One of my favorite animated movies is Ratatouille, a movie about a rat and a clumsy orphan boy. In the movie, Remy the rat dreamed to be a chef someday like his idol Auguste Gusteau, but all odds were against him—a detestable little rat. Remy became separated from his family and started to live in […]
If we were told 100 years ago that we would be able to send little packages of information through cyber space faster than the speed of sound, we would have thought the whole idea was ridiculous. We had some ideas of how technology would revolutionize everything, but not to the extent of which we see […]
In 1999, I was in Zambia at a meeting and people were asking me what I thought about Y2K. I jokingly replied, “You won’t have to worry about it, if you’re Amish, or live in a village.” People in the computer industry believed that the computer internal system clock was going to misread the date […]
I check mail at the post office about twice a week, and I don’t think too much about opening the door and waiting for someone to come through, but it is something I do very often; sometimes unconsciously. I notice people begin to hurry up when I have the door open for a while as […]
On one of my trips back home to Zambia, I had gone into the city to buy some African wood carvings and paintings for friends and for my apartment back in the United States. After I was done shopping, I made my way to a bus station. A man, a little older than me, was […]
What do we cherish the most? This last week before Valentine’s Day, I was thinking of what I should get my wife. Last year I had gotten her flowers, but this year, I needed to up my game a little. I usually get off work at 5 p.m. and make the 40 minute drive home […]
Dreams can be reborn – sometimes a little different than expected. When I was about 7 years old, I had a bad allergic reaction to some food I ate and my skin was breaking out with a rash. My mom took me to a hospital some four miles away from our home. While at the […]
How the past can make or break us. Years back, McDonald had put out a really neat commercial. In the commercial, there were two boxers. One of them was getting hammered and was about give up when his coach reminded him of something that happened in the past. The coach told him, “Remember when you […]
The journey of one touched by many With the child mortality rate of about 19 percent, many Zambian children were not expected to survive past the age of 5. 2 out of every 5 children had no chance of ever setting foot in a classroom. Life was a dead end. I was like a little […]
What changed my life is not what my father said, it’s what he did. I was born and raised in a shanty compound east of the capital city of Zambia. Kalingalinga was one of the poorest communities in Lusaka. An average worker made about $30 a month. Poverty, crime, diseases, witchcraft, and prostitution were rampant; […]