bus. She has the most incredible hair, spiky and blonde - I couldn't miss her in a crowd of hundreds. She lives close by my place so we walked, stopped and talked in the rain. The inevitable question - what have you been upto - was always the spark of our conversations since I left the company.

This time, I would tell her a story of a proud young woman who achieved something she never thought possible. A story that somehow seems to repeat itself in my life - or is it me repeating it? It took the first 15 minutes of the conversation for me to realise that that is the story I'm telling about myself these days. Now my new job may not be prestigious - I am no UN volunteer in any crisis striken area of the world, nor am I an EU intern or trainee at the Council of Europe.

I am a social worker within the public administration system of Denmark. I work in a municipality of 192.500 citizens, the third largest municipality of the country. Aalborg is a port city and has the mysteries and adventures as well as the human hopelessness that such a city tend to envoke. I work as a 'specialist' with refugees and immigrants receiving welfare support from the system - a system that I have come to know as a curious tale of ideologies and idealisms realized to the extreme.

My typical day consists of one or two appointments with citizens about whatever situation fills their life at this particular time - and some administrative work that serves as a welcomed break from the disheartening practice it can often be to meet humans who have or feel like they have no control over their own existence. Humans who have seen the last of their hopes and dreams vanish down the drain of endless bureaucracy. Humans who have so little ressources and so much frustration that it fills my office even hours after they've left.

I have 80 'cases' - that is I have 80 files on 80 humans in the cabinet beside my desk. Files that tell ghostly stories of lives gone by in devastation and atrocities, lives wasted on the fringes of society - a society that has left them for too long and now is measuring up the damages and trying to repair what has been destroyed. These files tell of victims of the most incredible human fates, the most vicious of humanity's actions, the most vigorous of human wills. They tell of the perseverance of human spirit - and the defeat of social systems to support and encourage that spirit in time.

I see an incredible amount of 'cases' where strong and powerful humans have been turned into moaning shadows of themselves, institutionalisation taking its toll on their existence. I see the gratefulness in the eyes of a woman who thinks she can do nothing but let the system make all decisions for her. But the vast part of the individuals I meet, carry the same disastrous characteristic - they do not understand the system that 'takes care of them'. They cannot grasp the workings of a public administration so immense, so powerful and so debilitating that it pacifies the drive of human beings and replaces the usual initiative, most people have to rely on to carry them through the day and create new survival structures in their own lives. The system employs 1/3 of the current Danish work force (I said ONE THIRD), most of whom have the really important jobs in the country (such as day care workers, school teachers, nurses, doctors and the likes). But still, too many are employed to execute a set of laws and regulations that are extremely complicated and - in essence - meaningless.

I am still proud to do my job because I am the human side of the system. I am the person who does understand the system and am able to explain it in human terms to the people who do not have this privilege. It must be possible to do better - and in the next year, I'll figure out how...