If you’re bilingual, trilingual, or a polyglot, you’re an icon. Because somewhere between thirty and fifty per cent of the world’s population are monolingual, meaning that they can only properly communicate with other folk who share their same language. It’s incredibly limiting, and unfortunately can cut off opportunities and connections before they’ve even begun.

In many areas of life, you can get by on just one language. However, if you’re following a life path in which international travel or business connections are vital, you will immediately find yourself a little stuck if you can’t speak any other languages or dialects. That’s why language classes can be so popular amongst adults, even if they had little care for them at school.

The person in this story knows more than most the importance of multilingualism, especially since, in their place of work, they’re the only person who can speak English. Given the fact they work in the Middle East, this wouldn’t necessarily always be a negative thing. However, the organization that they work for, and were actually hired to save, deals with plenty of English speaking companies and organizations, meaning that at least a basic grasp of the language would be a logical requirement for staff members.

However, as this employee discovered when they started at the company, this was far from the case.

Read on to find out what happened here.

The wonderful world of working for an International NGO when you’re the only native English speaker

I’m a PR/Communications expert that was hired to stabilise a struggling NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

They basically hired me to come to the Middle East and pull them out of a financial crisis caused by reduced funding.

Within two years, I managed to raise $6.8 million dollars in funding through various projects that I designed and that were greenlit by foreign donors, among some other spiffy little accomplishments.

I’m basically the organisation’s Swiss Army Knife, since I have very many roles (most of them unofficially).

The executive director sounds awful.

The Executive Director: However, despite my best efforts, this organisation is ultimately ****** – because the Executive Director is an uninterested idiot who doesn’t care about his job as much as he does playing around on Facebook and chain-smoking like a champ (I keep the windows open even in dead of winter because otherwise this place would reek like a giant ashtray.

He only cares about money, the organisation’s money, and is too cheap to approve of simple expenses that could really help out – like buying real office chairs for all the staff (I went through three that broke, and now I’m sitting at my desk on a metal folding chair).

We had a meeting once and he told all of us, “I’m not complaining about my chair. You shouldn’t complain about your’s either. If you’re not comfortable, we’ll get you a new chair but it’ll come out of your paycheck and when you leave your job, you can take it home with you!” (He has a big comfy leather reclining office chair).

The finance officer sounds annoying too.

My job also entails working with the Finance Officer to make a budget for the projects, and as soon as we’re satisfied that we’ve made an appropriate budget within the donor’s guidelines, he comes in like a bull in a china shop and demands to change everything to his liking, “You have some good ideas but I’m the Executive Director and at the end of the day, what I say happens.”

Then a couple months later, we receive a letter from the donor saying that our proposals unfortunately was not approved… and guess whose fault it is?

Mine! After all, I wrote the proposal!

There were a lot more problems he had to deal with.

As for the staff, they are all locals and 99% of them can’t complete a sentence in English, despite the fact that the biggest donors of this office are from the EU and the UN and all of their communications are in English – which leads me to my biggest problem.

Because I’m a native English speaker, I have become (against my better judgement) the organisation’s English/Arabic translator. When I’m required to write quarter or year end reports for our donors – you know, so they know where their money is going – I ask for data in the form of internal reports from the actual staff that do the project activities.

They ALWAYS send me these reports in Arabic, which I end up wasting weeks on end translating into English. Also none of the staff members know how to use Microsoft Office, so they always call me to teach them how to do stupid things, like changing the document size in Word, or creating a column in Excel, or adding a contact to Outlook.

And God forbid the internet goes down or their computers aren’t picking up a wifi signal, as I’m also the de facto IT specialist.

Here are some examples of the crazy requests he gets from the employees.

The other day, one of our staff called me down to her office because she had a problem with the internet. It wasn’t working and she couldn’t log into the organisation’s website to update the news section. So, I dropped everything I was doing and went to see what the problem was.

It turned out that WiFi button on her laptop was turned off.

Another time, another staff member called me to his office and asked me to write a response, in English, to an email invitation asking him to attend a conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Only the invitation was in English, the conference most certainly will be in English, and he is asking me to write a reply to the email in English because he can’t speak English!

What’s he going to do when he gets to Geneva and has to make a presentation on the work of the organisation – in English??

He knows this will mean more work for him.

By the way, I can guarantee you that I’ll be asked to create his presentation for him because I KNOW that he doesn’t know how to use Powerpoint – and, yeah, the presentation needs to be in English.

I also love when they rely on Google Translate to create their own English-language reports, and when they send me the draft, I can’t understand what on earth it says!

So not only do I need to translate from Arabic to English, but I also need to decipher what that heck they cut and paste into the document in really bad English is supposed to say.

However, it wasn’t just the staff’s language skills that bugged this employee.

The staff are also very unprofessional and dramatic as hell. They can’t take criticism without resorting into a bunch of immature babies. On any given day, someone will get into an argument with another and you can hear them yelling and cursing at each other down the corridor.

It’s embarrassing.

One time we had a representative for the United Nations waiting for a meeting with the Director, while he was yelling at the top of his lungs at the secretary for messing up the printing order on some of his papers.

It definitely sounds like they act immature.

I swear that sometimes I feel like I work in a Daycare centre.

If one person gets a raise, the entire staff get jealous and hostile. They all feel like they’re the best employee, they all feel like they’re better than everyone else, but I’m the eyes and ears around here and I know that they’re all full of nonsense.

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I know what they’re doing when the boss isn’t around and I know what websites they’re visiting when they should be working (like I said, I’m the de facto IT guy).

Yikes. It’s not the fact that the staff can’t speak English, because of course, they’re not English, so why would this be assumed, it’s the fact that as the only English speaker, this employee seemingly has to do everything.

And they’re right. Sure they can write the emails, sure they can create the presentation, but short of going and delivering it for the guy, they can’t do anything else.

This business is a mess, and it’s going to take more than just one exemplary employee to fix it.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who stops speaking up in his Zoom meetings after getting constantly interrupted.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that the employee shouldn’t have to take on the entire failing business.

While this Redditor thought of the best chair-related arrangement.

Meanwhile, others learned a lot from this one person’s story.

It’s completely normal for businesses to bring in employees with specific expertise to help a company that is struggling. And as a part of that, the employee would absolutely expect to have a whole lot of work on their hands. But this is off the charts, way too much for one employee to be dealing with. The truth is, if they needed English speaking staff at the heart of the company, as they clearly do, this shouldn’t all fall to one person because what happens if they are sick or they have to leave?

Clearly this company needs to hire another English speaking team member, but if the boss is such a stickler for money, it seems like that might not be possible. And truth be told, that will be the downfall of this company. Because plenty of companies can function very well without any English speaking staff members. After all, there’s a whole world out there with so many different languages, and plenty of situations in which zero English skills would be absolutely fine. But if your business needs to deal in English, then you have to invest in properly-equipped staff.

Because let’s be real. This is a ridiculously intense job with too many responsibilities and a boss who could not care less. This English speaking staff member is eventually going to get sick of things and leave. And that’s going to leave the company in a real mess, isn’t it?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.