Sunday, March 29, 2009

Incidental Mentors


Tonight, I am learning all about a computer virus that my daughter accidentally (is there any other way?) downloaded onto the family computer. I'm also relearning that I should never use the same password on all my accounts...especially not on my Facebook account, my email account and my bank account.

Some of us are just simply slower learners!

Or maybe I'm just too naive and lazy to heed the warnings that pop up from the day you first touch a keyboard and read the word "GOOGLE".

Warnings that should make me wise enough not to let my first grader on the computer by himself at 6am on a Saturday even though my whole being is begging for another hour of sleep.

You get my point.

With all the ways to get in trouble in this world and all the things I keep learning way too late in life, I sometimes wonder how anyone, myself included, makes it past the age of 25 without spontaneously combusting.

Luckily, there are the guides and teachers, wise ones and gurus along the way. The one's with voices we tune into...the one's who have just the right balance of advice, kindness, humility and wisdom. The person who laughed with us and didn't laugh at us. The person who believed we would make it past 25 and was willing to bet we could do it without blowing ourselves up.

That is basically what mentoring is all about.

I wish I could thank all the people who mentored me on my journey to 25 and beyond. Fortunately, I had the chance to share my gratitude with most of them before they passed on to their next great adventure.

But there are many I will never be able to thank. The many incidental mentors who never even knew that they were on my journey with me.

The incidental mentors in my life were frequent. Random strangers at bus stops and on trains who spoke a sort of transcendent vision that sustained me in some weird way. Other incidental mentors were people I watched and learned from...people I admired from afar. The raven-haired grad student who I listened to speak with such intellectual curiousity and intensity. The woman at the concert hall who carried herself with such grace and strength. Images and conversations that marked me, that remain a part of me even decades later...all gifts my incidental mentors have given me.

And now, I work with hundreds of mentors. Mentors who are choosing that role through Infinite Family.

And all you mentors who I am lucky enough to meet in training and online from time to time? I learn from you. I learn from John, our "gaia guy" as I call him, who is inspiring me. I learn from Mike, whose friends say, "wherever Mike goes love grows". I am touched by Lori, whose love for her Keneilwe, her Net Buddy, is just boundless. I am so honored to know Barbara, a risk-taker and joy-sower, a rule-breaker and flag-bearer.

Just look at all those incidental mentors, who don't even know I'm learning from them! Lucky me!

With all these mentors surrounding me, maybe eventually I'll become a little less naive and lazy, so when the next inevitable teen tech tragedy unfolds, I won't spontaneously combust along with my bank account!

Once again, thank you for all you do...!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Running the Gauntlet of Growing Up in South Africa

This week, Manini's step-father was dragged from a car and stabbed to death.

Manini's response to our reaching out to her with concern was a deadened "These things happen."

And in her life, and the life of so many young people like her, it is true that these things do happen. Violent death, rape, the violence of poverty wrapped around the ever-present specter of HIV/AIDS buffets the children of Africa like a gauntlet of threatening men with bull-whips in their hands.

We can barely fathom what their days are like. In our days of complaining about traffic, decreasing investment portfolios and the trials and tribulations of appliances that break, children that whine and seemingly endless rounds of chores, tasks and responsibilities...it is hard to see our own lives as privileged.

But Betsy knows, and Cheryl is learning this from Liba and Chuck is being inspired by Siyabonga. The mentors of Infinite Family are given the gift of perspective from these incredible children of Infinite Family.

And Andrea? Andrea is logging on to a computer and coming face to face with Manini...sharing tears and the incredible depth of loss that Manini has faced in her very young life. Andrea in her NYC apartment, with her infant son, is a source of succor and support for this young woman who has no adult in her life...no one left to shoulder the grief with her and encourage her forward.

Manini is in a fragile place. A very smart, motivated young woman who has gone from orphanage to college. A fledgling success story. A child of infinite possibility.

A child of Infinite Family.

Infinite Family needs your support to continue to reach the children who run the gauntlet of growing up in such challenging circumstances.

Your support helps us keep Manini connected to an adult who isn't going anywhere...who she can count on...an adult mentor from Infinite Family.

We hope you would consider giving your time, talent and treasure to the children of Africa through Infinite Family. We make it easy, we make it fun...and it makes a difference.

We thank you for all you do!

Dana

Friday, March 13, 2009

Navigating the Technology Jungle!



Refilwe, an orphanage and community enrichment program located in one of the more rural areas surrounding Johannesburg, loses its power in the Infinite Family computer center every time someone turns on the stove in the cottage next door.

Yes, indeed! Everyday is a new technology adventure with Infinite Family!

*When we teach computer skills at Refilwe, we do it in the dark...afraid to turn on the lights, overload the system and then lose the laboriously typed user profiles the children have been working on.

*Internet Solutions generously donates satellite access to all Infinite Family's computer centers. Which means these hunking-big satellites are attached to tin roofs, concrete block outbuildings and shipping containers masquerading as technology centers. This incredible access to the internet provided free of charge puts the ultimate strain on these less than stable structures. But somehow, these humble dwellings bear the burden of the satellites, beaming the smiling faces of our Net Buddies all the way to outer space and over the pond on a daily basis!

*Nkosi's Haven, a Johannesburg hospice for HIV+ women and their children, stitches together their Infinite Family connection by dangling the modem precariously from a chair...the only way to keep the ethernet wire connected!

And those are just a few of the technology problems in South Africa -- one of the best wired cities on the African continent!

As for the US, you'd think you'd be looking at a fairyland of technological wonders. Guess again!

*100 different users with different operating systems, computers of varying ages and abilities, less than adequate internet connections, modems that are flukey, and speaker/headphone systems that mysteriously want to do something other than work when it is time to be talking to a Net Buddy during a video conference. The US is no technological picnic.

*And in my own home in Pittsburgh PA, if I use my telephone and my microwave at the same time, I sound like I'm underwater and the popcorn won't pop!

Some days, it feels as if technology is a jungle of preying problems waiting to pounce!

And yet, Infinite Family somehow manages to create enduring and special connections between orphans in South Africa and mentors around the world. Mentors and Net Buddies meet every week, sharing their hopes and dreams, their daily lives and funny stories...laughing, creating poetry and chair-dancing to music together...all on this same amazing and frustrating link called technology.

Until of course, one of the kids at the orphanage gives the key to the computer center to a man named David who went away for the weekend...and who conveniently dropped his cell phone in the Crocodile River so he can't be reached. And then you realize even when the technology works, you've still got problems!

Oops!! Gotta go...my neighbor is using his CB Radio and his voice is coming through my computer speakers!!!

Technology...you've got to love it!

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Louis CK's perspective

Last night, when I was roaming through the Facebook realm, I came upon a video that made me laugh out loud (or lol, if you do that sort of thing). Louis CK was on a rant on the Conan O'Brien Show about how completely ungrateful we are.

Louis CK did a lol job of pointing out how completely jaded and unappreciative we are of the miracles of our daily modern life. Louis painted a familiar picture of how instead of being completely ga-ga over the miracle of the cell phone, we whine over a dropped call. He wonders why we aren't absolutely stuck to the airplane windows amazed by the fact that we moving through the air in a chair in the sky. Instead, we are impatient, grumpy and never satisfied with whatever we have.

One thing the kids of Infinite Family give me every day is perspective. They are totally over the moon about touching the keys on a keyboard and sending the words they labor to write zooming across the room in an email to a friend. They are proud and bashful at seeing their faces splashed across the computer screen and beamed around the world. They are absolutely amazed by the fact that some adult out there in the big wide world of "important stuff" wants to spend time with them...they who live small lives in shanty towns or orphanages struggling to attain the basic necessities of life.

This miracle of relationship is not lost on these kids. The encouraging words they hear, the advice filled emails they get, the smiles that are shared with them are not incidentals in their day. These interactions are a miraculous intervention in a humble life.

So, yes, Louis CK has nailed us...painted a completely accurate picture of our wanton disregard for the amazing life we live. But if you want a weekly reminder of the wonders of technology and the beauty of shared time -- look no further than Infinite Family.

(I'll give you the Louis CK link because I want you to lol, too! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus)