Why?

 That was the question asked of me a couple of days ago by a long-time loyal reader. Why were Wife and I abandoning our travel patterns of the past to suddenly embark on the experiment to see if we could actually stay in one place for an extended period time? There are a couple of reasons.

First, we have been mulling in our head a desire to live somewhere outside of the U.S. for a variety of reasons. The pandemic put a big dent into the timing of that idea. But, it still has not gone away completely. So this upcoming 2-month stay in a single location is a test to see how that feels.

Second, travel the way we've been doing it has become very difficult physically. Our aging selves are having a harder and harder time with moving around, carrying things, being on our feet, etc. So this trip represents an experiment to see if we can develop a different pattern for experiencing a different place.

Third, the same issues that affect our style of travel are causing us to question whether we can stay in our big house. We love the house and truly make use of it. But, it requires a lot of regular maintenance that we no longer can do physically without exacerbating various ailments. We wonder if we can live in a smaller space...and not kill each other! So this is a test for that as well. 

So there you have them. We are off in 6 days.

NO CHANGE

 These are the sweetest words I can hear. I look for them once a year. They are the words from my eye doctor after I've done various tests to determine if the glaucoma I have has started to deteriorate my vision any further. They are the words that tell me I am not going blind yet. 

I was 59 years old when I was diagnosed with glaucoma. Already some permanent damage had occurred to my retina. I was put on these eye drops. My Dad had been diagnosed with glaucoma at exactly the same age as I was. But these 'eye drops', these 'drugs' didn't exist then. He went blind. And it embittered his life to his end. So when I got the diagnosis, I was terrified.

But year after year, the effectiveness of these drugs showed their worth. There has been no deterioration since. Though each and every year when I have the test done, I wait with anxiousness. Is this the year, that the decline will finally set in?

I assume it will happen some year. But not this year.

Deluge

 Can someone tell me who turned on the fire hose?

2020 was the death knell to my consulting practice. Throughout the halcyon days of our travel soaked semi-retirement, I had created a very nice, balanced amount of continuing consulting work. It funded most of our travel and kept me occupied when we weren't traveling. Then in 2019, the great Ghana/Theodora venture launched taking more of my time. Comes the pandemic and any thought of the kind of work I do was out of the minds of business owners simply wondering if they were going to survive. And on top of that, my whole practice was built on a face-to-face networking method of marketing which was completely out during the lock down period. 

2021 I finally managed to find an online platform and began to find a means of building my network again. But it was exclusively oriented on Theodora. The few consulting clients I still had were slowly withering away. 

Going into 2022, I was reconciled that my consulting life was over. Except when we did our financial analysis and realized that to get back to the travel life we'd had before and fund travel to Ghana, I'd better find some work! Fortunately the business world seemed to be reawakening. I did some perfunctory non-Theodora networking. But nothing that should have led to any business right away.

Comes July and I get two referrals. They immediately close. Then come two more. And two more. Suddenly over a period of 45 days, I've had the most new business closings in my entire career!!!!!

WTF!

And they are closing in the shortest amount of time. I meet with them. I give them a proposal. They say yes and off we go. 

Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly grateful to get this surge of income just when we needed it. I just have no idea at all as to why it is happening.

Preparing The Eldership Anew

We keep getting older but the desire for the adventure of travel beats within these aged hearts as strong as ever. However, as we deal with the slow, inexorable decline in capabilities, we have to be more and more creative in how we feed the fire of adventure.

In 16 days, Wife and I will be on yet another venture, different from any we have undertaken previously. The goal of this trip is to see if we can actually stay in one place for an extended period. We are going back to a town and apartment we experience when we were in Sicily last year, Cefalú. We had both observed that this town and apartment were as close to having everything we would want for an alternative living experience as anything we'd seen in the world.

So we made a decision, we were going to give it a try. We were going to commit to going to this one single place for 60 days! Two Months! Do you realize how crazy that is for Wife and I? The official 'crazed gerbils on crack' of elder travel! We are not just committed to giving this 'live in another place' experience a try but we are doubling down on our commitment. We will not be renting a car. In fact, one of the attractions of  Cefalú was we could walk to virtually everything we need from our apartment. 

Stay tuned for whether Wife and I find this new normal or go postal after two weeks.

Contemplating Age

There is so much happening. All good. The Theodora Project, of course. But, we are back in our travel mode again, getting ready for a big trip in just a couple of weeks with us contemplating a number of other travels. And I am consulting again. I have four new clients, the first new work I've taken on since 2019. During the dark days of 2020, I thought that part of my life was gone for good. But as I have needed more income to support our travel, behold, it has come back.

I have had a few people tell me in recent months that I had stopped being retired. I can't help the small minds of people who only can contemplate a binary world were you either are working (bad) or are retired (good). I find the whole play much more subtle. My state of mind is nothing like when I was 'working for a living'. Then, there was so much pressure to make money. I had to in order to hit our goal of not having to work. 

Now if I work, it is because I want to. If I want to do Theodora, it is because I want to. If I put time into Rotary Club to End Human Trafficking, it is because I want to. I only do what I want to. My state of mind is one of happiness and peace. It doesn't make any difference if it looks to others that "I am working." I know I have transitioned and am living 'the dream'. 

Another thread weaves through this awareness, the awareness of age. It comes in different forms. Part of me has a hard time accepting I have as much energy as I do. Not unlimited. I definitely have limits that I didn't 20 years ago. But within those limits, I am fully engaged. 

I find myself listening more and more to the news of deaths. Some are older, younger, or about the same. I have no illusions. I know my time is coming. It has to. I wonder when that one event will take place that puts me on the downward spiral. It has to. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when. I see peers who struggle to make their way around because of ailments. That will be me. It has to. It is the way it is.

And despite these thoughts, I revel in the joy of working, of promoting a cause. I lap up the pleasure of seeing young lives transformed. I get excited anticipating all the travel adventures to come. I have the deep contentment of knowing I have helped my clients through difficult periods.

It is an enigma. But it is my life.

SE Asian Smoked Chicken

Let us take a break from the heavy topic of transforming lives and refocus on the equally important topic of cooking and eating well!

We had guests over from Wife's Rotary Club for Sunday dinner. I decided to smoke some ribs. But I had seen on a YouTube food travel channel a means of smoking poultry where you marinated the bird with a ton of SE Asian flavorings. de-I loves SE Asian so I decided to try to hack a version. 

Fortunately, as I've written about in the past, in little ole Albuquerque on has access to just about every SE Asian flavoring ingredient. So I bought a ton of ginger, galanagal, turmeric root, kefir lime leaf, lemon grass, shrimp paste, fish sauce. I took all this and mixed it up with oil, soy sauce, sweet Indonesian soy sauce, onion, garlic, coconut milk and made a massive amount of marinade.

Here is our birds ready for smoking after a full night immersed in SE Asian cultural experience.

Sadly, as usual, I failed to take any additional pictures. I had an issue in not putting the birds on the smoker soon enough. The last time I made chicken it cooked way faster than anticipated. So I had to finish it in the oven. The flavor was excellent. But, it didn't have as much smoke flavor as I would have hoped. Nonetheless, I am all in on using SE Asian flavoring as an alternative to tradition American BBQ flavoring for smoking meat!

Graduation Day

 Transformation is a word we use a lot at Theodora Africa. But like so many words dealing with social impact, it can be thrown around like some fancy word du jour without understanding the depth that a real transformation means.

So it was that I was quite humbled by the experience of our Theodora group going through their 'graduation' and receiving their 'certificates'. When the idea was broached to me by one of my key advisors in Ghana, I didn't think much of it. I figured, fine, we will do it. It will be a nice thing. But it didn't seem to me that important. Man, was I wrong. 

First, I give all credit to my Ghanaian colleague. He went out of his way to make sure that the certificates we gave out meant something. He registered the course details with the Department of Social Welfare as part of our NGO in Ghana. And he made sure that I had a program organized to present them. What I did not realize but he did, was just how important getting a certificate is in a country like Ghana. All our candidates have expressed in their stories how not having a certificate was a major reason they couldn't get work and resorted to sex work. So getting a legitimate certificate of educational achievement and vocational ability was a big deal

But even more, the true transformation our people have experienced by being believed in and supported, by doing true, meaningful work for others, by earning a real living wage, is hard to express in words. So I am going to let pictures from our graduation even tell their own story.

 

A number of the women spoke quite eloquently about their experience. This recording is a bit difficult to understand in the beginning but by the end I think you will get the message.