The Sprout Grows And Is Sobered

It has been an amazing first week here in Ghana. When this program started, we understood we were dealing with women who had trauma in their lives…a lot of trauma. As we started to try to bring the initial group together, trying to develop the collaboration and trust needed for good teamwork, this trauma manifested in all kinds of behavior, not the least was outright conflict and antipathy between our participants.

 

Fast forward now two years. I am sitting in our office enjoying the banter between the team members as we are hashing out one challenge after another required to implement Phase II of our project. It’s astounding. It’s mind-blowing. It’s almost beyond belief. That these women who were almost in outright conflict with one another, could now be working as such a cohesive group. Not just working but being confident in themselves to allow each other to tease and be teased in return is so far beyond anything I could have imagined.

 

It is so hard to get across to people who have not experience this saga first hand just how big a transformation we are talking about. The credit for this goes to a lot of people. My co-founder, Gail, who saw this potential. Board members who stepped in a crucial times to intermediate between are participants and between some of them and me when the conflict got really tough. All our clients and our volunteers providing training from the U.S. who feed the steady dose of treating people with respect.

 

What really brought the amount of change to light was starting interviewing for our next group of trainees. We’ve given our existing team the major role in doing this. I am there, participating for sure, but mostly watching them. The compassion, the understanding, the encouragement, the firmness they communicate has one hardly believing they were just like those we are interviewing two years ago.

 

It has also been sobering listening to the stories of these new candidates. Rape, abuse, being trafficked, on and on. A lot of tears are being shed by all of us as the new candidates realize they, just maybe, are in a true trusting environment, with people who understand them, people who are not going to judge their past or close doors because of their past. As one of our women said after an interview looking to our future.

 

“I think this is just the beginning. I think we are going to be listening to many, many of these stories.”

 

That our initial group has gone beyond that to a position of self-confidence and self-belief is nothing short of a miracle, one they clearly intend to pass on.

Groundhog Day

You may recall from January this post about the incredulous experience of being told that the only means the neighboring apartment had for reaching the roof to repair an air conditioning unit was through the apartment I was using. And the subsequent multi-day saga of having work men haul themselves, their equipment, the old unit and the new unit through the rather small living room of the apartment. 

 What are the chances that something like this could happen again? Evidently 100%. Sure enough, the very first Saturday of my stay, the weekend where my goal is to relax and recoup energy from the long trip, there is a knock on the door. It is the compound security. The next door apartment has another air conditioning unit out. May they come through mine so they can access it? I suppose I could say no. Come back in two weeks when I’m gone. But if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn’t want that to happen. So instead, I had four hours on Saturday afternoon of people schlepping in and out of my apartment with tools and heavy air conditioning units.

 

Then in a new development this morning, Tuesday, I awoke to no electricity and no water. A high end unit like this advertises it has backup power supply. But I get the impression this whole complex was built on the cheap. I think it is time for me to find an alternative.

Jet Lag Management - The de-I Way

 If you travel a lot internationally, you will hear a lot of different ideas on how to manage jet lag, the issue of your internal body clock being out of synch the actual day/night cycle your body finds itself. Here are a few.

1. Adapt quickly to your new time zone. When you arrive at your destination, try to forget your old time zone as quickly as possible. ...
2. Manage sleep time. ...
3. Drink water. ...
4. Try light. ...
5. Drink a caffeinated beverage. ...
6. Keep your sleeping space comfortable. ...
7. Try melatonin. ...
8. Use medications.

I don't use any of these. I have developed my own system. It is a system based upon making use of the longest, transoceanic leg to readjust the sleep cycle so when you arrive at your destination you are well on your way to acclimating to time zone you have arrived. 

Sometimes the way the flights are timed makes this much easier. For example when going from the U.S. to Europe, one typically leaves in the evening and arrives in the late morning. By going to sleep as soon as possible after you've taken off and eaten, you get what is close to a regular sleep (depending on how long you usually sleep). Then if you immediately get into the day when you arrive, you are well on your way to getting adjusting.

However coming back the other way is more of a challenge. Now you leave late morning Europe time and arrive early afternoon U.S. time. As the day goes on in the U.S., your body clock thinks it is way in the middle of your sleep cycle. If you give in to it, you will be awake at just the time for local time to say you should be sleeping. The key here is to get some sleep early on, then fight to keep awake until it is finally local sleeping time.

Anyway you get the idea of how this works. This technique has helped me be incredibly productive and functional despite all the international travel I do. However, you may remember my last trip to Ghana in January my arrival was totally screwed up and I had the worst case of jet lag I'd had in years. The root cause of this was the particular routing I had taken. The core of the problem was a 7-hour layover in the evening at New York's JFK airport combined with a midnight departure to Ghana. As an early morning person, that 7 hours during the evening in New York was painful. I slept through most of the flight to Ghana meaning I had done exactly what I just explained you shouldn't do. I had kept myself on my original sleep cycle.

This trip, I was on the same flight so I knew I had to come up with another plan. The plan called for at least two naps during the 7-hour layover in New York, followed by a very circumscribed sleep of 3 hours during the 9+-hour flight to Ghana. Then, being sure to stay up after arrival to Ghana until the normal go-to-sleep hour, local time. The biggest impediment to executing this strategy was the lack of good areas to lie down and nap at the Delta Airlines club in JFK. However, I was to find an adequate place. I executed the strategy to perfection and have slept well both nights since arriving.

Theodora Phase II Is Leaving Earth Orbit!

 Off to Ghana again. Phase II of the project has been initiated. Thanks to a sizeable donation by one of the most wonderful couples in the world (as far as I am concerned) we have enough funds to initiate the second phase of our project. To review:

• The first phase was 'Proof of Concept"
• This is where we had to prove that we could indeed take these women from West Africa, living by their wits on the street and somehow train them to be acceptable virtual administrative assistants in the United States
• In the event, we took a target group of 4 young women and did just that. (Can I be candid here? I honestly don't think anyone who supported me in the beginning really believed we could do this. I think they decided to just take a leap of faith with me. It was so outlandish an idea. I have no idea why I believed it could be done. I suppose I can put it down to being in thrall to the higher power.)
• Now we need to prove that this wasn't just a fluke. We have to create replicable systems for everything we are doing. We have to create a model business that has the ability to expand and grow.

So you ask (actually you didn't ask but I need you to rhetorically ask so just be a nice reader and ask okay?), what specifically do you need to do to accomplish that? 

Why thank you for asking. Here is what we are creating.

• A system for recruiting new participants
• A means of evaluating and selecting from those we recruit
• The training system whereby we will transform these 'people from the street' to the raw material we can create virtual assistants from
• An entire marketing system to bring in the volume of new business we require to scale up
• A client on-boarding process integrated with on-going project management
• On-going capability training for all our participants so they get better and better at what they do
  
• Quality control systems to ensure client satisfaction
• A new U.S. 'for-profit' corporation (Newco) so we can move our people into an environment where they can earn the benefits of their work (profit sharing and ownership)
• A new Ghana subsidiary of Newco so we have a legal way of paying everyone here and our other expenses
• A new accounting and bookkeeping system for Newco
• New banking and money transfer systems for Newco

I am going to be working on all of these during the next two weeks I am in Ghana. Plus we have a major donor visiting us to do due diligence to possibly find other big donors. Someone paying their own way and giving us their valuable time to check us out! How cool is that. Truly there is something bigger than de-I (and you know how big de-I's ego is so it has to be REALLY BIG) that is pushing all this forward.

🙏🏽

 

Like A Phoenix - The Network Reborn

 I funny thing happened on the way through the pandemic. My network, my rich collection of personal contacts and resources, was reborn.

The changes resulting from Transitions 1.0 and 2.0 had slowly but surely made my life and experiences less and less relevant to the hundreds of people I had met and built connections with over my decades of being in business. Then came the coup de grace, the pandemic. 2020 was the year of the great isolation. With the exception of the work I was doing with Theodora and the few contacts from my old life who were interested in that, my contacts with my old network virtually dried up. My prior network had been built upon personal, face-to-face meetings and a focus on my local business world. I had the hardest time trying to maintain those connections in the new virtual world. And the issues they were interested and struggling with related to local business had no interest to me. The result was a period of darkness.

Then, last year, a change occurred. One of my board members in Ghana introduced me to a new global, virtual network building service called Lunchclub. Despite initial skepticism, this turned into a force of rejuvenation. The AI behind the program brought me people with a genuine interest in my life's trajectory. I began to meet the most interesting people all around not only the country but the world. This in turn got me back into my role of connector. It has become an exciting and stimulating part of my life as I build and entire new network focused on the social impact world I am now a part of.

Feeling The Pressure - So What If It Took A Decade

 How is it that you have a tool that has been sitting on your kitchen shelf for at least a decade before you finally decide that it might be useful. AND THEN, find not only is it useful, BUT IT DAMN NEAR CAN TRANSFORM YOUR COOKING LIFE!

What's bringing forth such passion?

My Pressure Cooker.

Not the new fangled Instant Pot. No my traditional, on the stove pressure cooker. 

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Necessity in this case is a lack of time. Theodora Africa Phase II has been launched (more on that in a future post) and there is a host of work to be done to realize the expansion. As a result less time to cook. YET, it is the time of year for long, slow cooked braises. And I have a freezer filled with pork shoulder, boneless lamb leg, beef chuck roast all begging to be slow cooked. But where is the time to do this?

So a month ago, I said, "Damn de-I, you've had this freaking pressure cooker you barely use for over a decade. Give it a try."

My first go was a pork shoulder pot roast. A challenge cooking here at altitude is getting meats like these tender because of the lower boiling temperature of water (causing all liquid based cooking to take longer). In the case of braises, a lot longer. Often, I would use a two-day process of cooking to get the desired tenderness and depth of flavor. Well I popped in my pork should with a bunch of flavorings and after 2 hours, it was this incredibly fork tender, taste imbued meat.

A couple of weeks later, I decided I wanted to make a lamb curry. Instead of a laborious, hand pounded curry paste, I put all my roots, leaves and stalks (galangal, ginger, garlic, onion, tumeric, cilantro, kefir lime leaf) along with my dried spices into the blender with some stock. I blended it into liquid (like is done with Ghana cooking). Put that and the lamb chunks in the pressure cooker. An hour and a half later, incredible lamb curry.

Today it was beef pot roast. On Friday, I had defrosted the chuck roast and covered it in dried flavorings (salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, sage, rosemary). I let it sit refrigerated overnight. On Saturday, I whipped out the pressure cooker, browned the meat on both sides, put a can of beef broth in, fired out the pressure cooker, an hour and a half later, turned it off. Let it rest until the pressure was down. When opened the meat was fall apart tender.

Now I am of the tribe the finds all braises are better the next day. So in the fridge it goes almost ready for Sunday dinner. An advantage to this is all the fat congeals and you can scoop it off so easy. I parboiled potatoes and carrots for 15 minutes. Reheated the roast and juices in the microwave for 7 minutes. Added said potatoes and carrots to the roast and put in a 350 oven for 20 minutes. Pot roast perfection for Sunday dinner (he says with extreme modesty). 

Easy Come, Easy Go

 Travel in the time of Covid adds a degree of stress to an already stressful process.

• Get your Covid test before you fly in the proscribed time - usually very short
• Fill out the country specific disclosure documents for travel 
• Upload your test results and forms to the airline
• Curse mightily as you realize your upload was not successful and you can't check-in
• Re-upload your documents and finally succeed in checking in
• Now get back to your packing which as always you've delayed and are now rushing through
• Reserve your Uber to get you to the airport tomorrow
• Collapse into an exhausted sleep
• Wake up to 19 texts on your WhatsApp account telling you that 3 out of 4 members of the #3 household have tested positive for Covid!
• Get on line with the airline and see if there is any way to change your flight for a week later. Sure there is. If you want to pay $10k more! 
• Realize that this trip isn't going to happen. Cancel the flight
• Mourn

Welcome to travel in the age of Covid.