The sisterhood of the traveling hair curler…
The voice of a professional movie trailer narrator booms in my head — “In the most unusual of places, in the midst of a social sabbatical with professional colleagues, trying to make an impact at the nonprofit that our team is connected to, where minds should be occupied with serious world changing ideas, where hearts should be bursting with joy over the impact created …” cut to the 1000 feet letdown drop in my own voice, “why the heck is my mind wandering to this giggly teenage book/movie I watched some eons ago called The sisterhood of the traveling pants? ”. Loca! As Livia Pommerening’s tattoo would say.
The book tells the tale of a shared pair of jeans that fit all four teenage protagonists perfectly even though all four girls are of different shapes, sizes, colors and cultural backgrounds.
In our bangkok hotel where our SAP Social sabbatical cohort is put up, the most fun place to hang out other than the dazzling blue pool on the rooftop is #1508, our team room. While there is so much happening in that shared area that deserves a post of its own, there is a secret transaction, unbeknownst to the men of the cohort, happening right under their noses.
Couple of times a week, a mystery parcel is left there by one of the women of the group and picked up by another, to be repeated each week. The parcel holds a key beauty secret that one of us forgot to pack, a hair curler. If you are as privileged as Markus Meisl or Lautaro Spotorno, you will not need to burn the midnight lamp in fear of what your hair decides to do tomorrow in the humid thailand air, right before that important client meeting or that heavily instagrammed vacation moment. For the rest of us follicled commoners, looking good takes hard work.
The traveling hair curler to the rescue. Always considerate of who has the bigger moment the next day to take home the parcel, who sacrifices for the greater good of the cohort, who takes one for the team and who gets to walk around in a shampoo-ad-style hairdo, rocking their day!
As we navigate the totally foreign environment around us, I have come to immensely appreciate the strong, healthy female friendship happening in our team. The 6 of us could not be any more different — different countries, backgrounds,skin colors, hair types, languages, job functions, family situations. Yet there is a strong underlying solidarity, sisterhood if you will, that is a really lovely part of my experience these few weeks of the sabbatical. (Relax Zvone Mandić, Holger Kuhn, harsha bhatt, Markus and Lauta, we love you too and will get you in another post, today it is about the better half ;)).
Be it through Klara’s wicked sense of humor, Christina’s latina sense of style, Geraldine’s brilliant travel instincts, Farirai Mubvuma’s infectious energy or Livia Pommerening’s bravery to crush scorpions with her teeth, these women are there to tell you that dress you got off a brilliant bargain with a street vendor wasn’t your smartest moment after all. What are friends for, if they dont tell you in brutal honesty everything that will make you a better version of yourself? Here’s to stronger bonds with all of you for a lifetime!
