This past Thursday I flew to San Francisco with Ms. Jacquelyn Richey to see my brother-in-law accept his appointment as a chair in Thoracic Oncology at UCSF. Alongside the professional and personal honorifics bestowed on Dr. Thierry Jahan there was genuine love, admiration and respect all on ample display. And just when a sublime evening seemingly could not get better – the Mezzo-Soprano Zheng Cao came forward to give a surprise performance.
What is remarkable, notable and other-worldly about this performance, aside from it happening to fall on her birthday, is that Ms. Cao’s vocal pyrotechnics were made possible due to her being treated by Dr. David Larson using a technique called the cyberknife, something that is so impossibly sci-fi as to not be believed. But, the point being that between the two of these doctors they saved this woman’s vocal chords. And by saving her vocal chords – we all get to hear this…
I recently had the good fortune of traveling to Washington, DC to see my friend and colleague Ben Olander present, along with his business partner, Tomas Apodaca, their work from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ben and Tomas had been invited to DC by Bill Strassberger, the Chief of Public Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department.
Having known Ben for years and heard of his work but never quite understood exactly what he was doing, when I heard that he would be presenting I leaped at the chance. And it was well worth it. In addition to meeting one Evagelia Touvalareas who is doing her own powerful work with women in Saudi Arabia seeing Small Power’s work on a big screen with an audience of between 70 to 100 people really drove home the powerful message of their work.
After about 20 to 30 minutes of conversation and a screening of the TV show that smallpower has created, the crowd rushed up to greet Ben and in what has to be one of the great summary lines of all time, the gentleman in this picture applauded my friend by saying, “You are the Aaron Spelling of the Congo.”
But you don’t have to just take my word for it – surf on over to smallpower.org to read the inspirational and fantastic tales of how to create a tv series of warmth and honesty in one of the world’s most horrific (and forgotten) warzones.
Hi. Welcome to Hi-TEK Communications, a T.E. Krieger production. This little corner of the Internet is where you will find the insights, musings, and unsolicited advice on how to navigate the Class IV and Class V rapids of being a content creator/marketer/business owner in this tweethappy, facebook sappy, revenues being somewhat crappy time we call the Best Years of Our Lives.
