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Ah, what an amazing experience! I plan to write up my thoughts after I have recovered from the 67 hours of travel to get home. In the meantime, feel free to browse my pictures.

My brother-in-law Pete just stopped by with 3 soccer balls for me to take to Rwanda! I hope to run across a couple football games and if the kids don’t have a real ball I’ll pass these on to them. Pete couldn’t resist the replica balls from the first world cup in Africa! Nice touch that I’m sure the kids will notice. He also provided a pump with extra needles for each ball. We’re thinking sustainability and maintenance, important concepts for even the smallest project…

Thanks Pete! Very thoughtful and there is nothing like the gift of play. I’ll try to get some pics and video of the balls in action once they get on the feet of kids who can use them!

I’m just about complete with my preparations for my trip to Rwanda. It’s been a whirlwind 6 weeks from when I first was asked to go. My philosophy is to prepare myself for amazing opportunities and then make the most of them when they present themselves. In preparation for this amazing trip, I’ve read these amazing books:

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families Gourevich’s book on the 1994 genocide goes so far beyond just a history, it almost feels timeless. He uses the genocide to allow us to consider what it means to be human. Everyone should read this book…

As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda Larson takes a look at what it means to try to carry on after the genocide. She presents dozens of real-life tales of reconciliation that are heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.

Mountains beyond Mountains Tracy Kidder tells the tale of Paul Farmer and his work in Haiti. President Kagame asked Farmer to Rwanda to help remake the country’s health care system. Farmer’s melding of liberation theology and public health is nothing short of brilliance.

And David Brancaccio has an amazing segment on Farmer’s work in Rwanda. This half-hour is amazing–take the time to watch it to see just how attainable conquering AIDS in Africa really is.

I want to live my life with autonomy, mastery, and purpose*.

Autonomy–the freedom to act and decide my own direction.

Mastery–excelling at whatever I choose to do.

and Purpose–the why behind my actions.

My purpose in life is driven by a great love for people, and a desire for them to be powerful in their lives.

What is power? Power is the ability to make change, to accomplish things, to be proficient, to have a say.

When you have power, you are confident, you get things done, you can unleash your creativity in solving problems. Powerful people make change for themselves and others.

My purpose is to help others find their power. This applies to all people–

• I want all people to have a voice in decisions that affect them
• I want people to unleash their creativity in service of solutions that improve the world
• I want my children to grow up to be independent/free-thinking adults
• I want the opportunity for all people to live a life of autonomy, mastery, and purpose

The work I do supports this purpose, and I am always looking for ways to push my impact deeper and broader.

*Be sure to check out Dan Pink’s talk on motivation.

I was privileged to get to write an article for DeveloperForce.com on exception handling in Apex. I wrote this article not from the perspective of an expert on the subject, but as someone who really wanted to learn more about my options for using exception handling in my Apex code.

I’ve always had a nagging feeling that I wasn’t following best practices in my exception handling in Apex. In most cases I wasn’t doing any exception handling at all. I decided to write up what I have learned about error handling on the Force.com platform so that others could jump into it full-bore, and make their programs more robust and fault tolerant.

I hope it’s helpful to Apex programmers out there. Let me know what you think!

Today I got confirmation of some great news–in February I’ll be going to Rwanda for a week to help install an open source medical records system at a rural health clinic! I’ll be going with Lucky Gunasekara and meeting with Partners in Health.

I’m really excited to work with Lucky! This project will be amazing, and Lucky has a longer-term vision. He wants to answer the question: does cloud computing have a role in health systems in rural Africa? He’s planning some really interesting efforts in Kenya later this year. In time, I think Salesforce.com can be a boon in rural Africa, and I’m really interested to start the work to figure out if that time is now, soon, or farther down the road. I see this trip as a great first step on that path.

When I started working with Salesforce.com five years ago, I felt part of my role was to go down the path of trying to deeply customize the platform for nonprofits, and then to report on that experience, warts and all. I really enjoyed that work, and I hope to do similar work and storytelling around Salesforce.com in parts of the world where people assume the cloud can’t work.

But most of all, I’m really excited to have all my assumptions and expectations blown out of the water! I can’t wait to walk the roads, meet folks, and most of all listen and learn. I will be arriving with no answers, and I don’t expect to leave with any. For me, it’s all about getting to the right questions. There will be so much to take in, to start orienting myself to this new set of challenges.

Only just a week ago a friend pointed me to this piece by David Brancaccio on Partners In Health’s work in Rwanda. I was floored by the outcomes they are getting, and the thoughtful design of the community health program. I recommend watching it–it’s amazing.

So many times people look to technology as a savior. That never works in my estimation–human systems are how problems are solved. Technology can augment and transform those solutions, but it isn’t the answer. I’m incredibly excited by what’s already working in Rwanda, and am fired up to start thinking about how technology can help extend that impact.

I watched this video and emailed the link to a friend of mine with the message, “this is the work I want to do with my life–helping people build community-based systems that really work.” Four days later I got an email from Lucky inviting me to Rwanda, to the very region where that video was filmed. Serendipity is a fabulous thing!

Ahh! I’m going to Rwanda! I still can’t really believe it. It all feels so fast and so amazingly exciting. Of course I’ll be writing about the experience, as well as taking tons of pictures and videos. So much to do to prepare!

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

- Rilke

Groundwire is an organization near and dear to my heart. I spent many wonderful years there back when it went by the name ONE/Northwest. My Salesforce-related career got it’s start there. Some of my most cherished relationships began there. And I was given the space and encouragement to grow exponentially as a person, technologist, and agent of change. I look back on those years very fondly–the work, the nonprofits we worked with, but most importantly the people.

Groundwire is looking for a top-notch CRM Consultant. Opportunities to join this amazing team are rare. If you are at all interested in using your Salesforce.com skills to make a difference in this world, you should follow up with Groundwire and make sure you don’t miss this chance.

A few weeks ago I felt a change in the force that drives me to do my work. It was a good and welcome change, one of renewed energy and focus. I wrote about how Africa has leapt back to the forefront of my mind, back to a position of prominence it held long ago. I have much to learn and catch up on as try to get reconnected to Africa. It’s an exciting time!

I’ve started connecting with interesting NGOs and entrepreneurs working in Africa. Through my contacts at work, I’ve been learning about some of the work being done in some of the countries in Africa. These conversations have been very interesting and helpful. I wrote a bit a while back about the cloud and the stack of infrastructure it relies on. This resetting of the landscape is an excellent process to undergo for me. It’s a process of understanding new constraints. Feeling out those constraints is key to critically thinking and solving problems. Knowledge workers who don’t understand the constraints they work under are doomed to come up with solutions that will not work.

And it’s been amazing to know those constraints but to keep in mind that boxes need to be broken out of. While constraints make you think creatively, blindly accepting those constraints is unacceptable if we want to bring about transformative change. Last week I changed my status message on IM from “constraints breed creativity” to “constraints are for suckers” to try to get at this duality. Understand, but do not accept the binds you feel!

A great place to get grounded in some of the newest thinking about Africa is to watch Africa-themed TED talks. So many of these talks are mind-blowing. In 2007, TED Global went to Tanzania and there are many amazing talks from that conference. If you’ve ever talked with me for more than 20 minutes, I’ve probably recommended a TED talk to you. I recommend watching them all! Stories about leadership, entrepreneurship, the economy, banking, the list goes on.

I’ve found a great way to follow what’s going on in Africa is to find the amazing folks on Twitter interested in the topics. I’ve created a list of Africa-related Twitter accounts I follow. Many are technology related, but not all. Feel free to peruse or follow the list if you want daily info on what’s happening in Africa from some amazing people.

Following Twitter will point you to all these blogs eventually. They’re all great:

• Afrigadget – making in Africa
• Appfrica – TED Senior Fellow Jonathan Gosier’s blog
• naijablog – Jeremy Weate with great stuff out of Nigeria
• Texas in Africa – Laura Seay, a professor at Morehouse
• White African – Founder of Afrigadget and Ushahidi Director of Operations, Erik Hersman

Ryan Norbauer just published a really deep article about one of my favorite pieces of software, Omnifocus. It’s a great tutorial on how to use the program, but I think it’s real value is as a description of what Getting Things Done (GTD) really is.

The great achievement of David Allen’s framework has more to do with relieving stress about work than organizing your lists, a fact that is seemingly lost on most of the GTD-professing masses who spend all day twittering about lifehacks and Moleskine list-management. GTD is about psychology, not “productivity” per se. Moreover, the system pays most of its psychological benefits when it’s implemented fully, and I mean really nitty-gritty, every-little-thing-in-your-head fully. The difference between 99% and 100% implementation is truly vast, as anyone who has made it to 100% readily attests (David himself included).