Lee Thorn - Jhai - telemedicine understood 2 ways

Dear friends and board,

I hope this finds you and your families well.

Here’s where we’re at.

• We are exploring the viability of a commercial JhaiPC buy-out. The notion is that licensing income would be given to Jhai Foundation for telemedicine and other village work and R&D. I believe we have developed a low power desktop that has the lowest cost/mhtz of any desktop in the world I invite inquiries. I think, too, the association of the machine with telemedicine is a long-term plus. We know the JhaiPC is doing well in the field in both Laos and India. We are building new machines for tests in other countries to be announced later.
• We are interested in ‘branding’ opportunities (your company?) to be associated with Jhai Networks, our incredible communication suite that works at low bandwidth. We are installing it, now, in every new JhaiPC.
• We are preparing to use new internet media to promote Jhai Foundation’s viability through sales, investment and donations.
• We have developed a proposal on request with East Meets West Foundation for a Vietnamese company to work with us on telemedicine there. I await the proposal’s translation.
• A committee of the Jhai board is taking steps to create broader and better funded opportunities for Jhai. They have a plan which will unfold rather rapidly in both organizational and funding terms. We will continue to focus on telemedicine as lead application in broad-based village ICT used for development on a sustainable basis.
• We will help set up a local association in Laos that focuses on telemedicine within the next two months.
• With our international partners, World Health Partners and Neurosynaptic, we are in discussion currently with various funders and local, major ngo’s for telemedicine in these countries: India, Laos, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Viet Nam, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Spain (a foundation that has projects in Cuba, Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia), and the United States.
• My need and Jhai’s need is money for Jhai infrastructure on an investment or donation basis. After seven years of preparation we are ready to do our part towards villager solutions for health crises, poverty and education. Our social and business systems are well proven. Our technology is as good as it gets. Our network is very large and accomplished. What we need is partners with means who can help us mobilize our experience and intellectual property to do beautiful social change.

I’m intrigued by this: What makes beautiful social change? I have been thinking about this a lot. I hope sharing my thoughts with you helps.

I know this:

— Beautiful social change acts with ‘the other’ and pays particular attention to ‘with’.

— It does not shout.

— A key measure is humor. Can we laugh across cultures at ourselves? Can we use humor as a lubricant for social change?

I am trying to comprehend the broadest, biggest, most generous, most every day, most appropriate, most beautiful acts that move us along the way of compassionate social change. I am not talking about Goddesses and heroes. I am not talking about revolutionaries who must do violent acts to meet their objectives. I am not actually talking about people, places or things.

I AM talking about action. Beautiful action. Action that works.

What if we start from the word ‘beautiful’?

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Might this not be true for great social change work, too? Might great social change work be beautiful?

In the 30 plus years I have worked with poorer people, I always come to a place of gratitude. Usually it is in the first few minutes. Out of the blue some very poor person does me a great courtesy. She gives me a chair to sit in or serves me a cup of tea. He asks his daughter to show me her traditional dancing. She engages me in conversation through a translator that gives us both a giggle. Can you imagine the gratitude in these moments of simple kindness? That is the beginning of beautiful social change, this kind of hospitality.

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly
by embracing one another.

— Luciano de Crescenzo

While still in college I found this great little Zen story which I now will mangle. Some then-well-known, arrogant author came before a Zen master in Yokohama and asked him, “What is the secret of life?” The master looked at him quizzically and did not say anything for quite a long time. Finally he said, “In the old days if I were asked such a question, I would hit you with a stick.”

I’ve seen the science. We're related. To disrespect, abuse or ignore your relatives is stupid and wrong. To help them, especially the distant ones in dire straits, is natural. It not only makes sense, it is fun.

I don’t mind you coming here and wasting all my time, ‘cause when
you’re standing oh so near, I kinda lose my mind.

— The Cars

I bet we’ve all felt exactly this feeling in its most common and extreme form: infatuation. It is hormonal. It is wonderful. It passes. It comes back again.

More importantly, at least at 66, is the experience of a related feeling. This is the feeling one gets when doing the next right thing with someone else – or maybe a whole community of ‘someone elses’. It can happen simply and familiarly as we make a meal with community members. (For my wife: yes, I know I’m not good at this! ;D) Or it could be something very complicated, like working cooperatively with people some places else to put in telemedicine in a country half-way around the world. The first might take two hours. The latter could take two years. In both cases people are working side-by-side with other people for a common end, even in the case when some of that experience is virtual. We become so happy doing this we ‘kinda lose (our minds).”

What it is NOT is political.

What it is is camaraderie.

When I was in the service I knew exactly what ‘camaraderie’ meant. It meant working together to stay alive with my friends, no matter what it took. For me it is the same, now. We are increasingly dependent upon one another for our common survival. Global warming means all of our ecology is changing. Nuclear armaments are dangerous for us all. Very uneven incomes are dangerous, since they lead to increasing instability unless addressed. We can work together on all these for our very survival. Camaraderie is what people feel when they are working together effectively and sometimes that is in dangerous times. If not in a war (and I hope to God you aren’t), it is fun. Fun means laughing and fun means relating closely and feeling it thoroughly. You feel the joy in your whole bodies sometimes. For a long time. Even remembering it, you get joy. It’s a shiver, not a quiver by the way. ;D

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until
they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

— Anais Nin

The wonderful thing about meeting a new person in a remote village is that very soon everyone is going to laugh – and probably at you. Each village, especially remote ones, is familiar with some bigger culture – like Lao culture – and is part of it. They are also familiar somewhat – through relatives and through television and radio and maybe movies – that other cultures exist. But pretty much never is anyone prepared and ready for the first meeting. It will be confusing. The least prepared are people like me from the outside. Despite all our best efforts, we stumble and are very confused, even when we don’t know we’re confused. And eventually everyone will laugh. And THEN the communication really starts.

I used to think some chemical thing made community possible. Something in the ether. (This was not exactly science, but it worked for me because I didn’t get out much. ;D)

Now, I take risks towards community all the time. We take risks even in the toughest of times and toughest of conditions. This means it sometimes hurts. But I do it anyway. Why? Because it is the absolute best thing in life. Better than money. Better than sex. Better than anything. It is where God is discovered, Martin Buber says. He’s in the converstion. He’s felt in the converstion. And in conversations where confusion is a given and humor is Grace, we’re particularly blessed. Always, no matter our known connections with any Goddesses or Gods at all.

Why? Anais Nin has it right. It is the entry to more and more worlds, all consequential, all simultaneous, and all real. ***And it is in the transactional awareness of these worlds as well as the consequence of attention to them, that real change happens. This change in a social setting will be seen as beautiful by most all of us, I think, if we let them happen.***

The ones that are most fun are those where we risk stumbling. I must admit – and anyone who knows me will affirm – I stumble all the time. My life is one big bruise. ;D But I know these conversations. I’m acquainted with them. I feel the blessing in them. I expect you could say this, too.

Do you see the beauty here when social change work is informed by these moments? ***Do you see how movements grow? They grow through the reciprocity and repetition in these moments and of these moments. They happen all the time.***

When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long
and regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see
the one that has opened for us.

— Alexander Graham Bell

Another thing you obviously know is what it feels like when a door closes. If Bell was like all the inventors I know, he had to deal with a lot of closed doors. He did thousands of experiments. Each one for a while felt like a closed door. Eventually he succeeded. And even after he commercialized this early ICT, he almost certainly still fiddled with it.

If we keep looking at closed doors ‘so long and regretfully’, as Anais Nin says, we venture into the world of the nutty and stupid – something all of us, of course, do. Why do we do this nutty, stupid thing? Ego. We should have known, we say. Why? Even saying tht is ego.

A better way is to be open oneself to the next new door, the next new experience, the next new awareness, the next new ‘other’ that will teach you about yet another world.

Please mark this: the key to beautiful social change is our willingness to open the new door and meet the ‘other’ fully. This other person will have a world of their own – especially in cultures that you are not familiar with – that is valid and beautiful and fine.

The FUN is going ahead and stumbling into this world, if you are invited, and screw up. Face it: you will definitely screw up. But as you do you will begin to break through on that side of the meeting you control – your own ability to dare more awareness of yourself and your own willingness to give the other person a break.

In attempting beautiful development work here’s the break I give:
• They know what they are doing.
• There are good reasons that make sense to them for the ways they are doing things.
• They know about their own relationships, their own place, BETTER THAN I EVER WILL. What a joy! What an opportunity to learn something new! What a fine risk!
• I try to bring my whole self to this meeting with another human being … and see where it goes. I have objectives but I know I have no control.
• And we’ll even know when we get ‘there’! It is when we’re all laughing or sharing a meal or suddenly find ourselves (without trying too hard) doing something wonderful together.

Want to see how it is done? Watch little kids. See how they meet? We do the same thing – except slower and usually with a less beautiful dance. But we get there.

Where does this leave us? Beautiful social change is a function of conscious relationships, that is, not-asleep relationships, that is, not those kinds where you say ‘yes’ as you think about e=mc squared and have no idea what you said ‘yes’ to. The first step is to notice how your part of the asleep relationships move. You’ll find you stop contributing to that boredom.

What I’m asking from you is to risk relationships with the most unlikely of people, like me, for example. Partner with Jhai, support us, … and have fun.

I love this by Rilke:

... I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over --
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.

Yours, in Peace,
ee Thorn
chair, Jhai Foundation
I tweet @leethorn_jhai
Way cool .... see 30 sec video of
2003 JhaiPC bicycle-powered set up at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiZa_A0QrtQ

350 Townsend St., Ste. 309
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
+1 415 344 0360 (office)
+1 415 420 2870 (mobile)
lee@jhai.org
www.jhai.org


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