Inspiring Me.

This past week I had an experience that sums up so much of how the workplace and the rest of my life operates here in the Philippines. Wednesday, I was asked by my co-workers to be the keynote speaker for the graduation recognition ceremony coming up at our center. Since I was asked around noon on Wednesday, and since the ceremony wasn’t scheduled until 4 PM on Thursday, this gave me twenty-seven preparation hours for the speech. In the Philippines, twenty-seven hours is seen as ample time. With a lot of persuasion, I accepted the task, knowing that it would further help with my integration into the workplace. As my co-workers were having a hard time understanding why I was a bit nervous or stressed about the speech, I kindly tried to explain that first, I don’t exactly enjoy public speaking as much as Filipinos do, and second, usually if I am going to write a speech, I am given much longer than twenty-seven hours to write it. I find that sometimes explaining things about my typical workstyle or about American culture and working environment helps me to feel better and hopefully helps them to see that I am not, in fact, a crazy woman, but rather, I’m just American. On a side note, it is difficult to do this without sounding like, “Well, in America we do this….” Or “In America…”, but hopefully it helps to explain my seemingly neurotic personality at times!

The time for the recognition ceremony on Thursday came, and by that time I had thought of many ideas for my speech. The only instructions I had were, “Be inspiring. Tell them why you are the way you are”. I hope that these words were indicating that I was successful, but then again, who knows? They could have meant that I should instruct the kids on how to be very serious, or how to dress a bit sloppy, or how to be tall, or how to be always focusing on work and deadlines, or how to manage myself with such a long nose. Who knows? But I assumed that this meant successful, and I went with it. Leading up to speech time, I still wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say. The theme song of the recognition ceremony happened to be “Time of my Life” by David Cook, and sitting and listening to the song over and over again before the ceremony (practicing pressing the play button, perhaps?), I noticed the lyrics. The first line is, “I’ve been waiting for my dreams to turn into something.” Well, since this was the theme song of the ceremony, and since I was planning on talking about dreams of some sort anyways, bingo. So, my question for the graduates was, “Why are you WAITING for you dreams? Why not start them today?” Of course there was a lot of accompanying messages, but that was the overall gist. Inspiring? Not sure. But hey, with twenty-seven hours to prepare something, I think I did alright.