Alls Well That Ends Well With Travel Musings

FINISHING UP THE THEODORA TRIP

By Wednesday of last week, I had pretty much recovered as had my two participants so we had a productive last couple of days. I am particularly pleased with the new manager, how she is coming along and how she is integrating with our team. 

On the last day in the office, I did testimonial videos from the new manager and our senior local manager (who is on volunteer status since I can afford to pay her yet). I was blown away by comments they had made earlier concerning how much our women had accomplished. But I was not prepared for the things they were saying on camera. Part of it was how impressed they were with the project as a whole and who they had bought into the vision. Part, was their comments that our people were doing things beyond what they've seen from professional workers with degrees. The newest manager had this to say.

"I had come into the group expecting to be schooling the participants in various business skills. Instead, I was the one who needed schooling! The women were so proficient with various apps I didn't even know about. They were working with ease with their American clients. Some were out doing virtual business development calls. When you consider none of these understood anything about office environment, virtual work or American business a year and a half ago, it is amazing!"

TRAVEL

I am in the middle of the long schlepp home. 

Does it make me a bad person when I say that I really enjoy all the perks that go along with flying business class, having airline status, and having taken advantage of the government programs for navigating security and the like faster? It probably does. I am sure I will be consigned to part of hell where I have to travel by broken down developing country bus for the rest of eternity. But in the meantime, I am enjoying being practically the only person in the Accra airport going through the First Class line for Passport control and Security and the additional security to get on the U.S. bound flight. 

And now due to the fact that facial recognition is ubiquitous in our government, when you arrive and have Global Entry, you just have your picture taken, now showing of passport or questions asked, and you are given your slip of paper to pass through. 

On to the not so great, having to transfer through Dulles International in Washington, D.C. Flying through Dulles internationally is a royal pain. After you arrive you have to bus from your arrival terminal to the main terminal to go through all the enter country stuff. Then you have to schlepp through a huge terminal that is mostly closed (it is early in the morning) to go through security again and then take a buss back to the terminal you started from. There is nothing open in that terminal to eat. Only one of the three airline clubs is open and it is one that is far from you gate. I have four hours so it's not like I don't have time but it is annoying.

Ghana - A Whirlwind of Activity - Then A Wall

 As the Theodora Project gets more and more established, each of the trips here becomes busier and busier with more things we are needing to establish and put in place to ensure a viable on-going enterprise. 

We recently hired a full-time manager with virtual assistant experience to give our team the day-to-day guidance they need to keep learning and growing. She just started four weeks ago. This is the first time I've had a chance to work with her in-person. There is a ton of things we are needing to discuss and create timelines for dealing with. 

There has also been a variety of learning I have wanted to do with the group as a whole to continue their professional growth.

Then there's the Board of my local partner NGO. Up until now they have been mostly passive (with the exception of one person). But now that we have the makings of a viable activity and business, members are getting a lot more engaged.

So the trip already was scheduled to be very busy. Things got more complicated. Just before I arrived, one of the ladies had to go to the hospital dealing with a variety of issues. She was only going to be available to us virtually. Then, as she got better, another one had issues and was briefly hospitalized. Yikes! So we have been doing this tap dance to keep the group learning activities moving. 

On top of all this, there has been an on-going drama related to the pitch deck (mentioned earlier this month) we need to produce for our financing search. We'd had the good fortune to find some people who wanted to develop skill in this area and were volunteering their time. They were doing a great, great job. They opened our eyes to presenting our story in a much more dynamic way. Until...Until they just disappeared. Stopped responding to any communication at all. 

Now I am faced with a choice. Do I look for someone else to finish the project? That would take a lot of time to find, get someone up to speed, wait for them to do the work. We are already behind my desired timeline. The other option is for me to do it. But when? I decided to make last Saturday my day to get it done. It was a much bigger task then I thought. I worked from the morning through midnight (with breaks) but I got it done. 

But at a price.

I couldn't sleep that night. My whole body was aching. My head ached. Pain killer had not effect. Sunday I was a basket case. I rested all day Monday and Tuesday as well. Today, I am feeling much better. But I am definitely going to take it easier until I go home on Saturday.

All Hail Monkey Brain The Mighty

 You are all very, very familiar I am sure with the Monkey Brain. You may not call it that. You might call it your sub-conscious. You might just think it is you being you. It is that voice in your head that never, NEVER stops going on and on and on about all the things you should be worried about, concerned about, haven't considered enough about, haven't planned enough about. 

In Yoga, the Monkey Brain is one of the aspects of the play of consciousness that makes us feel separated from the universe. It makes us feel small rather than expanded. Insignificant rather that great. We spend A LOT of time on the yogic path trying to develop the discrimination to just let the Monkey Brain ramble on and not give it energy by focusing attention on it. If you want to know one thing that will disturb your peace-of-mind, it is letting yourself get caught up in the pedantic rantings of your Monkey Brain. 

I am happy to say that after many decades of hard spiritual practice that my Monkey Brain is still able to throw moves at me and take me down out of a state of peace. The sages tell us not to let this bother us too much but because the influence of the Monkey Brain is actually one of the hardest of all things to overcome. It is still depressing though after so much work. 

My Monkey Brain has found the perfect, I mean the PERFECT foil to lever me out of internal peace...Traveling Internationally During Covid Times Where Testing (and other things) Are Needed to Get On Planes! Ah yes, what better food for Monkey Brain then having to get a variety of tests and other paperwork done just days before you leave AND hope they show you are not infected.

I just got into Ghana again on Thursday. This is my fourth trip to Ghana since the pandemic. Each one has had its own set of issues associated with getting the testing and paper work write. If you remember last trip, they added a step requiring you to upload your Covid test results to the African CDC and get  QPR code or they wouldn't let you on the plane. This trip's Monkey Brain food was over the Covid Test itself.

First, it took forever to find a resource where I could get the test within the 72 hour period as it was the Labor Day weekend. That got Mr. (or Ms.) Monkey Brain started. I finally got a test at Walgreens that was a 24 hour turnaround which was wonderful. And in fact I got the results back in just a few hours. What I didn't pay close attention to was the specific name of the type of test. If I had, I would have noticed the test was a NAAT test, not the PCR test that is required. Now the Walgreens site says this rapid test is a PCR test. So why it is titled differently, I don't know. The important thing is I don't really pay attention to this until after I am already in route.  

My money saving itinerary has me flying on a domestic ticket to Houston, staying overnight there, and then getting on my international flight which is on a different ticket. I spend a number of hours at the hotel researching what is a NAAT test? What is a PCR test? I find that the PCR uses the NAAT methodology. So a PCR test is a NAAT test. But are all NAAT tests PCR's. Clearly not. Nonetheless I save these pages of discussion to show at the airport if I'm called out on this. Then I find a place only 10 minutes from the airport that does drop in PCR 1 hour result testing. Great, this is my back up plan. IN THE MEANTIME, Monkey Brain is going crazy ranting on all the permutations and all the things that can go wrong, blah, blah, blah.

I get to the airport early in case I am going to have to run out and do the testing again. It is very crowded. A harried agent, dealing with many different flights and requirements, looks at my requirements. He picks out two, neither of which are the Covid test. I have those. He checks me in. What the &@#!*.

I get to Washington Dulles where I get my Ghana flight. I show my docs. He barely glances at the Covid test and sees "NEGATIVE" and that's that.

Thanks Monkey Brain. Thanks for showing me how far I have to go in my spiritual development...which I suppose is just another aspect of Monkey Brain.

 

Refining Cookery

 The nature of my career and my work with people transitioning from their full-time career/have to work phase to their 'whatever comes next phase' (I will avoid calling it retirement), has put me in a position to observe a lot of people. I find that the term 'life long learner' is thrown out often more as an ideal than as something truly imbibed. But for me, it is definitely the case. I would present the case of the Theodora Project as a prime example. But let's focus how this 'life long learner' attitude manifests in the more mundane...like with cooking.

I have been cooking for a long time. And like anyone who cooks a long time, I have my standards. But with all the traveling and cooking classes I've done over the last five years, I keep adding more techniques into my repertoire. Recently, I found a couple of rather small adjustments that have made a BIG difference in the consistency of my cooking results. They are use of the instant read thermometer, paying close attention to time, and bringing food to room temperature.

The Instant Read Thermometer

I've had one for years but never used it for some reason. I would typically just rely on rough time and observation to see if food was done correctly. This led to erratic results. Out of frustration on consistently over or under cooking salmon, I decided to try the instant read. Voila! Suddenly I was achieving perfection...especially when applying the next simple technique.

Paying Close Attention to Time

Since I was reading the results with the instant read, the next logical step was to be way more exact on the amount of time I was cooking things. No just watching the clock. Setting the timer. A result was finally cooking burgers (a nemesis for me) to a satisfactory result. I even use the timer now to make sure that pans are the right heat before I start cooking with them.

Bringing Food to Room Temperature

Even with use of the prior two techniques, I was having issues getting the innards cooked for large pieces of protein. This was especially true of when I put things in the smoker. I guess I have been a bit paranoid about food going bad so I would not take it out of the fridge for very long before I cooked. I experimented with taking it out much earlier. What a difference. Now foods were coming to their proper cooking temperature way more consistently and with less time.

Theodora On The Launch Pad

Maybe we are not quite on the launch pad but the rocket is being wheeled out, the launch team is getting geared up, and we are preparing for the next phase of this not quite believable endeavor. 

I last posted about Theodora in June. A ton has happened. Most significantly, we have gotten super serious about getting funding for the next phase of growth. Maybe I should pull back and recap what has happened to date

In April 2020 we launched Theodora Ghana Virtual Assistants mostly based on our own belief right in the teeth of the pandemic gale. Despite that obstacle, we managed to prove to ourselves that our theories on taking women from the street who had resorted to sex work to survive and transforming them into reasonably acceptable potential virtual administrative assistants could work.

In October 2020, I was finally able to get back to Ghana and we painfully worked through getting our team of participants more focused on what we needed to do to have success providing business services, the key to our success. But there was still critical weaknesses. We had no place where our people could come to work which meant we couldn't give them a structured environment. And we had no local management, which meant I was trying to do it from afar which was far, far from ideal.

In January 2021, we thought we were doing pretty good with our group of test clients. But a volunteer did some interviewing and we found we were incorrect. I threw myself more into client engagement and we started to get that turned around.

March 2021 we finally secured a physical location. Just having our people come to a formal work site had very positive influences on behavior and focus.

I got vaccinated and was comfortable going back to Ghana in April 2021. We recruited a local manager. The positive, she was an incredible talent, personality and person of values. The negative, we couldn't afford her. She offered to work part-time while keeping her day job. Since she was working from home, that was easy to do as she just moved 'home' to our office. There was an immediate surge in professionalism and focus from the women.

Spring of 2021 and I am thinking about how we fund getting our manager on full-time. I am using a new international network creating service called Lunchclub. I am making incredible connections. One of them is a professional fundraiser for not-for-profits. He tells me to forget donations. Turn the Virtual Assistant business into a for-profit business and seek what is called social impact capital - money that wants to both do good and make a return. This fits us fine as we always have thought of the Virtual Assistant business as a moneymaker. AND he says add another zero to the money I am looking for - go from $50 thousand for one year to $500 thousand for three years. I think about this for all of a week and say "Damn, I am going for it."

This is transformational. I now have to think about how we would actually grow rapidly and how we would spend (wisely) that kind of money. In June 2021, I am back in Ghana working with my team to think in detail what we need to grow and what it will cost. 

Through the summer via Lunchclub we meet a guy in Singapore who want to help us with our Pitch Deck, a critical document for going after serious money. This guy is great. He sees us in ways I hadn't and has us change our focus so that we are a platform for creating future businesses that will employ the women we are trying to help. This truly transforms our pitch and places us in an innovative space that few in the social impact market of Africa are. It is really crazy. Here is in brief our new pitch.

Theodora Africa is an innovative platform whose mission is to transform the lives of African women via the power of business creation. Hundreds of thousands of African women find themselves funneled into sex work due to environmental factors (no social safety net, lack of jobs, misogynistic culture). We use the power of business creation, but not any business creation, but businesses that provide meaningful business services to under served developed country markets.

 

Our primary innovations are:

 

1.   We find the market opportunity first before we recruit and train – seeking out under served markets for outsourced services in developed countries where our sales price is a value to our clients but the amount earned is substantial for our participants.

 

2.   Creating specific environments to drive behavior change – don’t just teach…create a total immersion into a new set of values that drives individual transformation of participants faster.

 

3.   Pathway to ownership – we are not the entrepreneurs…our goal is to make our participants the ultimate owners so we don’t just create jobs, we create capital.

 Now we are really getting attention because no one in the social impact space starts with the idea that we find the market to sell services before we start training people!

In the meantime, our super local manager's employer requires her to work out of the office again. Bummer. She can't be onsite and give the direction we need. She, of her own volition, says she's not earning her money. She suggests we take what we are paying her and use it to recruit a full-time Team Leader, an more experienced woman who can lead but also do some of the work. We are fortunate to find a person who not only has the qualifications but whose early life is much like our participants. 

I now have a real management team. We are going balls to the walls to finish our Pitch Deck and start going after investors. I am heading back to Ghana next week. I have a detailed operating improvement plan to start implementing. 

Can all this really be happening? This is truly stranger than fiction. Theodora Africa to Ground Control, please commence the rocket fueling process.