Prayerfully Preparing for 2008

Praying The Scriptures
I went to The Scriptures this morning to literally pray some Scriptures. I always love to go through the book of Isaiah, and to receive instruction therein. The book is full of so many promises. Since this is a Word based blog, you’ll permit me to document one or two of those promises.

Chapter 51 verse 3
For The Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places: and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of The Lord: joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.

On every occasion that I read and pray this promise, I replace Zion with my own name.

Chapter 41 verse 10
Fear not, for I am with you: be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. Yes, I will help you. I will uphold you with the right hand of my righteousness.

Chapter 44 verse 3
I will pour water on him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour My spirit upon the dry ground: I will pour My spirit upon thy seed, and My blessing upon thy offspring

In praying this scripture, my utterance is that God Himself would fulfill every thirsting, and pour floods of blessings and remembrance on all and every present scarcity.

Chapter 43 verse 18 and 19
Forget about what has happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I am about to do something brand new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? There it is! I am making a road through the desert, rivers in the deserts

And as I completed quiet time, one other scripture shouted at me: chapter 55 verse 12: for you shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace…

In 2008 I choose to continue to believe Him for yet more of the evidence of His promises.

Won't you?

Celebrating Christ-mass

I am persuaded without a shadow of doubt that my Christmas is better celebrated in these parts, without the turkey and the stuffing, the shopping and the Christmas credit card debts.

I remember my first Christmas in Ghana in 2003. Christmas Eve was enjoyed at a BBQ at a friend's house. I returned home at 4am. Jumped out of bed at 8am to go to the Christmas day service in church. Came back from church and slept.

Ruka woke up again at around 3pm, and went for Christmas lunch (Motherland style with plenty of local delicacies, full roasted lamb, and well, let’s just say plenty of vin rouge and vin blanc). She returned home at 11pm.

Then I thought: yes – that’s the way to do it.

Christmas 2007
Christmas 2007 is going to be massive fun. What am I saying, it is already proving to be massive fun.

I am taking time out of work (yes, you read right), and I can’t wait for the full party season to set in. In fact the party, enjoyment and relaxation season has actually already started. We do a lot of BBQ’s here, and I went to one on Saturday evening. What fun that was.

So, there’s going to be a bit of golfing, some Anomabo Beach Resort time, yet more BBQ’s, and some me time.

New Year's Eve?
As for the 31st night, it’s going to be a ball – there’s only one party to be at in Accra on that night, and guess who has an invite?

But of course I must start the evening of new year's eve in church praising and praying - forgeting those things which are behind, and reaching forth to take hold of what is before me, even as I press for the higher calling that's called up for me in Jesus Christ.

So you see, I have determined to celebrate Christ-mass, enjoying the abundance of the friendships, love and family that He has surrounded me with in Ghana.

How are you celebrating Christmas?

Grace

Reflecting on 2007
It is 4.20am in the morning, I am in Nairobi Kenya, and I am reflecting.

I am reflecting on the year that is 2007. I am remembering the triumphs during the year, and I am praying that the sorrows of the year that is will not rise a second time, for the Bible says in the book of Nahum: affliction shall not rise again a second time.

I am remembering that somewhere in the Bible it says that: "I have been young and now I am old. I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging for bread.”

I am remembering my late father. I am remembering his small beginnings and I remembering his astonishing end, and even as I do that I reflect how true the verse in The Bible is that reads something like: though your beginning may be small your end will be very great.

I am reflecting that when the year started and I had just embarked on my MBA course I honestly never dared to believe or anticipate that I would be awarded the distinctions and merits I have hitherto been awarded on the course modules I have taken thus far. And I am remembering that all things work together for the good of them that are called according to His Name.

I am wallowing in the Grace that has brought me to where I am today. Even as I write I lay in bed in a luxury hotel surrounded by all things opulent and comforting, and I am thinking my parents would be very proud.

I am remembering one of the prayers that my pastor often prays which says: you will go to great places, you will do great exploits.

I am remembering the Grace that saw me through many travels in safety during the year; the same Grace that introduced me to new friendships, deepened some existing ones, and yet still sifted some others.

And I am acknowledging the wisdom and necessity of the verse in the Bible which says in all things we should give thanks.

Thank You.

Humpty Dumpty

And Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
I’ve had a few doors shut in my face over the past few weeks, and boy has it been tough. Insomnia. Tears. Anxiety. Loss of appetite (well, that’s never a bad thing for a woman….).

But I’ve also had great open doors. At a recent business trip, I can honestly say that I walked into every high office in the country that I visited which I wanted and dared to walk into – and I was given the audience I sought.

So I wondered: ‘Erm. Hello, God? It’s me, Ruka. Can I ask a question? How come several doors of fortune and favour can open effortlessly, and at the same time, the major opportunities and doors that I have sought to enter over the year slam on my face as I dare to enter in?”

My negative emotions were even more heightened every time I entered church. As I listened to the words of the praise songs, and listened to The Word as it was preached, my soul and essence yelled a huge ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘really?’. I am told it happens to everyone.

Rejecting Despair
Then I determined that well, I probably could do with the loss of appetite for a few more weeks and lose a few pounds, but I certainly could not deal with the insomnia anymore (listen, it shows on your face – Heaven forbid for much longer!), and really, my eyes are really too exquisite and delicate to be consistently tingly; and no, all that anxiety? I can’t really deal with it.

So, finally, I settle down. I settle down to hope, I settle down to sensibleness, and I settle down to expediency.

Remember
Someone spoke to me this week and in passing said: God is not merciless, He is merciful. I took her at His Word, so to speak.

Bebe Winans wrote a song about Humpty Dumpty. Well, you know how it goes: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; and Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Oh dear. Poor old Humpty.

But Mr Winans goes on….It wasn’t that he fell so hard and so bad that they couldn’t put Humpty together again, it was just that the king’s men were calling on the wrong king. For we know a King Who can put your life back together no matter how great the fall.

And that The King, The Most High God, is still mending broken pieces.

So, if ever you feel like Humpty Dumpty, Mr Winans advises, if you’ve been broken from a fall, remember that He’s just and so faithful and He’ll be there to fix it all. Remember that He is Love and so faithful.

Remember Still
Bebe also sings about Mary. The one who had a little Lamb. Jesus is that Lamb.

He further advises that someone should tell Jack and Jill to get off that hill on their search for a pail of water. Had they not come across The Living Water?

And Little Boy Blue? Tell him, give Him your troubles. He'll take your blues away.

Mother Hubbard? If you trust in Jesus, He’ll put food in your cupboard.

Fables and Fairy Tales
Fairy tales, Mr Winans says, reflect some truths that sometimes happen to us all.

Maybe I had to have a fall, be a little blue, and search the cupboard of my soul to get to this place of hope.

Mindset and Nuances - Reading the Unspoken

Still Exploring
I have been exploring the issue of culture, cultural differences and nuance in my head over the past couple of weeks. I guess I am trying to find answers and/or understand my own mindset better, as well as trying to appreciate those of others.

So in turn I went into my books for help. MBA Summer School learning diary, in fact. The Summer School module was on Managing People – and I posted something on that enlightening experience in August.

My Learning Diary
So I turn to the Learning Diary. The first four bullet points shout at me. Here goes:

1. People are governed by different and complex fundamentals – upbringing, culture, exposure, race, gender and therefore managing people is an art
2. In managing people, remember the cultural context – some cultures have a culture of deference and others have a culture of negotiation. Normally, Southern Cultures display deference and Northern cultures display negotiation. These translate into organizational cultures
3. Men and women communicate differently. Women tend to collaborate and cooperate. Men automatically assume that there is a hierarchy to observe
4. People from different cultures and nationalities communicate differently. Watch out for the nuances

Deep.

And yet still very infant
I am slightly amused that, at this age, I am still infant in my thought and expectation that the people I come into contact with are governed by values equal to those I have been brought up to hold dear. And I think many of us probably fall into the same category.

That’s why we can be surprised when we hear that a university student is a student by day and prostitute by night; and when we learn that that most respected CEO is actually overseeing the cooking up of books to inflate the profit and loss account.

All well and good, but what am I driving at? The notion of differing values and mindsets still.

I met a renowned Ghanaian writer the other day. We talked around these same issues, and, as women do, homed in on the issue of relationships and marriage. Her finale?

(i) Men and women marry for different reasons
(ii) In Southern cultures people often marry principally to attain social status, economic status and to have a family, instead of principally for friendship, love and companionship.

Wow. That second point kind of threw me away. And I wandered where that left me.

Or, should I say, I discovered a possible explanation for where I am today…

Laugh at me.

On Managing Change and Being a Legal Alien

Confessions of a Blogger
Okay. I confess. I kind of got scared last week when I was posting the entry. I felt that the posting may have been too heavy and I wanted to make it light hearted – so I changed it a little.
Well, bloggers rights and prerogative et al, I changed my mind. Here is what I actually meant to post last week.

Legal Alien Revisited: On the Psychologist's Chair
You know the song by Sting: An Englishman in New York? The chorus goes something like this: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York.” I am improvising that song for me to go like this: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an….” Actually, there’s a problem now for I don’t quite know whether to add “Nigerian in Ghana” to that or “British in Ghana” or “London Nigerian in Ghana”. Confused? Well, that makes two of us.

I had another session with the Psychologist yesterday. This time though it was less intense – it was fun in fact. In fact it was cool. So, there I am on the couch, all relaxed and thankful that since the last session with the Psychologist, by the grace of God, healing finally came. Relief.

So very useful?
So he asks of my opinion as to why the session was so useful. “I think I just finally realized that I was not weak in feeling all those negative emotions. I realized that those emotions were and are legitimate, and the guilt left me. As the guilt left I could finally let go of the negative emotions and thank God for giving me the opportunity to have known Kojo.” I added that I was still bewildered as to how many people seemed to have coped so well and so quickly with their bereavement.

Then, it happened.
“Coped so well?” he responded. “What do you mean by that?’’ So I explain how when my father passed ten years ago the company that I worked for, realizing that my life might be in turmoil for a while, offered to give me leave of absence from work for ‘’as long as it takes”. In the interim I only took two weeks off anyway (being a Muslim, Chief was buried within 24 hours of his passing and no, I could not get a flight to Lagos in time for his burial). The point is, they did not expect things to go back to normal with me for a while.

Bereavement, Change Management and Culture
I then remembered that when a former colleague passed recently in the UK, everyone, and I mean everyone, had been offered counseling and leave of absence for as long as they needed it, and, even from here in Ghana, I could feel that people had been so affected by the colleagues passing. It was a slow grind for everyone to try to get to grips with what had occurred.

The difference is here, well, everyone just seems to be getting on with it, and here I am, or was as the case may be, struggling with coping in amongst super coping people.

“Might it be that what you are actually trying to deal with is cultural differences, and coping with those cultural differences?”

Ah. Now, that’s an explanation and an avenue I had never ventured into.

So, I began to think of all my legal alien experiences.
Well, I listed all of those at the last posting so I won’t bore you with the details again. What I will say is that at that moment I came to realize the ever apparent need to change manage in each and everyday of life and circumstance.

Change management.
In management consultancy, we preach about it all the time – and I mean all the time. Actually let me just make this really personal and admit that I preach all about it all the time during the course of my work.

But. When it comes to applying it in our everyday lives, we seem to forget the fact that we are managing change and disregard the need for an interim period, a transition period, a period of adjustment and a period of coping. In the end, in resisting and not managing a change so obvious and in your face, you find yourself caught between a rock and a hard place.

“Might it be that what you are actually trying to deal with is cultural differences, and coping with those cultural differences?”

I exhaled.
I began to think about some of the adjustments I had had to make over the past four years – and the adjustments I had failed to make which were really pulling me into, well, let’s just say brief moments of confusion coupled with frustration, exasperation and sometimes pure stress.

I’ll start with the time keeping
Where I relocated from, you either work flexi hours, or you work standard hours – you don’t have the option of mixing the two. So I come here and there are no flexi hours. Work begins at 8am.

There’s the small issue of the traffic though. A 20 minutes drive to work could take an hour at least and an hour and a half on average. So it means waking up at 4.15 and leaving home at 5.45. So I am in the office on time – and, because of the evening traffic, I leave the office at 7pm for the gym and get home say around 9.15 – averagely.

I don’t need any lifestyle guru to tell me that that kind of a lifestyle leads to well, let’s just say, many negatives – in amongst trying to have a productive home, work and social life.

But it never occurred to me until recently that, at this level, my employer is not interested in me marking time, but more so in my productivity within the parameters of the outputs and outcomes earmarked for me to achieve in any one financial year. I just put more and more pressure on myself – because I had to, or so I thought, be in at 8am at the latest.

Let’s go on to the genderisation of everyday living
I can’t help being a woman. But when I walk into some client meetings with a male colleague, the assumption is that all the knowledge, authority and information for the meeting, the project, the assignment is fully and only imbibed in my male colleague. It could never be imbibed in me of course, me being a mere woman.

In the moments when you do assert your authority, whether that’s through the insight and ability you display in your sphere of professional discipline or whether it’s in the strength of your socio-economic achievements, the same men in the majority of cases (clients, friends and enemies alike) are, shall I say, somewhat unsettled and some women will even tell you to ‘slow down’.

Help.

But I don’t want to understand that mindset at all, and it’s been challenging to say the least. Accepting that mindset to my mind would be a scorn to the vision, love and toil of my earthly father who so very ably pursued excellence in his endeavours and spurred all of his children on, educating us to the highest standards available.

And most of all, accepting that mindset would also I believe be in contempt of the purpose and gifting which my Heavenly Father has called me to.

So what am I learning to do?
I am learning to manage the change by showing respect, regard and honour to the character and person of everyone I come into contact with – man, woman, child. My hope is that they would see that despite any and every achievement, I am still human. I am still respectful, considerate and thoughtful of all humanity. How could one not be?

The problem is though sometimes, in a culture of power and status deference as you have here, that is, more often than not, seen as a sign of weakness.

Help.

Ending on a light hearted note
I had dinner with a friend last night. And we were talking about this very issue – cultural differences and the challenges these pose to every day living.

My friend is having issues with the way their staff cannot, it would seem, think outside of the box. My response was that people are illimitable by their exposure, and by the same vein, people limited by their lack of exposure - and that's why travel, whether that's regional, national or international, is so important. What is common sense to you may not be common sense to anyone else. The systems, processes and procedures that are standard to you might very well be alien to someone else who has never even left the shores of Ghana. It’s about continuous mentoring. An 'Aha' moment occurs.

And thinking of continous mentoring...
I am reminded that our Lord Jesus Christ is continually mentoring us.

Well, let me speak for myself. I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I obey and sometimes, well, let's just say I miss the mark. I am not exposed to the things He is exposed to for His ways are not my ways, as the Bible says and that means that because I cannot see the end of today from tomorrow and the day after that, I sometimes make decisions and mistakes that He would have me not make because He does see today from tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that.

That means even He is having to exercise patience, exercise mercy and exercise love unto me even as He mentors me.

I guess what the Psycologist is making me realise is that, in managing the change of my new life in Ghana, Iwill also need to exercise patience, mercy and love to those whose exposures, mindsets and experiences are different to mine, and whose responses and reactions to me, are, well, let me say, different to what I might expect.

Aha. I'm a grown up now...

A Legal Alien

You know the song by Sting: An Englishman in New York? The chorus goes something like this: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York.”

I am improvising that song for me to go like this: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an….” Actually, there’s a problem now for I don’t quite know whether to add “Nigerian in Ghana” to that or “British Nigerian in Ghana” or “London Nigerian in Ghana”. Confused? Well, that makes two of us.

So, with Sting's melody ringing in my head, I began to think of all my legal alien experiences.

Heard the one about the gardener?
At 6am he calls on the phone. “Madam, I am coming this morning.” “Please it’s too early to be calling me. Call me back after 7.30.” The gardener never showed again – apparently offended that his madam had told him that a 6am phone call to say that he would be reporting to work was too early.

Heard the one about the roundabout?
Here I was, approaching a roundabout and I stop, as there is another vehicle actually on the roundabout and I am waiting for him to move on so I can move in. Guess what? On the round about, he slows down for me and stops and gestures to me to move in. Bewildered, I shook my head and said at him: ‘’You have right of way. Move. This is how accidents start.” The guy angrily uttered words I care not to repeat. I am sure that he thought I was off my rocker.

And the one about the renowned private hospitals?
A friend and her colleague go to donate blood. The nurse’s gloves are stained with the blood. My friend remarks that she would like the nurse to change his gloves before taking her blood. His response? “What’s your problem? Isn’t it your colleague’s blood?”

Another friend’s son goes for his yellow fever vaccinations. The nurse is only able to inject in half of the vaccine – the injection just won’t push down any further. My friend realized that they are using the wrong type of injections for the vaccines.

And the one about the driver?
He gets a premium salary, for the comfort of working longer hours. Perhaps twice maybe three times the salary of the average driver. You give him a tip at least twice a week but unfailingly every month there’s at least one urgent family incident that necessitates him asking for an advance, or a loan, or both.

And the one about the African time?
Meetings do not generally start on time – period. Thirty minutes late, at least. The Africa Business Leaders Forum was held here last week – note, Africa Business Leaders, so a whole load of people from Africa had been invited and paid to attend the forum. Opening day. 8.30 start, to be opened by the President. 8.30 come and goes. Not even the organizers had arrived at 7.45am. The start was delayed by at least an hour and a half. At the morning breakout session I attended on the first day, three of the panel speakers did not turn up – and we start two hours late.

And the one about the ladies at the till in supermarkets?
I soon realized that there’s no point in losing your temper. They serve you, but they serve you at the most leisurely of paces – and they serve you whilst they chat with the adjacent cashier. Forget the fact that all you want to do is pay for your groceries and get out of the supermarket.

And the one about the carpenter who makes you a table that wobbles?
“Madam, I don’t know why you are annoyed. This table is okay. Look at it. It is standing. You can put things on it”

And the one about ….

Imagine how our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must have felt for all those 33 years on earth?