Foreign Travel? Research Their Medical Systems First
My niece, Sarah, is a recent college graduate. She’s done several short-term missions trips to countries in Africa, including Kenya and Uganda. She also helped with community development and outreach projects on Indian reservations in Oklahoma during her college years. The other thing that is notable about her collegiate period is that she started to have seizures.
Teaching English in China
Sarah’s concern upon graduation was that she really wanted to serve overseas in a capacity that would help people, and hopefully, would enable her to introduce them to relationships with Jesus Christ. Funding for such work is always dicey, so she accepted a position as an English teacher in China. She knows that she cannot discuss religious topics, or political ones, at all. But she can live her life in such a way that her students will take the initiative to find out on their own about the Living Lord who motivates her actions.
In China, she had a few seizures, ran out of her medication ( dilantin), and found a doctor. She found, or her father found for her, a supplier who could get her the medicine she needed. And she has been really doing well and enjoying China immensely.
Medical Crisis
Recently, she traveled to another province for the Chinese new year holiday. This was her first vacation in China, and she was really liking everything. Then, without warning, she started having more-frequent seizures. Her father made an “executive decision” that she should come home for a few months and stabilize. In less than a week’s time, before she could catch a flight home, her condition worsened to the point where she remained hospitalized.
Her sister Deborah, who also has a passport, got a rush visa to head to China and prepare her for the flight home. Deborah was appalled at the level of treatment that was available there, and has asked for prayer to help effect a medical evacuation as quickly as possible.
Currently
At this time, I have no knowledge of the cost involved, except that it is beyond the family’s available resources. Sarah stops breathing during these seizures (something new, as far as I know), and is expected to require nursing care during the flight back to the United States.
We are also requesting that Christian believers join in prayer, asking that the way be provided to get her back to America safely, as well as a way to pay for the medical costs.
No one has informed me as of yet where contributions may be made, but if you are viewing this and wish to be of assistance, send e-mail to huckstech [at] warmmail [dot] com (please use “medical assistance” in the title). I will respond with the information as soon as I have it.
Update: There is now an account at WAMU / JP Morgan Chase. However, the bank forbids us from sharing the number over the Internet. Here is some information from our press release.
WHAT: I am writing to you because our family is desperate for some help. My daughter Sarah Hucks, a Monterey High School and an Oral Roberts University graduate is ill and in a foreign hospital in Chounguing, China. She was transported there after suffering multiple seizures in China and has been in the hospital there for over a week. The care in China is not like US care and we don’t have the extended insurance or the capitol to medically transport Sarah from Chongquing to Hong Kong ($51,000.00) or to Tokyo ($65,000.00). Repatriation to UCSF or Stanford would be upwards to $200,000.00.
We have contacted the State Department and the local Embassy in Cheng Du which will make a health and welfare stop but for some reason can not assist with repatriation for Americans working or in Sarah’s case teaching as a missionary in a foreign school in China.
I know you are not medical professionals but we desperately need your help and the help of any others you may know who believe in America, who believe in compassion and have a heart for others. For more information please do not hesitate in calling me, Vince Hucks, at 831-915-7231. Any donations, resources, and help would be greatly appreciated. You can make donations to Vince Hucks with Sarah Hucks in the memo and mailed to P.O. Box 1094 Seaside, CA 93955. Thank you for your prayers and support while we try to get Sarah in a stable conditions with the medical attention she needs and back to the US for the correct treatment.
Summation
There is a lesson to be learned. I do not think that Sarah would change anything. She originally wanted to be a medical missionary back when she went to college. She would rather burn out on the front lines than rust out in the base camp. More believers should live this way.
But, given the choice, learn about the medical system of the nation you intend to visit before you go. What is their care like? If you have a problem, are you going to need to be evacuated because their system cannot provide the needed care? If it is necessary, will it be possible for family members to obtain visas on short notice? Will it be possible to contact an American embassy or consulate from where you expect to be? Are there adequate communication and transportation resources in the area where you will be?
Again, I ask for your prayers, and if you have the ability to assist us with getting Sarah home, please contact me at the above e-mail address. Thank you.
There are only 24 hours in a day so something in your schedule usually has to give in order to find the time to start your own business. When my wife and I first started our online business, both of us had full time jobs which left only about 3 hours of free time on weekdays and 2 full days on the weekends.
As a result, we had to make some sacrifices in order make time for the business. To make matters even worse, my wife was pregnant so there were always certain days when she simply didn’t feel up to working on anything.
I recommend that you read the entire linked article first, then return here.
Okay, now that you’ve read it, I don’t have to repeat most of the same points. You know that you have limited time, limited energy, limited attention, limited space, and limited funds. If, as is likely, your business requires more of these resources, you will have to cut back on using those resources for other things. In the case of the family at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, they had to make concessions and adjustments that included limiting television time. For you, it may be XBox time or Internet time that you have to limit.
Because every family and every business is a little different, I won’t presume to tell you what you need to include in your own self-examination. Simply look at the resources that you have available and compare them to what you would like to make available to the business. If the business is not getting as much of resource X as you would like it to get, examine your allocation of that resource. Every small, locally-owned business (SLOB) needs this kind of examination from time to time.
One of the biggest challenges for the CCCDC to overcome as they work to get Cincinnati’s downtown and uptown revitalized is the lack of a dense enough and sufficiently socioeconomically diverse population. The stores wait for people to move downtown before they commit to providing services, while people won’t move downtown until there are stores so they don’t have to trek to the suburbs for groceries.
Chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken.
This is where trying to draw in outside resources fall flat. Unless there is something else going on that is beyond your control, basing your town’s development plans on outside investment and population influx is going to be a rough, and not often successful, endeavor.
The key to reviving Cincinnati, Ohio, is their local residents, local businesses, and local resources. Outsiders are not interested. In my own local area of California, the local town and cities have spent thousands of dollars over the past twenty years promoting the area to outside businesses. The result is that retail stores, gas stations, and restaurants (including fast food restaurants) have proliferated, with their substandard wages. Our population is still unemployed and underemployed, with many commuting fifty miles or more to obtain decent pay.
Troy, the author of this blog post, often talks about the local businesses and other quirks of Cincinnati that make it a recognizable place, distinct from similar cities around the country. I believe that this is the key to building up that city, just as it is the key to building up California’s Victor Valley. We cannot allow our cities to become giant strip malls, full of dozens of chain stores and look-alike knock-offs. We have to build locally-owned businesses, encourage local citizen involvement, and devote local resources to solving local problems. We cannot depend upon federal or state funds, nor on large, out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) to solve our problems for us.
«We cannot depend upon federal or state funds, nor on large, out-of-area corporations to solve our problems for us.»
This is where local politicians have to have guts. When every other city is spending its money trying to attract still another chain store to open a branch in town, a smart, locally-focused politician will be working to build up small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) and local non-profit groups. He or she will be trying to get local citizens to become involved, and to actually give them a voice in the choices that affect their lives. The smart, locally-focused leader recognizes that the best way to attract outside investment is for local businesses to prosper. The best way to attract an influx of residents is to have relatively low housing costs, but a high quality of life, including sufficient well-paying local jobs to support your local population plus extra move-ins. And one of the best things to do is to have strong community-based medical and substance abuse programs, as drugs are one of the leading causes of criminal activity and a large segment of the population has no health care insurance. These things gradually improve the local quality of life, relative to similar areas around the nation.
Like so many other things economic, it’s all about volume. Here in Corryville we have a few abandoned properties. Not a huge number, but one is too many. A house across the block from us is reported to have had no utilities since the 1970s! This is one of many properties in Hamilton County with an absentee owner. This doesn’t help the density situation because the owner isn’t interested in renting or selling–if they can be found–and some of these buildings just need to be taken down in spite of the architectural loss.
Again, with locally-focused, active leadership, such problem properties can be pruned. Forty years is a long time for a house to be abandoned. It should long ago have been either torn down or turned into a museum. Perhaps the current downturn will finally cause municipal governments to wake up and recognize that LOOACs have little incentive to stick with the city during hard times, while SLOBs will stay, sometimes even longer than they should, because with SLOBs the key concept is locally-owned, while LOOACs’ key concept is out-of area.
One of the keys is building the local economy around local resources. Turn off the spigot of incentives that taxes SLOBs and local residents more heavily in order to subsidize LOOACs that come into town. If it does not make sense for a large company to be there, let them go where it does make sense. Otherwise, your town can end up stuck with an abandoned building, where the big company closed their local branch once the incentives ran out.
I believe that giving away the town treasure to attract hundreds or thousands of minimum-wage jobs is a betrayal of the local tax payers and business community. If we instead spend those resources to make the area better for the people and businesses that are already there, we will avoid many of the ills that go along with these giveaways.
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. – Diana Felber brought her groceries to the checkout and counted out her cash – purple, blue and green bills that are good only at businesses in western Massachusetts.
Known as “BerkShares,” the colorful currency is printed by a nonprofit group to encourage people to spend close to home in the state’s Berkshire region. Customers who use the money also get a built-in 10 percent discount, since they can get 100 BerkShares for just $90 at local banks.
“I like all the ideas about local,” said Felber, a 64-year-old artist shopping at the Berkshire Co-op Market. “I also like that it’s a discount. Who wouldn’t like that?”
The BerkShares program is one of the most successful of its kind in the country, and it is attracting attention as other communities look for ways to insulate their economies from the deepening financial crisis.
I ran across this in my old hometown paper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. I wrote about it in today’s Owner-Managed Business. I am cautiously optimistic about this new tactic in the quest to strengthen locally-owned businesses and build local economies. I am wondering just how effective the local currency would be without the discount pricing. Are potential customers being swayed by the pricing (the main reason they choose that national retailer we nicknamed “Big Blue”), or are they persuaded that buying local means more money stays in the local area, where it is available for things like hiring your brother-in-law who has been unemployed for five years?
Future Standards has a little to say about this as well.
“In the last four years, there has been a renewed interest in local economy, local production,” said Witt, executive director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, a Massachusetts-based think tank focused on local production. “It just skyrocketed with the collapse of the global economy.”
With our emerging focus on building locally-owned businesses, this is the kind of thing that energizes me. It makes me want to wake up the local chambers of commerce and try to resurrect our local “Valley Buck$” campaign from fifteen or sixteen years ago. To be sure, there is a lot of work involved, but this should get you energized and looking for a way to get your local community working together on their own buy-local programs, with or without the local currency element.
The Crooked Bow Tie sheds some more light: “Widely used in the United States in the early 1900s, local currencies are a legal, but underutilized tool for citizens to support local economies.” Go there and read the whole thing.
I ask this question because I see people getting into this blogging industry and starting a make money online blog to make money. They think that is how money is made online. In all true honesty, if you think that you are an IDIOT. Yup you are. I have experienced and I am sure a lot of you guys will agree with me that blogs are not the direct source of income. It can become a main source of income but that is in a very long run. So what motivates you for the long run… It is actually a pain in the ass to get up and write daily or weekly. Why would you do it?
I’ve been blogging now for a couple of years. I very early ran into the “blogging for buck$” sites. I quickly noticed that they all seemed to be about–you guessed it–blogging for buck$. I also noticed that it was like the ads you see in those start-a-biz magazines. You can do this part-time, at home, and you’ll soon be living a life of luxury. Well, my take on the whole thing is this: I don’t want to work from home in my underwear. I want to produce products and services that benefit others, and to earn a fair income as a result.
Yes, search engine optimization is important. Yes, engaging, informative content is important. Yes, it is important to have advertising (it actually adds credibility). And if you want to have readers, promotional activities are also important. But if you want money, get a job at your local grocery store or something. If you are excited about sharing your area of focus, your personal life, and the inside scoop on what is happening in your business, start a weblog.
That said, I love the way that being on the Web enabled me to become–in some small measure–a publisher. It started with one ‘publication’ on Blogger, and one on WordPress.com. From there, it became two on each of those platforms, plus several on this domain. I still have my regular job, so there are months where I barely have the time (or connectivity, in some places I go) to post at all. But all in all, this has been a great experience for me. I feel that I am developing better communication skills, and that it is easier for potential employers or clients to find me and to actually see what I have been doing.
Which is why I find it so puzzling when one of those work-at-home companies contacts me, saying “We found your resume on Monster, and we believe you’d be perfect for our innovative money-making program…”. If you really read my resume, if you did a Web search, you would see that multilevel marketing, outbound telemarketing, and collections jobs are not for me. Yes, I will do some calling when I have to for my own business, but if you’re going to try to convince me that your job is for me, at least search on Google or Yahoo! to find out what I do before you contact me.
To answer Syed Balkhi’s question, would you still blog if you never got paid for it, yes I would. I have never gotten paid for it, and that was never my objective in the first place.
I recently logged into my e-mail to find some messages from recruiting firms (using the online job boards). These were of this sort:
I just looked over your resume, and I think you’d make the perfect candidate for this position … … commission sales for exciting products and services….
So, was he just unable to read? Or was he intentionally lying to me, trying to get me to apply for something that neither matches my interests, nor my skills, nor my history? In other words, was he clueless, or was he deceptive?
I realize that, in hard times, there is a need for salespeople. I also realize that I am not a salesperson. My resume reflects this. I also realize that recruiters only get paid when they fill the interview list and one of the people they suggested gets hired.
Furthermore, in my limited experience, recruiters are like HR people–not only do they not understand your business, but they do not understand what makes a good candidate for any particular position. Or rather, in the case of recruiters, they have different incentives from yours. They need to get someone in the position, so they get paid, while you need to get someone who will be productive and a good fit with your business and your existing staff.
I ask you this: how can someone who depends on keyword matching determine whether any particular candidate is able to create your new website in PHP, using MySQL and Apache, on Linux or FreeBSD? How can that keyword-matcher determine whether any particular candidate is able to modify an open source content management system (e.g., Drupal or Joomla! or Tikiwiki) and theme it for your needs? The answer is clear: they cannot.
Will the keyword matching system bring you the person who has always wanted to do X, but never had the opportunity, even though he or she has the aptitude and desire? Will it bring you the highly-motivated career-switcher? Will it bring you the recent high school graduate, the person who is putty in your hands for you to shape into the employee you desire? Again, the answer is no, it will not.
A keyword-matching system will miss the subtle cues that can get you that brilliant, but slightly eccentric artistic guy. It will miss the production person who pulls the team together from within the ranks and builds goodwill, motivating increased output and loyalty without any extra work from you. It will instead fill your building with mediocre, look-alike candidates, people who might be okay, but will never be great, employees.
The next time you are contacted by an employment recruiter, either as a job-seeker or as a job-provider, think about these things. You’re probably better off if you let the people who will actually be working with the new hire do the hiring process with appropriate supervision. And if you’re running a small, locally-owned business (SLOB), you should already know that recruitment firms do not understand your business or its needs.
This used to be one of my favorite attractions at Disneyland. But it is more than that now. Why are we here? Are we here to exist for seventy years and then return to the dust of the earth?
Think about it–the question is valid. In a time when everything you know seems to be falling apart, you can sit back and passively let the LOOACs and the government ruin your future and that of your children and grandchildren, or you can actively pursue activities which will help your SLOB, your family, your neighborhood, and your city avoid collapse.
First of all, you have to remain positive, despite all the bad news you hear on the television. There are billions of people who live in huts with dirt floors, without electricity or running water. If you are not in that situation, you are better off than at least someone. If you foresee a foreclosure, you might just start putting your resources into being ready to move into a rental property by the time your lender brings the sheriff to your door. It is possible to spend thousands of dollars fighting an eviction out of fear of homelessness, when you could be positive and move into a rental with some of the resources you would otherwise squander on a hopeless court battle.
Secondly, you have to remain realistic. Have you ever met someone who has unrealistic expectations, who believes that everything will always resolve in the way he or she desires? What usually happens is the person is deceiving himself or herself, and the result is worse than it could have been because he or she refuses to accept a lesser (but still positive) outcome. Yes, I am a believer in Jesus the Chosen One (“Messiah” or “Christ”), and I believe that God is at work behind the scenes in every situation. But I remind you that millions of believers were killed for their faith, and they were killed in the most horrendous and painful ways imaginable. You are not better than they were, so you also are subject to undesired events sometimes.
Thirdly, trim away the fat. Are you eating out when you could be cooking at home? This is not the time for that. Buy yourself a recipe book and make a list of which meals you will try each week, then buy the items you will need for those recipes. Are you buying expensive toys? Are you still using your credit cards, instead of paying them off and holding them in case of emergencies? Are you spending hours each night in front of the television? Examine your behavior. You will probably find some areas where you can cut back without suffering too much. And those additional resources (this is not limited to money and time) can be used to help get through the crisis (e.g., paying off your debts), to help live healthier (e.g., walking regularly or joining the local gym), or to help someone else (e.g., your brother-in-law who has not held a job in three years).
In a world where we are constantly bombarded with advertising (“buy this, buy that”) and media celebrities telling us what to do and think (“fight global warming, support our troops”), it is very easy to lose track of what we should be doing. You did not start your own business so that you could be stampeded and panicked into losing everything when the big corporations got into trouble. Therefore, you must get back to the basics of what you do.
Your task is to satisfy your customers enough that they continue to spend their dwindling resources in your business. You should be, first of all, talking to your customers about their buying plans and especially about their experiences in their dealings with your business. Go ahead and ask them what they liked, what they did not like, and how you can do things to make them feel better about doing business with you. But do not just talk about it–evaluate the things they tell you to decide what you can implement.
One thing you should be doing is training your employees. First of all, train them to serve the customers’ needs. They should smile, ask how the customer is doing (but only if they really mean it). If your employees do not care about the customers, you need to make it clear that the only reason those jobs are there is because someone buys your product or service. Employees should also learn to care about one another. You’ll know when that happens once employee B comes in for employee A’s shift, because employee A’s babysitter didn’t show up. But most important, in my view, your employees need to see that you care about their well-being. This is not about some kind of pop psychology touchy-feely thing.
Simply put, employees need to know that they matter to you for more than just how many burgers they make or how many orders of fries they upsell. Let them know that you have dozens of people every week showing up and asking for job applications, but you keep the employees you have because you enjoy working with them. This means that you have to get rid of that ‘no outside conversations’ rule. Let them talk about little Billy’s soccer games and little Mary’s science projects. Ask about the mother-in-law that lives in their homes. Don’t do it as some kind of manipulation thing. Do it because caring for others is the right thing to do.
Evaluate your product mix, your pricing, your expenses, your location, and the image your business projects. Given the increased competition for every last dollar of your customers’ incomes, would you be better off if you changed some things?
A lot of the companies you pass every day will be gone in the next year or two. If yours is going to avoid the same fate, you have to start focusing now on ways to survive.
