Live in the moment, enjoy the moment, each moment!

This New Year, I have no resolutions, no reflections, no expectations. I want to go through time and process: observe, feel, enjoy what I can and let the rest fly. Be here and know that I am here.? Having my wife and kids join from New Jersey made the new year's countdown more than delightful. What truly marked it, though, was our trip to my hometown.

?We drove the long 342 kilometers from Abidjan to Bouake, my home town.? Bouake is the second largest town of Cote d’Ivoire (after the commercial capital, Abidjan) with a population of about 600,000 inhabitants. Sokoura, where I grew up, is an area of the city that has maintained the characteristics of a village. It is marked by a strong sense of community where everyone? knows each other and there are? some cultural practices rarely found elsewhere in urban communities. Most houses are multi-family compounds where kids roam and play in whichever house they want to. Our compound in particular houses 3 other families with dozens?of kids aged from just a few months old to 10+ years old.

Our first night in Bouake, kids in the compound were watching the typical? 7:30pm cartoon. They were very focused and unusually silent. Scooby-Do was the center of their world. A soccer game was going on another channel that my brother wanted to watch. There is only one TV set in the house. So with the authority conferred by his age, he took the remote control and changed the channel to watch his soccer game. I was expecting some complaints, screams, or?cries from the kids. I was ready to intervene and defend the poor kids' right to watch their beloved cartoon. However, as soon as the channel changed, the kids left the living room without any of the reactions I predicted. They were just having small talks with each other as they exited. ?

Few minutes later, I started to hear some noises outside, playful noises with songs, screams, and shouts. I know we don’t have a playground in the compound? so I went to see what was happening. The kids had formed different groups.The first group of 3 or 4 had turned the chairs into racing cars. They mimicked the bbbbrrrrrr engine sound and pushed as fast as they could. No matter who wins or loses, they do it again. Another group was singing some popular songs they had learned at school, each of them taking the lead for another song as soon as one finished. Some of the songs were wrong but they didn’t care. The third group decided to climb on the table and jump off to see who goes the furthest. All seemed to be self-organized, self-structured, and self-secured. The kids were all smiles and looked so happy.?

?I had to retain myself again from intervening as I found each of the moves dangerous and the noise increasingly unbearable. But the joy they were having was so contagious. I could only watch and share the moment. I started reflecting on the lessons these kids were teaching me right there: acceptance, adaptability, creativity, teamwork and above all, to enjoy the moment. The kids needed no technology, no supervisor, no rules, and no security protocol. They just moved on from the initial setback, focused on their desire to have fun, used the resources available to them (not focused on the constraints), freed up their imagination, and trusted each other. I couldn’t help wondering how these kids will adapt for the future in an increasingly digital world, how competitive they will be within the global talent marketplace, what contribution they could make to Africa's future development… But right now, seeing them enjoy their time, live in the moment and have fun seemed like the most important thing in the world. Live in the moment, enjoy the moment, each moment! This is a life lesson I was reminded of. Indeed, decades ago, I was one of these kids.

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