Memoirs--family history | Strategic Inheritance

Memoirs–family history

I’ve been writing about some tools that can help you record your personal, family history.

I recently finished Bill Gates, Sr.’s book Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime. It’s not a particularly remarkable book among all the books one might read. But it struck me, as I read it: It is one man’s testament, one man’s summation of “lessons from life,” and it’s a good model of the kind of thing parents might do for their children in terms of memorializing family history, values, purpose, and so forth.

Gates is actually rather self-effacing. It seems he spends more time honoring the people around him from whom he says he took his lessons than he does talking about how he “figured things out.”

Intermixed with the “lessons,” you also hear the stories–of how Bill met his wife; how she actually arranged for their marriage; of family traditions–Sunday dinners and summer vacations, gatherings through the years with family friends, and so on and so forth; statements of admiration and honor for each of the Gates children; and much more. The book is intimate and revelatory, yet one realizes it has been edited for an “outside” audience.

I found the last several chapters most intriguing, primarily because, for me, they happened to be talking about things I’m interested in at this point in my life. Specifically, they deal with the Gates family’s philanthropy and and why they do what they do.

I was most pleased with the author’s explanation of “who is my neighbor.” Today, says Gates, our neighbors are often on the other side of the world. And we need to pay attention to their needs.

Three of the most striking statistics he mentioned (p. 174 in the book–just 11 pages from the end):

Even in developed countries, the poor die five to ten years before the rich.
In the last twenty-five years, the number of people in Sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has almost doubled.
Every thirty seconds a child somewhere in the world dies of malaria.

Gates comments on these kinds of things:

There is an unconscionable disparity–and egregious inequity–between the way that we live and the way the people of the developing world live.

There are also endless possibilities for helping these distant neighbors of ours improve the quality of their lives.

Here’s an example.

Having been to Bangladesh, I can tell you that this morning a neighbor of ours there—a young mother—was making her way through the crowded capital city of Dhaka (a city of at least 400,000 rickshaws).

She was worried because the baby in her arms was dangerously dehydrated from diarrhea. Diarrhea has been one of the biggest killers of children around the globe, and Bangladesh has had one of the highest child mortality rates in the world.

Can we really impact such immense problems?

The answer is yes.

By tonight that mother in Dhaka—the one rushing her baby to the hospital—will most likely be at home in bed with her baby sound asleep beside her.

I saw dozens of mothers just like her at that hospital in Dhaka.

Thanks to some impressive science, international cooperation, and a process called oral rehydration, 95 percent of those babies leave the hospital just fine.

Doctors rehydrate these babies’ intestines by giving them a solution to drink that consists of little more than water and salt and sugar. Every year that process spares millions of families the unspeakable pain of losing a child.

The International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, pioneered oral rehydration. Then a group called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee took it out into the field to 13 million mothers. As a result, the infant death rate in Bangladesh has dropped dramatically. . . .

All this shows that when we put our best minds to the task and work together, we can help our neighbors solve some seemingly impossible problems.
–pp. 146-147

“We can and will conquer these problems,” Gates says, expressing faith in human capabilities, “when, instead of turning away, we learn to embrace them as our own.”

Clearly, that is Gates’ testament and aspiration.

What is yours?