I mentioned a month ago the remarkable save of our Theodora Ghana project. Now a month in, we not only have started our formal training process but we have embarked on servicing a most ambitious work project. It has provided our six women with a crash course in listening to American business English, learning how to take notes and transcribe conversations, arrange a schedule, and handle the management of workflow to get a finished product.
The project itself is something I convinced the networking group I formed 12 years ago, Trusted Advisor Network, to do. Since this group is based on a 'give-to-get' philosophy and our community is going to need great assistance to aid its small business community to recover from the enforced shutdown, I recognized a need to focus the knowledge we had in a form that our business community could use and use quickly. So the project is a toolkit for how businesses can navigate this drastic change. And it involved getting information from a group of individuals and synthesizing it.
This led to Theodora Ghana's six women setting up 23 interviews over a 10 day period, sitting in and transcribing those interviews, and getting the information back to all the participants for their review, then assembling it into a composite document. When we started this none of the women had ever sat and done transcription. They had minimal understanding of the American business. They didn't understand the jargon. They had a lot of trouble even understand 'white' as they call our dialect.
And yet, they cranked out the 23 interviews. We gathered the critical information we needed. Some interviewees had major changes to what was transcribed. Others hardly any. By the end of the week and a half, they were understanding more and more and we are set to hit our deadline of getting the summaries of the interviews done.
We made a ton of mistakes (I most of all as I never did anything like this!) but in the end, we accomplished the mission and gained composite knowledge to promote the goal of the project that we never could have without their work.
It is really very cool!
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
At What Price...
This might seem like one of my diatribe posts...but it is not.
Life circumstances enforced by the Covid-19 lockdown have brought into perspective various issues associated with what is important and what is not important, what we value and what we don't value, what we are willing to sacrifice and what we are not.
A month ago in a post, I made some strong statements about what society could and could not do as regards making the saving of lives at all costs its goal. I still feel that way. However, what one feels about society in general and what one does with one's own life can often be very different. And in my case, I am not ashamed at all to admit to being quite Machiavellian when it comes to my own well-being.
What we're talking about here is COGNAC. Or rather the lack thereof. Cognac is a type of brandy (a distilled spirit made from wine) that comes from a particular region of France. I am quite partial to it and it is my drink of choice for sipping in the evening as I write. In normal times, I can go to a big box chain, Total Wine, and get a very nice VSOP Cognac for what I feel is a very reasonable price. As a bit of education, there are regulated levels of quality for this region. They being VS, VSOP and XO. I would normally never buy XO because I don't think the quality versus price differential merits the additional cost. On the other hand, I can clearly taste the difference between VS and VSOP and will pay up for that.
However, our dear Governor has decided that liquor stores are not essential and closed them. That means I no longer have access to that resource. We can buy alcohol in grocery stores but they don't carry Cognac as a rule. But Wife went to Costco where she found an XO Cognac which I would normally deem too expensive.
My inventory has not gotten low enough yet but I think I will be parroting or paraphrasing Governor Cuomo of New York. "What cost can one put on one's taste buds. There is none. A person who needs Cognac should be fulfilled. Regardless of the cost."
XO here we come.
Life circumstances enforced by the Covid-19 lockdown have brought into perspective various issues associated with what is important and what is not important, what we value and what we don't value, what we are willing to sacrifice and what we are not.
A month ago in a post, I made some strong statements about what society could and could not do as regards making the saving of lives at all costs its goal. I still feel that way. However, what one feels about society in general and what one does with one's own life can often be very different. And in my case, I am not ashamed at all to admit to being quite Machiavellian when it comes to my own well-being.
What we're talking about here is COGNAC. Or rather the lack thereof. Cognac is a type of brandy (a distilled spirit made from wine) that comes from a particular region of France. I am quite partial to it and it is my drink of choice for sipping in the evening as I write. In normal times, I can go to a big box chain, Total Wine, and get a very nice VSOP Cognac for what I feel is a very reasonable price. As a bit of education, there are regulated levels of quality for this region. They being VS, VSOP and XO. I would normally never buy XO because I don't think the quality versus price differential merits the additional cost. On the other hand, I can clearly taste the difference between VS and VSOP and will pay up for that.
However, our dear Governor has decided that liquor stores are not essential and closed them. That means I no longer have access to that resource. We can buy alcohol in grocery stores but they don't carry Cognac as a rule. But Wife went to Costco where she found an XO Cognac which I would normally deem too expensive.
My inventory has not gotten low enough yet but I think I will be parroting or paraphrasing Governor Cuomo of New York. "What cost can one put on one's taste buds. There is none. A person who needs Cognac should be fulfilled. Regardless of the cost."
XO here we come.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Writing History While Reading History
In my last post, I mentioned my effort to regain sanity and balance by swearing off the media and replacing it with reading a rather weighty but well-written tome on the French Revolution. It has been quite successful in that regard. However, an unforeseen benefit has accrued as well.
You see this book is quite long and weighty with a big wide binding. It is hard to keep open while I am eating. So I resort to a variety of eating tactics whereby I can use my left hand to keep the book open for reading while I use the right hand for eating. This works pretty well except that I constantly tend to get little bits of food or drips or grease on my hands that inevitably get on the pages of the book.
At first, this was bothering me (desecration of books being rather a serious offense). But then I realized the social history opportunity. I typically read a few pages with each meal. That means I could logically reconstruct my entire eating history during the lockdown, just by studying the pages of my book!
I am sure this will prove to be enlightening and fascinating for future social historians.
You see this book is quite long and weighty with a big wide binding. It is hard to keep open while I am eating. So I resort to a variety of eating tactics whereby I can use my left hand to keep the book open for reading while I use the right hand for eating. This works pretty well except that I constantly tend to get little bits of food or drips or grease on my hands that inevitably get on the pages of the book.
At first, this was bothering me (desecration of books being rather a serious offense). But then I realized the social history opportunity. I typically read a few pages with each meal. That means I could logically reconstruct my entire eating history during the lockdown, just by studying the pages of my book!
I am sure this will prove to be enlightening and fascinating for future social historians.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Getting Lighter By Going Heavy
A few days ago I decided that my schizophrenic life was not a sustainable model...not least since Wife seems ready to divorce me if I keep going on with my rants.
To review, prior to the change I will detail below, My days since the Stay-at-Home order have looked like this:
The solution? Give up the news! Newspapers, TV News, Online News. Give it all up. Or at least give up 90% of it. And replace it with ....wait for it....I don't think you can guess....No, that's not even close....It is...
To review, prior to the change I will detail below, My days since the Stay-at-Home order have looked like this:
- Get up, get the paper, read the paper while having breakfast and get intensely upset, angry and depressed.
- Go upstairs and start working. Get pumped by all the stuff going on in my work and Ghana philanthropic life.
- Go downstairs to make dinner. Listen to the TV news Wife has on while making dinner. Get upset, angry and depressed.
- Sit in the Library after dinner, start writing but constantly look at the media on-line and keep my state of depression continuing.
The solution? Give up the news! Newspapers, TV News, Online News. Give it all up. Or at least give up 90% of it. And replace it with ....wait for it....I don't think you can guess....No, that's not even close....It is...
YES! A GIGANTIC BOOK ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION!
This is what I read at every meal now. And believe me, this thing is long. It is going to carry me through I think this whole damn shutdown. But more important, it is very well written, very readable, and has a boatload of interesting observations. I found myself today at both breakfast at lunch exclaiming out loud in response to an learning expressed int he book. That, in turn, has led to a demonstrable overall improvement in my emotional state.
So in times of pandemic, remember, the study of the French Revolution is there to carry you through!
Monday, April 6, 2020
An Argument In Favor Of Persepective
I am going to wade again into the ethical and moral arguments associated with Covid-19 event following on from my post of March 15.
And before I go on and earn the approbation of being insensitive and uncaring, I'd like to state, without reservations, that yes, I do think this is a particularly nasty and insidious disease. I am following the guidelines set by my government for restrictions on movement. I am quite aware that I am in one of the highest risk groups and am being careful.
That being said, one cannot just ignore the social and ethical consequences of our decisions concerning containing this contagion. Where we are now, is not balanced and is not sustainable. It can be maintained for some period (not too long). But after that, there are going to be serious repercussions for the very fabric of our way of life.
I am not pretending that I have an answer. I just know that the current attitude and decisions are not sustainable. So without pretending to have an answer, I do want to frame the discussion in different terms. I want to give a different perspective on what we are experiencing in hopes of promoting difficult but rational conversation and decision-making.
First Point - Disease and Contagion have always been a part of human life
Cholera, Typhoid Fever, Typhus, Scarlet Fever, Bubonic Plague, Polio...up until the Polio vaccine in the 1950s, significant contagions where a part of human life. No one liked them. The pain of loss was horrible. And a lot of people died year-after-year-after-year. But life went on. Society went on. Since the Polio vaccine, we've enjoyed a 60-year window without such a contagion. Maybe that is a fluke. Maybe it is just not realistic that we can live in a world without a higher level of disease driven mortality rate.
Second Point - How Much Death Are We Really Dealing With?
Yes, yes, yes. I know. If you are the one that dies, or one of your loved ones dies, the effect is devastating. But when dealing with an entire species, that thinking is irrational. We have to think about the whole...that the good of the many is more important than the good of the few. As of today, the reported death toll from Covid-19 was 74,595. Let's assume through the rest of 2020 that number grows by 10 times and around 750 thousand dies! OMG.! That's horrible right?
But...Oh, Wait...did you know that 1.35 million people die each year in automobile accidents worldwide. Each year! But I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should shut down our world economy until such time as car makers stop supplying these tools of death.
Another data point - in 2004, the genocide in Rwanda killed over a million in a single year. The international community did virtually nothing. They certainly did not stop the whole international economy to bring an end to the killing. In 1984 the Ethiopian famine killed off another million in a year. We got Live Aid concerts. But no stop to our world economic order. Since 2014 450 thousand have died in Syria...no call for everyone to stop all economic activity.
I can point out example after example after example of similar situations in our world history where we accepted a mortality rate much higher than we do today.
There are those who talk about how this disease will rebound and how it will be around for a long time. keeping on killing people Well if that is the case, maybe what we must do is just accept a level of mortality that is more in keeping with what we as a species have experienced over the total of our existence?
Maybe we just need to keep it in perspective and realize that a higher mortality rate is the price we are going to have to pay to maintain our civilization.
And before I go on and earn the approbation of being insensitive and uncaring, I'd like to state, without reservations, that yes, I do think this is a particularly nasty and insidious disease. I am following the guidelines set by my government for restrictions on movement. I am quite aware that I am in one of the highest risk groups and am being careful.
That being said, one cannot just ignore the social and ethical consequences of our decisions concerning containing this contagion. Where we are now, is not balanced and is not sustainable. It can be maintained for some period (not too long). But after that, there are going to be serious repercussions for the very fabric of our way of life.
I am not pretending that I have an answer. I just know that the current attitude and decisions are not sustainable. So without pretending to have an answer, I do want to frame the discussion in different terms. I want to give a different perspective on what we are experiencing in hopes of promoting difficult but rational conversation and decision-making.
First Point - Disease and Contagion have always been a part of human life
Cholera, Typhoid Fever, Typhus, Scarlet Fever, Bubonic Plague, Polio...up until the Polio vaccine in the 1950s, significant contagions where a part of human life. No one liked them. The pain of loss was horrible. And a lot of people died year-after-year-after-year. But life went on. Society went on. Since the Polio vaccine, we've enjoyed a 60-year window without such a contagion. Maybe that is a fluke. Maybe it is just not realistic that we can live in a world without a higher level of disease driven mortality rate.
Second Point - How Much Death Are We Really Dealing With?
Yes, yes, yes. I know. If you are the one that dies, or one of your loved ones dies, the effect is devastating. But when dealing with an entire species, that thinking is irrational. We have to think about the whole...that the good of the many is more important than the good of the few. As of today, the reported death toll from Covid-19 was 74,595. Let's assume through the rest of 2020 that number grows by 10 times and around 750 thousand dies! OMG.! That's horrible right?
But...Oh, Wait...did you know that 1.35 million people die each year in automobile accidents worldwide. Each year! But I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should shut down our world economy until such time as car makers stop supplying these tools of death.
Another data point - in 2004, the genocide in Rwanda killed over a million in a single year. The international community did virtually nothing. They certainly did not stop the whole international economy to bring an end to the killing. In 1984 the Ethiopian famine killed off another million in a year. We got Live Aid concerts. But no stop to our world economic order. Since 2014 450 thousand have died in Syria...no call for everyone to stop all economic activity.
I can point out example after example after example of similar situations in our world history where we accepted a mortality rate much higher than we do today.
There are those who talk about how this disease will rebound and how it will be around for a long time. keeping on killing people Well if that is the case, maybe what we must do is just accept a level of mortality that is more in keeping with what we as a species have experienced over the total of our existence?
Maybe we just need to keep it in perspective and realize that a higher mortality rate is the price we are going to have to pay to maintain our civilization.
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