From the Pearl of the Orient to the Pearl of Africa
“Widen your World”, as the Turkish Airlines slogan says.
(Written while on the plane on a 21-hour journey from Silicon Valley to Uganda, Africa.)
How does a girl originally from the Philippines, known as the Pearl of the Orient, find herself on a Turkish Airlines flight on the way to Uganda, known as the Pearl of Africa?
What helps a mother of two, walk away from her bravely waving 10-year-old daughter and her uncontrollably sobbing 9-year-old son, on the other side of the security checkpoint at San Francisco International Airport?
I was born in Maydolong, Eastern Samar, Philippines. If the Philippines is the Pearl of the Orient, then I would say Eastern Samar is the “orient”-most of the Pearl of the Orient. My beloved hometown of Maydolong, where my parents and the rest of my extended family live, sits on the shores of the Pacific, about halfway through the eastern length of Samar, the third largest island in the Philippine archipelago. Whenever I gaze at the ocean from one of the beaches in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I have now been living for the last 17 years, I tell myself my hometown is just on the other side of this Pacific Ocean.
Now here I am, on a 21-hour journey, from San Francisco, California, USA en-route to Entebbe, Uganda, via Istanbul, Turkey, with a stop in Kigali, Rwanda. I knew Uganda is in Africa, but I had to google it to find exactly where. I knew it sounds like, but it’s not, Wakanda, the fictional country in Marvel’s Black Panther movie. My kids (and okay I’ll admit, us parents also) are big Marvel fans. As my trip neared, the kids and I have been doing the Black Panther cross-arms-on-chest salute and saying, “Uganda forever!”. But only recently did I learn that Uganda, too, is a country known as the “Pearl of …”.
This will be my first time in Africa. “Widen your world” indeed!
The “how” I came to be making this trip has an easy answer — it’s thanks to the SAP Global Social Sabbatical program. I work for SAP, the market leader in enterprise software application, whose mission is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. I have been working for SAP for 20 years, the first 3 out of Melbourne, Australia, and the last 17 out of the Silicon Valley. As part of SAP’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, and to directly embody its mission to uplift people’s lives, the SAP Global Sabbatical program sends a diverse group of 12 employees from around the globe into emerging markets to provide business skills to help non-profits and social entrepreneurs.
This year, I have been incredibly lucky to be one of the 12 now on various stages of journey to Uganda. We are all flying out of 9 different countries — two from the US, three from Germany, and one each from Australia, India, Singapore, Brazil, Ireland, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia. Even more amazing, we are 10 different nationalities with even more diverse countries of origin. One colleague is a Brazilian of Japanese descent, now living in Australia. Another colleague is a Taiwanese-born Canadian, now living in Singapore. There’s me, the Filipino now living in the USA, while the other colleague coming also from the US is Dutch, and the one from Czechoslovakia is Polish. There’s also the German colleague who’s lived in the US for many years, and I’m sure there are more country affiliations I’m forgetting. Just by meeting these amazing people and getting to work with them for a month, I would be “widening my world” so many times over. I am grateful to be working for a company like SAP, who recognizes the incredible value of the diversity of its employees and harnesses that diversity into developing the products and services we offer customers, and putting it into good use in its volunteering projects like this that directly contribute to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
In Uganda, we will be partnering with the international aid organization VSO in their SCOPE (Skills and Capacity for Organizational (VTI) Productivity and Employment) Project that is aimed at increasing access to employment for the people of the Albertine region of Uganda, by building up the resilience and capacity of several Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) in Hoima and Kasese. The goal is to support the VTIs to better equip its students to be the future workforce that will support the developing oil and gas industry in the Albertine region.
In the past few weeks, as part of our social sabbatical pre-work calls, we already got the chance to meet some of the Ugandans we will be working with — chief among them is Michael Talemwa, our project officer from VSO, and Emmanuel Etonu, our VSO counterpart in the MIS (Management Information Systems) sub-team that I have been assigned to. In one of our email exchanges, I had casually mentioned to Michael that I have two kids and my son just had his 9th birthday the other day and that I was really happy I was still at home to celebrate with him. He immediately replied with birthday greetings for my son and regards for my daughter, and my kids were beyond thrilled to be receiving greetings from Uganda!
By now you probably have an inkling on what thoughts help a mother like me, walk away from her two crying children, not to mention an incredibly supportive husband (as in, “wow, after nearly 14 years of marriage, I did marry the right guy” kind of supportive) at the airport. It’s the thought that I have been given an opportunity of a lifetime — a chance to meet and work with amazing colleagues from around the world. A chance to work in partnership with an aid organization and hopefully learn how sustainable development is maintained so that I can some day apply this to helping my home region in the Philippines. A chance to meet some of the incredible people of Uganda and learn about their culture and their way of life. A chance to see and experience some of the wonderful things that the Pearl of Africa has to offer. (We are already planning a weekend safari trip to Murchison Falls National Park.) A chance to see Africa for the first time and to fly Turkish Airlines for the first time — and find out, that I had been unknowingly following their slogan already — widening my world.
Most of all, what helped me as a mother is the belief that what I’m doing is also widening my children’s world. We started talking about this trip pretty much as soon as I got the happy news that I’ve been accepted to the social sabbatical program and will be sent to Uganda. They watched BBC’s “The Hunt”, which is a similar documentary to BBC Planet and decided that if Mommy is going to be gone from them for several weeks, she better bring back pictures of animals in Africa. Last week, my daughter decided to research and make me a checklist of the animals I could see in Uganda.
Not to be outdone, a couple of days ago, my son decided to research on the top 10 deadliest animals in Africa to “help” me. And now I’ve read more than I care to know about the “puff adder”, considered number one on the deadliest list. We’ve talked about how my social sabbatical trip is meant to help some of the people of Uganda in some way. And so sometimes they would embarrassingly brag to their teachers, classmates, and their classmate’s parents that their mom is going to Africa to help people.
I hope that someday they would embody helping others as part of their DNA. And hopefully one day, they, too, would find themselves on a flight to Africa to “widen their worlds”.
(This is the first of hopefully many more blogs about my Social Sabbatical experience in Uganda. Check out the other inspiring blogs written by SAP colleagues about their own social sabbatical journeys in Uganda and other countries.)
