A view from 37,000 feet

A few months ago I was on vacation in Thailand – turquoise water, white beaches and palms. It was idyllic – this was the first real holiday I had had in over  7 years – but I had one piece of work to do – I had come across the British Airways Business Grant – a years worth of business class travel!  Prior to leaving, I had started a crafting a structure and I convinced my wife to allow me a 4 hour work session. (4 hour work week anybody?) So, on the Friday.  I woke up on the Friday morning early (±5:30am) and whilst sipping a great coffee took to work on my laptop – this was the only time I was allowed to open the laptop (fortunately coco-cottages had a sat-link to the internet – yay!) The cut of time was 14h00 Thailand time – after an intense morning I made the final edits and sent it off and hoped for the best.

A few weeks later I got an email notifying me that I had won – woohoo, when I enter the plane from now on, I turn left (or go upstairs) to business class!

This brings me to today – I have just made my first use of the grant for a flight to Ankara, Turkey – Why Turkey ? In another grant writing exercise that came about as a result of attending the WEF in China at the kind invitation of the City of Cape town, I randomly met up with Bahar Yetis Kara , a Turkish associate professor in logistics and young scientist  – she was given the task of finding an entrepreneur at the forum and would have to submit a project proposal to the IAP for a $10,000 grant . Our coincidental meeting was at one of the forum’s famous ‘idealabs’ and after a quick chat made arrangements to before a dinner function later that evening – due to prior engagements  we chatted for only 25 minutes and she informed me of her task. Upon our return to our respective countries, we had about 36 hours to write the grant, and were literally strangers but, somehow, through some luck and skill, we won the grant!

I am sitting on BA 0679 from Istanbul to London writing this and reflecting on the past week. I flew from Cape Town to Istanbul to Ankara where I was received by a driver from Bilkent University who drove me the 40 minute drive to university (in silence – he spoke not a word of english) Bahar had kindly arranged a catered residence at the university. A few hours later I met Bahar and her husband and they proceeded to take me around Ankara ( I taught them about the angora rabbit originally from Ankara!) and over the course of the past 6 days have taught me Turkish history, the best places to eat and introduced me to the Turkish institution of Raki.

Through their kindness and hospitality they transformed a casual meeting into a lasting friendship that I feel will last a long while.

The purpose of the trip was work and Bahar and I quickly got to work and some practical outcomes from this encounter have led to a clear definition of our proposal that will see some direct implementation of a Broccoli Project within a diabetes clinic in South Africa – this we hope will validate our proposal that will explore a new field in logistics field (humanitarian logistics)  We will be implementing technology together with food security rewards – in effect using a part of our grant to sponsor food security vouchers to incentivize participants to take their diabetes diagnosis more seriously – I will write about the implementation of this exciting project in a  later post.

For me the validation of this trip was the underpinning intent of my British Airways application – that face-to-face communication is the underlying requirement for really getting things done. Apart from the practical and somewhat difficult requirement for both of us of making time to get things done.

The further development of this opportunity is that I will be returning in September not only to co-present the results to Bilkent University’s panel of scientists but also to some of her associates at Istanbul University. In the emerging field of Humanitarian Logistics, we are planning to write a further paper. The exciting part for me is that often academic papers can become abstract and theoretical without real world applications – as a real world implementer (me) and academic researcher (her) team we have blended our respective passions into results driven research.

I am very excited at the way things are beginning to progress for The Broccoli Project and I can hardly wait to see what happens next – but I have to!