Life on Chemo

“I can’t” , “I’m in a hurry”, “I haven’t got time”

Such were the responses when I wanted to tell those around me that I’d reached a ‘major response’ in remission from leukeamia. I needed someone to celebrate with.

After all, don’t we all need someone who values our existence and encourages our progress?

If we need to ask for it, aren’t we already devaluing ourselves?

I’d lived like a zombie for several years, due to insomnia from the treatment. I recall telling my consultant that I was coping by focussing on something bigger than myself — our focus on vulnerable children .

These were children with disabilities who were abandoned to state care because they were seen as having little value to society.

“They’re called children with no prospects, not trainable, not treatable. A colleague called these psychoneurological internaty ‘death camps.’ The situation there is terrible.”

What hit me harder was the apathy I experienced when I petitioned David Cameron for support. I managed to gain the support of only 57 people.

My colleague, our founder Terry Hallman had already died, His appeal to USAID also seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

My attempts to leverage support from the EU were likewise disregarded.

So was our application to partner with the British Council sharing our proposal for social enterprise development in Ukraine. Eventually , I’d learn that their partners were expected to make a financial contribution.

The irony is that today the British Council is run by Sir Ciarán Devane the man who formerly led Macmillan and the campaign to raise awareness of facing cancer alone.

A local civic activist found Terry’s body and wrote on Maidan:

“The author of breakthru report “Death camps for children” Terry Hallman suddenly died of grave disease on Aug 18 2011. On his death bed he was speaking only of his mission — rescuing of these unlucky kids. His dream was to get them new homes filled with care and love. His quest would be continued as he wished.”

I reflected on the words Terry had written at the same time as his missive to USAID:

“The term “social enterprise” in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today — 2008 — refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don’t address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven’t enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not.”

This is why I write today about business where other people matter.