How I got my "name"

Hello everyone.  I am Ryan Kennedy.  And growing up that meant something to me.  We carry our name around like an appendage, allowing it to grow with us and to some small degree shape who we are.  Our relationship with the names people call us, our calling names you could say, grows and changes with the cultures around us.  Don’t believe me?  Just look around you.  Do you live somewhere where your get to call your boss Steve? Or is it always Mr/Ms. Jackson?  Have you ever had a professor that insisted that you call them “Dr. someoneso” vs. “Mr/Mrs. Someoneso”?  They did get their PhD after all, and how you address them should reflect this accomplishment.  Your insistence on what your calling name is seems to be an insistence on who you are.  Your individuality.  So when living in a culture devoid of individuals, does it make sense, or seem right to demand to be an individual?  Great question, Ryan.  Thanks Ryan. Well this isn’t the kind of question that has an answer, but I will share my take on this problem and would invite you, my dedicated readers to contribute to the conversation either in the comments section or you can reach me via e-mail because my experience is just one of many and these are the kinds of questions that really need to be shared amongst multiple perspectives.  So more on this in the bonus section at the end.

Growing up as a white, straight, American, male I was afforded the privilege of dictating who I was.  Culturally I was permitted to base my identity off of my accomplishments, my jobs, my academic achievements, and ultimately my choices.  If somebody did make assumptions about who I was they were typically positive and affirming and gave me the space to develop into the person that I felt that I wanted to become rather than spending my time trying to fit myself into a mold that society had created for me or felt the pressure of societies expectation of who I should be weighing down on me.  Now I have mentioned in previous posts about how even for someone like me the groups and cultures around me exert enormous influence over who I become, but even so I was left an enormous license in deciding who I wanted to be.  Living in Burkina challenged that space.  Challenged my identity.  But in a strange and unprecedented way.

In the states names are very important.  You meet someone, you shake their hand, they ask you your name, you tell them and ask them their name, and then if you’re anything like me you some how never manage to focus hard enough to actually hear their name because you’re too busy thinking of other things like breathing and saxophones and literally anything your brain can think of besides that person’s name.  At which point you are forced to embarrassedly ask that person what there name is while assuring them that you are going to forget it again.  And all of this because names are important.  We identify with our name, we are proud of our name, we like people calling us by our name, and we note with pride the moments when our superiors upgrade us from “you” or “weatherby” to our actual name.  It’s a sign of respect and refusing to call somebody by their name is refusing to acknowledge that person as an individual.  So I guess it would surprise you all to hear that for a good portion of my service I had no name.

In Burkina a person’s name serves a different role than it does in most social circles in America.  It is used to identify somebody as part of a group rather than as an individual because no individual is more important then the group that they belong to.  The title of that group allows you to know something about who this person is, what they do, and decide if they should be allowed within your group or if you are not ready to trust them.  While in Burkina many volunteers are confronted with what I would call the “Nassara problem”, that is the general population simply calls all of us a single word.  In my region it was Nassara.  In the western region it was Tubaboo.  When I was in Togo and Benin it was Yovo.  And no matter where you go it is never your actual name.  It is an informative statement of who you are made by others.  There is rarely a moment during the introductions when you will be asked for your given or personal name, you are simply given this new name.  Often times I will hear people translate this name as “white”, which is often the case, but not always true.  In fact I know many nonwhite volunteers who still receive this name.  I find a more accurate translation to be “stranger”.  Which makes a lot of sense coming from an interdependent culture that’s primary objective is to protect the in-group, protect the village.  Being called “stranger” immediately identifies you as an outsider and it allows people to treat you accordingly.  As I mentioned in a previous post not every call of “nassara” is the same, but this is where it was important to practice listening so that you could actually hear what you were being called.  Some “Nasara”s meant, “Go away”.  Some meant, “entertain me”, some meant “who are you”, and some meant “this is what you are”.

Now every volunteer has a different interaction with the Nassara problem and every volunteer comes up with their own method of handling this problem.  Because it can be hard.  Moving around the country with chants of your whiteness following you around.  Maybe starting a meeting where you present yourself by your name and the response you get is “ok, Nassara”.  I think that to some people this refusal to be acknowledged as an individual is hard and scary.  For most of us, or at least those of us who have been benefactors of white privilege we have never lived in a culture that dictated who we were.  That gave us a role that we were obligated to fill. 

So I guess there are multiple ways to respond to being called Nassara, or “le blanc”, or really any other term that dictates your identity.  The path that I ended up following was to accept it.  Because, as I said, the bizarre nature of this labeling.  In fact the labeling that comes from being a Nassara isn’t inherently negative.  In fact some of it is positive.  Being a Nassara can sometimes open the individual to realms of unearned privilege due to the fact that the culture values whiteness.  Oftentimes this privilege makes us feel uncomfortable or guilty.  But the response to this feeling shouldn’t be to demand the culture to allow you to feel comfortable.  In a way, I think that it is important to feel uncomfortable about this treatment.  Accept the reality of it and try to learn from it. I saw it as an acknowledgement of my place in Burkina.  I was not here to be an individual. I had not earned that right and I don’t think that I should use the privilege that comes with my whiteness to insist that I be acknowledged as an individual.  Some volunteers sit their friends down and explain, “do not call me Nassara, in my culture that is an offensive thing to do, my name is ______ and you should call me ______”, which is a perfectly reasonable request.  If you were amongst Americans.  But you aren’t and sometimes you have to bend to the reality of your situation.  Imagine it from their perspective.  You see a white guy and you call them, “hey, white guy!” just like you would expect to be called “hey black guy!”.  But then the white guy comes over and sits you down and tells you that that was a rude thing to do, and that you should call him Greg.  And well, he is a white guy, so you want to do what he says, so you say, “ok, Greg”.  But on the inside you’re really thinking “but why? You are a white guy?  I must not understand”.  And so now if you’re Greg, I would be curious as to whether or not that was the impression you wanted to make?  I would argue that you haven’t fixed anything; you haven’t explained some aspect of your culture to a friend or colleague in the hope that they might learn something new.  You demanded that they treat you as if this was your home, but the problem is.  It’s not.

Another response is for volunteers to ask to be given their “village name”.  And I would imagine this comes from a place of wanting to find a replacement for “Nassara” and so you tell you friends in village, “don’t call me, ‘Nassara’ call me something local’”, and normally your friends will be delighted to do this.  And so you get a name in the local language and it is easy for your friends to remember because it means something to them and you now have an identifier that you become attached to.  I guess the interesting conundrum here is that essentially you have arrived and you are called “Nassara” or “stranger” and the response comes across as “no, I am not a stranger.  I am here and I am one of you and I will have my name”. 

I felt that it did me more good to have that constant reminder that I was not one of them.  I was not a villager from Kogho.  And no matter how hard I tried, how much I integrated, how much I denied the trappings of a western life to completely immerse myself within the conditions of this life I could never truly be one of them.  My reality wouldn’t permit it.  If something went wrong for me the Peace Corps had me medically covered.  If the rains were bad, I received a monthly stipend regardless of the rain so I would still eat.  Hell I’m hoping most of you, my dedicated and detail oriented readers, noted that during my summer in the fields I left in the middle to go on a vacation to Togo and Benin.  It still allows you to live in your village and integrate, but it changes the way that you address life having that background sense of security.  Living in Burkina is hard.  There is no questioning that.  But as volunteers we all knew that any suffering that we endured was a temporary condition and that eventually it would end, or if you needed you could take a break.  You could learn to adapt and accept, you could find ways to avoid it, or you could just white knuckle your way through a service in the desert.  But it will end.  For your friends in village that isn’t the case.  They aren’t holding on to any idea that this suffering is temporary.  This is their reality and you just have to deal with it.  As a volunteer or hell even as an American when we encounter a difficult situation we can or are encouraged to just leave that situation.  You don’t like your town?  Move to a better town.  You don’t like your name?  Change your name.  You don’t like your school? Transfer to a better school.  The way you adapt and develop your problem solving ability is very different from somebody who understands that these unpleasant conditions are permanent.  You don’t like your village?  Make your village better.  You don’t like your name?  That’s not up to you.  You don’t like your school?  Work harder to like your school. 

It falls in line reasonably well with a lot of the hashtags attached to different posts from the instagram account @barbiesavior (lord the internets are amazing) such as #gonativeorgohome or something along about being one of the average, getting the true local experience.  Its this thinking that I really think people like the creators of this account are trying to go after.  Not necessarily to attack, but to encourage conversation and awareness.  Because at the end of the day neither this post nor, I would imagine, the posts by others talking about this topic.  Are intended to be an attack.  I don’t want my message to be, “don’t go out there and serve” or “don’t travel” or “don’t try to help”.  More “be aware of what it is you are doing, what you are not doing, and accept the differences”

Your interaction with the world around you is different depending on the cultural cycles that you occupy and while living in your village you will always occupy a different cultural cycle.  But that’s ok.  We aren’t there to be an African.  Or to be a Burkinabe.  To earn some sort of “I’m now an African” badge and come back to America and start talking about how much more meaningful life is because you’re African.  No, we’re there to be different.  And to share that difference, to understand why they are different.  And if they are going to remind me of my difference every time they call me, that’s ok.  Because I am different, so let’s talk about that.

Now I did eventually get given a village name.  Which is good, I guess, otherwise the title of this blog post would have been really confusing.  But it was because my village decided too, and it wasn’t really a replacement of Nassara.  Just an adjustment.  I was given the name Ouedraogo Rayende after I had lived in village for about a year and it was really just a different label to describe me.  To explain what I was.  My name is Ryan Kennedy they told me.  Kennedy is the royal family in America and Ouedraogo is the royal family in Burkina.  So we will call you Ouedraogo.  And you live alone. You have no wife and you have no kids (weirdo) so we will call you Rayendé, which means “a man alone”.  And it’s funny.  Most of my friends in village just shorten Rayendé to Rayen.  Which sounds oddly like Ryan.  So at the end of the day I was called by my given name.  But I think that the way that I got there made all of the difference.

So what is the take away from all of this?  Besides the fact that my village thinks the Kennedys are the American royal family (which in and of itself excludes me from being a #truenative , but is still kind of funny).  I guess the best that I can offer is that the world is really made up of a lot of different groups.  Some groups composed of individuals.  Some composed of people who see themselves as one.  Some groups with privilege. Some without.  Some groups well publicized.  Some never heard of.  And while living in Kogho it impressed upon me that there are just some groups that you don’t get to belong to.  You can insist that you belong, or you can force your way into a different group.  You can do everything just like the members of another group, but at the end of the day, you are different, separate, Nassara. But I think there is something connective about recognizing our differentness while at the same time trying to take the time to learn and listen to these other groups.  So yes, after two years in Burkina I never became a true native.  But that wasn’t why I was there.  And yes during my two years I had the opportunity to do some pretty cool work, but I didn’t really solve any problems.  I was given a unique opportunity to go out and share something with this little village and they were able to share something in return.  And allowing my village to remind me every day that that was all that I did and that I was simply a small part of a larger whole leaves a bigger impact than convincing myself that I was there to be one of them and to solve their problems.

But what am I doing, I just spent all of this time talking about how these kinds of things are meant to be conversations rather than a one sided lecture.  And as I have mentioned, my experience is very limited to..well my experience.  A white, American, male serving in the Peace Corps in Kogho, Burkina Faso.  So I would like to invite you, my dedicated readers, to participate in this conversation.  Maybe I missed something, maybe I wildly oversimplified an extremely not simple problem, or maybe I am way less smart than I like to sometimes think that I am and you would simply like to inform me that I am wrong.  Feel free to use the comments section as a forum or even email me your responses at rkennedy12345@gmail.com.  I will respond, and if you want to compose a response highlighting how wrong that I am I will even post those later, either anonymously or with your name attached so that others can enjoy our attempts at defining the indefinable.  Well here’s to hoping this idea actually works.  Cheers, and until next week.

Fun picture.  This was taken during my ride home from my neighboring town about 10km away.  It was always a nice relaxing ride once I got over the fear of becoming lost in the bush.  But also a good add on to this conversation.  I could ride this route 100 times with a bushel of hay on my head and I would still never know what it was like to be the guy in this picture.  Only he knows, so why not spend the time to ask him?

Remembering the fields

So where are we now.  About a week since my last post (see look I’m trying to stay a little more regular on these posts now) and I’m going to once again share a previously written article that I had worked on for our in-country volunteer newsletter.  BUT. I'm doing it in a different way so this is not more of the same, but rather innovation at its finest.  It has been interesting look back on different aspects of my service and how I viewed them at the time versus how I view them now, which is why you’re getting this delightful introduction and an equally delectable conclusion that I am adding on to this written piece.  An analysis.  One might go as far as to call it commentary from the Author.  So enjoy the article, peruse the added conclusion (think of it like bonus material on a blue-ray disc of your favorite sci-fi movie), warning this is a long one, and Go Hawks.

A Summer in the Fields

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live” (Henry David Thoreau)

For those of you that live in villages and haven’t taken the opportunity to plant something, the best advice that I have for you is, plant something.  Anyone who has spent enough time in this country has gotten to watch the gradual transitions of the land and people from season to season.  You watch the rains come, the village breaks out into a palpable buzz of excited energy as preparations are made, the crops fill up the countryside, the rains stop, the harvest begins, the families move back to the village, the markets swells, and everybody gets settled in to wait and weather six months of windstorms and heat.  Throughout all of this there is a small aspect to everything that you miss by only observing or helping.  There is a certain eye opening aspect to investing a sense of ownership into this whole process that can’t be found any other way.

I affectated in August with enough time in village to catch the tail end of rainy season and wanted to try my hand at farming, the occupation of almost every member of my community.  The trouble was they weren’t my fields to farm and also being the first volunteer I was still firmly held in the position of being a foreign stranger and I was appropriately treated as such.  If I went out to the fields with my Daba I would be allowed to work for about five minutes before my daba was taken from me and I was told to go rest beneath a tree.  And so went all of my visits to the fields, but it was pointless to try to fight against this.  My friends were simply following the cultural protocol of having a guest come to visit and it would have simply been rude for me to demand to be allowed to work rather than a gesture of comradery.  I only had about two months in village to explore the fields before the school year started and lacking any real sort of investment in the harvest my entire attention was allowed to be eclipsed by trying to figure out how to teach math and science in French to hundreds of kids who barely understood me.  And with that my season was over, not because I had finished the season, but because I simply had no more time for it and I was well off enough to simply walk away when I needed to.  The school year sped by, as school years tend to do, and slowly around March the village started stirring from its season long hibernation to start to get ready for the upcoming season and this is about the time that I either had a really stupid or really amazing idea.

I felt like I had a decent amount to do on my plate, but with the rains coming and the students getting ready to leave for the summer I started thinking about what I could do to fill my impending free time.   I had been thinking about doing some projects with soy, but having not had the chance to demonstrate to the village the varied uses of this crop I saw it to be a rather fruitless idea to attempt to convince a large group of subsistence farmers to experiment with a new crop that they had never heard of or seen in a region already dealing with a paucity of rain and rich soil.  Thinking back to my past rainy season I started to come up with my plan to plant my own field and I would plant soy.  “Brilliant” I thought, with my own field nobody could stop me from working all I want and people will be able to see this new crop and then maybe next year they will be interested in farming it themselves.  Absolutely no drawbacks. 

The interesting thing about language is that we use different words and grammatical structures to express certain thoughts and emotions and certain words conjure up certain emotions and ideas when we hear them.  There is a real difference in knowing what something is and knowing what something means and I found that to abundantly be the case in farming.  I knew what a half a hectare was, but I didn’t know what it meant.  I knew that my neighbors often worked eight to ten hour days, but I didn’t know what that meant.  And I went on to find that there were a lot of things about my village that I knew, but had no idea what they meant.  Farming in a small village forces you to ask certain questions that you never thought to ask as well as providing you with a platform on which to ask them.  For example I probably would have never thought to ask my friends in village “what does a family do if they don’t own a donkey and a plough?” or “what does the village do if the supply of government subsidized fertilizer doesn’t come in time?”.  And more importantly even if I had thought to ask those types of questions without having been forced to by my new found farming needs my village would not have understood why I was asking those questions.  These were facts of life for them, everybody knew the answers to these questions and since everybody already knew these answers nobody knew how to answer these questions.  More often than not if I tried asking some sort of question in this vain during the dry season they would wonder why I wanted to know, or tell me that it doesn’t concern me so I don’t need to worry myself over that.  Now asking these same questions as a farmer in the village I finally made sense to them, of course he needs to ask these questions, he’s the idiot farming by himself.

More important than the questions my experience taught me to ask, however, were the questions answered for me simply by my experience.  You read in papers and in manuals all of the new and efficient farming techniques that can increase yields and help soil structure and you wonder why nobody uses them, like digging Zai pits for your fields.  Well after spending two straight weeks digging Zai pits I completely understand why very few farmers implement that strategy in their own fields.  I spent two weeks digging ten fifty meter long rows of Zai pits and one long miserable day crawling around my field planting those same Zai pits before having to leave village for a vacation.  One of my friend’s kids offered to finish up my field for me while I was away and with his family’s donkey and plow he was able to finish the remaining 80% of my field in a single day.  Well there’s two questions answered.  Why don’t families use the Zai pits more often?  Because they suck.  They are extremely time consuming and when time comes at a premium this time of year and you still aren’t convinced this strange new technique will actually be worth the huge initial investment of time it is easier to just plant a larger low producing field and then move on to the next crop.  Question two, what do families with no donkey and plow do?  They lean on the support of their community, their family and friends.  Kogho was becoming my family, little by little.  Many volunteers are often touched by the family like nature of the communities in this part of the world and the sense of welcoming and family can come in all shapes and sizes.  The communities over here don’t know how to exhibit love and affection using the languages of Western Culture, because they have their own ways of expressing these feelings.  It’s part of our cultural exchange with our hosts to learn their language, not just the spoken language, but the language of their behaviors, so that we can understand what we mean to our closest friends during our time here.  Understand what they are trying to say even if they don’t have the words to express it.  This can take many forms, and farming isn’t the only way to connect, but in a small farming community, it is a great way to start.

The rains continued and little by little I began to understand more about my village, about the life, about the struggle, and about how life and struggle were often intermingled into the same sentence or salutation because when farming is all you know than your only concept on the reality of life is that it is a never ending cycle of struggle.  With August came my two rounds of weeding the fields and adding fertilizer.  Every day, in the fields, six to eight hours a day.  My body was broken down, and built back up week after week.  My hands hardened as each new wave of blisters developed and healed over.  And little by little my field of Soy was developing.  During my time in the fields I didn’t have any sort of great epiphany, or philosophical insight, I was simply too tired.  All I could think about was weeds and dirt.  I would close my eyes and see them dancing in front of my eyes, mocking me.  It was during this time that I had some of my favorite interactions with members of my village.  Since my arrival many members of my village had been scared to come talk to me because I was something of an unknown quantity.  Children ran in fear and adults simply waved but said nothing since they didn’t really know what to say to me, we shared no common ground.  That all changed with the fields.  Every day I would meander back and forth through the fields weeding and checking my plants and now suddenly people had a reason to come say hello. 

“Nassara manna wanna?”   (stranger, whatsup?)

“manna neere”  (it’s good!)

“fo manna boe?” (what are you doing?)

“mam manna tumma” (I am doing work)

“ah! Nassara. Po po po. Mam nonga fo” (ah! Stranger, po po po. I like you!)

“barka! Wend na man sabg songo!” (thank you! May God do good things for you)

“amina! Wend na ko saaga” (amen! May God give us rain!)

“amina” (amen!)

note most of my Mooré was just learned orally so that fun dialogue is probably wildly inaccurate as far as written Mooré is concerned

Some people came to just watch, some people came to ask what I was planting, some to know what I could do with my new crop, and some just to ride their bike back and forth a few times to casually double check that I was actually farming.

            Overall I would like to say that I did a reasonably good job developing my field, but my biggest learning curve hit me during the harvest.  During the rains if you can’t quite get all the work done its ok because Mother Nature comes in on the assist, the rains take care of a good portion of the responsibility.  But come harvest time it’s now all just you against time.  The previous year I was simply able to walk away from the harvest when I no longer had time for it and as such I completely missed the scope of work that goes on during the harvest.  But this year was a different story.  The fields were ready to harvest, classes were starting, and I had to start organizing the students for a school garden.  And I wasn’t the only one overloaded around this time of year.  During the rains your life is just farming, but come harvest time the real world comes storming back and you are still just as busy as you were during the rains just with all of your old responsibilities as well.  The students were able to help me a little, but they had harvests of their own to work.  We had to cut all of the soy plants down with a machete, carry them by hand to a drying area, protect them from animals while they dried, beat them to a powder with big sticks, and then pour this powder into large bowls using the wind to blow away the crop residue leaving just the finished product.  Writing this in one sentence makes it sound smooth, but it wasn’t.  We were late cutting the soy down so many of the seeds fell early and were lost to chickens, then the village released their animals earlier than I thought and they came through and ate a lot of the harvest, later we left the pulverized crop in my courtyard for too long leading to a mouse infestation, and finally my friend’s wife took pity on me and helped me “vanner” my harvest.  I finished the season around early December with around 70 kgs of product from an area of land that can produce 400kg in ideal conditions, 3 sacks of animal feed and no animals, blistered hands, and what felt like a new village.

            I started this article with the advice that you should plant something.  And then went on to belabor the point that it was painfully difficult and I was in over my head.  That may seem counterintuitive, but in my opinion that is exactly why you should plant.  It teaches you an important lesson about life.  Coming from America we believe in the power of the individual, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and making our own way in life.  I think this attitude masks the reality that nothing in life is truly accomplished alone.  There are few things that really hammer this principle home more than trying to farm a field that is too big for you.  It forces you to accept that there are things you can’t accomplish alone.  It teaches you how to lean upon those around you.  It helps you understand the importance of culture and community.  And afterwards you will start noticing that there is a lot in life that is like trying to farm a half hectare of soy.  And that we’ve been leaning upon people our whole lives, we just forgot that we were doing it.

 The fields

Friend’s wife Assesta taking pity on me

Beating up the soy with sticks

BONUS MATERIAL

What I took most from this multiple month experience in my service was how it really served as a turning point in my service.  It changed who I was in the eyes of my village and when you live in a village who you are is more defined by what people think of you and less by what you think of yourself.  Throughout my service, and hopefully throughout my upcoming posts, I struggled with the idea of privilege.  Of the ideas that my village held about me because of my whiteness.  And often how I didn’t think that I should even be here as I worried that Western meddling in the developing world did more harm than good.  But my summer in the fields helped solidify certain ideas that I had about my place in the village, and as I noted, changed some of the ideas that my village held about me simply because of my whiteness.  This whole undertaking put me in a very vulnerable and public position.  Coming into Kogho the general idea was that white people know everything, Africans need to just listen to white people, and whatever this white person says we will give it a try (this was also compounded by the fact that I am a male on top of being white).  And this creates a very difficult situation.  Sometimes people take this response and run with it.  Say to themselves that they do know everything.  And by the end of their time, wherever that may be, they will have oodles of successful projects, solved malnutrition, and made the world a better place to boot.  But this line of thinking has missed a whole half of the equation, and that is the village.  The most important aspect of spending time in these development roles is to understand that you are simply part of a dialogue.  And a good conversation needs two halves, two sides, and honesty and understanding between both sides. 

A theme in a lot of my writing has been learning through failure and I will probably bring this up at least..1.4 more times.  It’s important to fail, it’s important to know why you failed, and beyond that it’s important to avoid unnecessary failures (but you just said failures are good?)  I know. Shut up.  What I mean is what I believe all Peace Corps volunteers figure out before the end of their service is that we should never go into a community—go into a problem—with our own ideas about how to solve this problem.  Because we will fail, one hundred percent of the time. We have to go in, shut up, and listen, a sentiment best expressed by Ernesto Sirolli in a TED talk that he does in 2012.  And the reason that I bring this up is that my ill-advised foray into farming really helped my community and myself with the “listen” part of this formula.   Up to this point I had done some shutting up, and I had done some listening, but I hadn’t yet become comfortable with hearing that I might be wrong.  And my community had not yet become comfortable with telling me that I was wrong, and so there was something missing in our dialogue, in our conversation.  Well after making a monumental ass of myself for a few months with a hand hoe my community discovered something.  Yes I was white.  Yes I was a man.  And yes I was the volunteer sent to their village to help them.  But I could be just as clueless as any one of them, and seeing me struggling through my failure turned me into an entirely different person in their eyes. 

Following this progressive “light bulb” moment my conversations with my friends and co-workers became different.  They began to bring their own ideas more often; they told me when my ideas wouldn’t work, when they would, and how to change them to better address the needs of the village.  They brought their passions to me and in turn I was able to simply serve as a resource, as a servant, as a friend, and not as a leader.  And that’s something special about the Peace Corps.  It allows individuals and communities around the world to get together, share their passions, and try to solve problems.  Because at the end of the day we share the same problems all over the world; just not necessarily the same solutions.  As Ernesto says, “nobody can succeed alone”.