Greetings and Happy Midweek!
And it’s just before mid-month, so it’s time for another of our RAP sessions (Review and Process, deeper and wider). In our Global SKILLs training, we emphasize how ‘Review and Process’ are key components of strategic planning and implementation. Each of these mid-month RAP sessions revisits a cross-cultural theme or topic from a previous Connect, going more deeply into what we’ve begun to explore. This month we are going to revisit the topic of “Opportunities”, which we began to explore last autumn (see my November 4, 2020 post here)*. In that first reflection, we met a rural Senegalese farmer who had used opportunities in his life to create an expertly grafted fruit tree - quite an achievement.
Today, let’s meet another Senegalese individual, Khaby Lame.** Khaby is a young man who has single handedly transformed his life through taking advantage of opportunities which social media, the pandemic, his own creativity and human nature have offered him. Seizing upon the isolation lockdown required by the pandemic alongside reaching a potential global audience Tiktok offered him, Khaby began making videos of solutions to challenges life brings our way. Using video clips of “life hacks” posted online (ways people met challenging situations), and eventually clips his followers send him, Khaby offers - in silence - his own inevitably much simpler, basically common sense solutions. Today, Khaby is one of the most popular Tiktok presenters with over 100 million followers.
Several cross-cultural facets of what Khaby is doing, which I find fascinating, include the fact that he does not speak in his videos - which for this linguist is in itself a source of much reflection (!) as he instead universally communicates the solutions through his actions. Also, Khaby is being heralded as the funniest guy on social media. This causes me pause, because when I watch him, it’s not so much that he is funny but that he is just naturally doing things in a common sense way. I suspect my different take on this perhaps comes at least partially from Senegalese cultural perspectives and approaches I share with Khaby.
Funny or not, I am really awestruck at how Khaby’s taking the opportunity to do what he is doing has catapulted him to global fame, reaching a cross-cultural audience of immeasurable diversity!
How about you ~ check out Khaby’s work in the LINKs below, and reflect on how it impacts you and how you have perhaps seized on an opportunity lately which had cross-cultural impact...
Share about that with a friend or note it here.
Thanks for being part of this Connect community.
Until next week,
Betsy
* PROACTive Learning Strategies:
PRO = PROfile, PROcess, PROgram
ACT = Applications , Collaboration and Transformations (which we looked at today through Khaby's seizing opportunities)
~ contact me for more information on these strategies and how you might use them in your current programming
** Khaby was 'introduced' to me by one of our own Connect Community members, Nancy - a fellow Global Nomad! So, shout out to Nancy - thanks for sharing his story! And if any of you have suggestions for a Connect topic, theme or RAP - to go more deeply into a previous Connect...let me know!
Global SKILLs LINKs
~ introducing Khaby: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/02/world/tiktok-khaby-lame-cec/index.html
~ a compilation - his “funniest” 2020 videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJgzT87yAYs
~ one take on how Khaby’s life has changed - seizing those opportunities which came his way:
2021 ~ Celebrating 40 years of working in
intercultural communications and global community building
Connecting, Collaborating, Cultivating Community