First reflections about England

Bags, bags and more plastic bags...

I have not yet finished my first week in London and I am surrounded by plastic bags at home.

Coming from an 'anti-plastic-bag' country like France, this has been a real choc culturel. 

Maybe I am simply stating the obvious. So far I have noticed that people reuse them until they finish in the trash. I, myself, cannot keep track with the speed of reuse that is required.

On top of that, my neighbourhood does not recycle :( 

I live in a complete nature unfriendly environment :P in one of the greenest cities in the world!

Skills help donations be effective, donate your skills!!

Most of those that were blessed with a very good education, that made the choice of study even more and get trained by companies on how to be efficient, productive and do our best at work, also decided that we wanted to get well paid for all the efforts. Very few are those that decide that prefer a job where helping others is the priority and pay comes second or third. Jobs where salary comes last are less backed by good training and continuous learning, thus leaving NGOs full of individuals with great potential being unexploited. Volunteering associations and NGOs also suffer from a very little data/scientific approach to run their :"businesses". They seem more driven by a political will that a thorough analysis of facts. That makes them inefficient by wasting money in activities that with ‘better management and accurately interpreted data’ could have been avoided.

Things are changing. Bill Gates, in one of his speeches at the TED talks, exposed his view on how to tackle challenging problems for developing countries by using a more scientific perspective to have better results.

I guess we do not have to become as rich as Bill Gates and as old as him to start applying what we have learnt to help people working in programs that help society development.

So, I encourage everyone to reflect on how they could volunteer their skills, many times more needed than their money, to help around. Often help is needed around the corner. Let’s not wait until we are old, we’ll enjoy it more while we are young :)