Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place. I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind. *** I visited The Apartheid Museum today. The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides. The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams …
I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation. The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here. Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major thoroughfares were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere. Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is …
So far my favourite expression here at the Art of Participatory Leadership is “listen loudly.” People use it to describe a quality of attention where your ears are filled with sound and meaning, even if the person you are listening to is whispering.
For the first time since 1978 I stepped today onto a new continent. I have never been to Africa before, not even close. Today after travelling thirty hours from almost exactly half way around the world, I arrived in Johannesburg, on a hazy and warm summer morning. It is a strange thing to fly over Africa at night. As we winged south and east from New York a little more than half way into our flight we skirted the west coast of Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. I looked out the window and could see nothing save a little high …
The vacation in Hawaii has ended for me and I’m now somewhere over the middle of the United States on the third leg of a four leg journey that sees me flying from Hilo to Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Johannesburg. I arrive in South Africa Monday morning in time to recover and help design and deliver and Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with friends from REOS Social Innovation. It’s exciting to be heading to South Africa, the birthplace of my wife, and therefore one of the ancestral homelands of my kids. Exciting to be working with …