Tag: health
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Reflect on: What is the Oldest Thing You Are Wearing Today?
my Kyokushin Karate belt. Frayed at the edges from years of training, travel, and introspection, it is more than just a piece. It is more than just a piece of cloth. It holds stories of my journey. It symbolizes experiences far beyond its simple appearance. It’s become a physical chronicle of my path
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Mastering Leadership: Knowing When to Lead and When to Follow
For over fifteen years of work across three continents, a question has plagued me. It resurfaced recently. Am I truly a leader, or am I a follower? Through spectacular failures and occasional wins, I’ve discovered the answer hides in the messy middle.
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Top 5 Tropical Fruits for Energy and Health
Growing up surrounded by fruit-bearing trees shaped my understanding of nutrition in ways I only fully appreciated later in life. On our island, we didn’t “add fruits” to our diet—they were our diet.
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Transforming Community Engagement Through Learning
Working with communities affected by poverty and HIV changed everything I thought I knew about making a difference. Ten years in the field taught me an important lesson. Clipboards and curricula don’t build communities. Shared vulnerability and mutual learning do.
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The Power of Lifelong Learning
Upon first reading Peter Drucker’s writings about continuous education, I was deeply moved by his commitment. His dedication to learning a new subject every few years resonated with me. It resonated deeply within me.
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Work as Redemption: Insights from Les Misérables
Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” offers one of literature’s most in-depth studies on how work provides more than just subsistence. Work can be a pathway to redemption and a means to discover identity and service. This is shown through the transformation of its hero, Jean Valjean. His journey and transformation from convict to benefactor highlight the…
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Finding Fulfillment: What Work Would You Do for Free?
A basic consideration when we choose a career is the salary packages and social status associated. Still a profound question worth contemplating is, ‘What work would I pursue even without financial compensation?’ This question is not merely hypothetical but fundamentally challenges our relationship with work. It is the intersection of labor and a deeper sense…
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Transforming Communities: Lessons from Madagascar’s HIV Response
Working in Madagascar’s HIV and AIDS response has offered invaluable insights and reshaped my understanding of community improvement. Madagascar’s HIV prevalence remains relatively low compared to mainland African countries. The approach has gone beyond traditional healthcare interventions to embrace HIV and AIDS as a development issue requiring multi-sectoral collaboration.
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Adapting Professionally Post-Pandemic: Key Changes
When the pandemic struck, I never anticipated how dramatically it would reshape my professional identity. Having personally battled COVID-19 and lost colleagues and friends to this disease, my perspective on work and life fundamentally changed. I now share these reflections on my adaptation journey. Redesigning My Workspace: From Afterthought to Architecture Before the pandemic, my…
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Legacy Beyond Names: Insights from Public Health Work
When today’s writing prompt arrived—”If you could have something named after you, what would it” be?”—I paused. As a statistician who has spent the last seven years working with UNAIDS on the HIV and AIDS response in Madagascar, I felt the tension immediately. My professional life straddles two worlds: the analytical realm of statistics and…
L J Padayachy 