Shoshana Stewart is the president of Turquoise Mountain, an NGO founded in 2006 in Afghanistan by His Majesty King Charles, to preserve cultural heritage and support artisans where their traditions are under threat. Shoshana lived in Afghanistan for five years when she first joined, and has led the project to create over 25,000 jobs, bring over $17 million of crafts to market, build the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, restored over 150 historic buildings in the Old City of Kabul, and provided primary healthcare for almost 200,000 people. She has also expanded the project to work with artisans in Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan (including Syrian refugees), and Palestine.
Shoshana has an MBA from the London Business School, a master’s degree in Education, and a bachelor's degree in Astrophysics. She is also a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
Shoshana shares with Anne her life’s serendipitous journey which began in astrophysics, before leading her to teach 8th grade science, and that saw her find her way to Afghanistan, in a career cultural heritage restoration in Afghanistan.
Turquoise Mountain was created with the original goal of revitalising Kabul’s architectural legacy, as Shoshana explains, and now supports artisan communities in several regions of the world. Shoshana emphasises to Anne the organisation's expansive work with artisans and, in some areas, with refugees in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine and Myanmar.
Further going into Turquoise Mountain's initiatives, Shoshana tells Anne about her experience and the collective effort that was the restoration of the area of Murad Khani in old Kabul and how putting the art school in the centre of the old city gave the project a sort of a beating heart for this impressive regeneration project.
She shares compelling stories of resilience and creativity, showcasing how these efforts were helped by global collaborations. Designers like ethical jeweller Pippa Small play a pivotal role in this story, bringing Afghan jewellery to international markets and highlighting the powerful impact of blending tradition with modern market strategies.
Through these partnerships, Shoshana further emphasises how the work of the nonprofit not only preserves cultural heritage, but also creates sustainable livelihoods for artisans.
Shoshana also tells Anne about her decision to pursue an MBA to address market challenges, which showcases her commitment to finding innovative solutions for artisan communities.
Their discussion touches on the significant challenges posed by recent global events, including political upheavals and the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the resilience of the communities supported by Turquoise Mountain. The organisation’s ability to maintain connections and support artisans through these turbulent times is a testament to its enduring impact.
As the conversation unfolds further, Shoshana highlights the transformative power of cultural heritage in fostering connections between artisans and clients, and changing perceptions about regions often associated with conflict. Anne then touches on broader themes of mindfulness and intentional living, and Shoshana shares the practices that ground her amidst the ongoing challenges she experiences.
This interview provides a rich illustration of stories and insights from Shoshana's work with Turquoise Mountain. It paints a vivid picture of how cultural preservation can create a positive global impact, demonstrating the importance of heritage and craftsmanship in building resilient communities.
A compelling conversation with an exceptional leader and advocate for the craftsmen and craftswomen she supports. Happy listening!
Selected links from episode:
Out of the Clouds website: https://outoftheclouds.com/
Out of the Clouds on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_outoftheclouds
The Mettā View website: https://avm.consulting/metta-view
Anne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annvi/
Anne on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@annvi
Anne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-v-muhlethaler/
Shoshana Stewart on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoshana-stewart
Turquoise Mountain website: https://www.turquoisemountain.org/
Turquoise Mountain on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/turquoisemountain/
Shoshana’s talk at TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo2qgHUDbRo
Shoshana’s talk at London Business School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ty1PzJa_Yg
Yale’s Jackson School for Global Affairs
Pippa Small’s Afghan-made collection
Pippa Small’s Olive Bethlehem collection
Aliph Foundation, the Alliance for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Conflict
the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund
the American Embassy's Ambassador's Fund
Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
00:04
Hi, hello, bonjour and namaste. This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness, and I'm your host, Anne V Muhlethaler. Today, I have the great pleasure of being joined by Shoshana Stewart. Shoshana is the president of Turquoise Mountain, an NGO founded in 2006 in Afghanistan by His Majesty King Charles to preserve the cultural heritage and support artisans where their traditions may be under threat. So in our conversation, Shoshana tells me about the serendipitous early steps in her career, how she went from studying astrophysics to teaching eighth grade science, to teaching eighth grade science thanks to Teach for America, and how she later found herself in Afghanistan, again through serendipity, joining the team of the newly created NGO. We talk at length about the early days that she spent in Kabul and the extraordinary work that was carried out by her team and her now husband, Rory Stewart. Shoshana tells me about the origin story of the project and the name, the meaning behind the name, and that is. Shoshana tells me about the origin story of the name Turquoise Mountain and how the project was really meant to.
01:44
No and how the project was really meant to. No, Shoshana tells me about the origin story of the project and the significance behind its name. She also explains how great it is to pass traditions and crafts and to train the next generation of artisans. We talk about the way that they run the charity and the challenges that they face, how they realized early on that, beyond what was the monumental lift of restoring 150 buildings in the center of Kabul, getting the water supply and sanitation and everything done, and how, over the past 10 years, the struggle, or let's say challenge, has been about finding markets to sell the wares created by these artisans and making sure that there's a match with a client internationally People like me, perhaps with a disposable income, who want to be buying things and spending their money or stay in places that are a reflection of their values. We also discussed about how Shoshana chose to do an MBA at the London Business School while working at Turquoise Mountain and how they then started adding territories like Saudi Arabia, jordan, myanmar and the Levant.
03:11
We do talk about the designer, pippa Small a lot. If you've not heard me talk about, if you've not heard my episode with Pippa, I highly recommend you have a listen. So I used to work with Pippa in my capacity as a consultant in communication, and she has been a tremendous partner to Turquoise Mountain for many, many years. Shoshana makes the case for the crucial role of designers to the artisans' livelihoods and how they can impact the future of crafts, and how important the mentoring of a designer can matter for these craftsmen and women, especially when they're isolated in times of conflict, which is true now, sadly, across a number of regions where Shoshana and Turquoise Mountain are involved. So this is a profound and dynamic conversation with a real changemaker.
04:10
I am so excited to be able to introduce you to this brilliant, brilliant woman, so warm-hearted and passionate about the work that both her and her organizations are doing. So, without further ado, I am delighted to introduce you, if you don't know her already, to Shoshana Stewart. So, without further ado, let me stop talking. And so, without further ado, I'm delighted to share my interview with Shoshana Stewart. Happy listening, Shoshana. It's so lovely to see you. Welcome to Out of the Clouds.
04:48
Thank you for having me.
04:50
So I love to start by asking my guests to tell me their story quite broadly, and the reason why I lean on this is because I like to find out about where you've been, who you were as a kid, what were your aspirations as a teenager or a young person before you became the woman that I'm interviewing and talking to today? And I know it's a big ask, but would you give it a try and tell us your story?
05:15
Sure, I was raised in New York, upstate New York sort of American suburbia and had a great childhood and never really left America until I was 21. I loved rowing, I loved skiing, I loved science and math. So I was a physics major in college, though I think I spent most of my time rowing and I graduated. And then the first year after university I went and taught in Honduras and Central America, which was a very new experience. I hadn't spent much time traveling and I think I really just saw a new world that I loved and that sort of probably set me on a path of traveling more.
06:00
But my beginnings as a teacher was really my love of kids and really kids. The other part of growing up that I hold very dear is my experience at summer camp. I know it's a very American thing, but you go to sleep away but I was a camper for four years and a counselor for four years and I just loved every moment of it. I loved the outdoors, I loved the sense of community and camaraderie all around, people just being nice and enjoying the outdoors and being up for anything. So that was my sort of defining childhood was summer camp.
06:32
Amazing. How did you find yourself directed towards physics and astrophysics?
06:37
Mostly Star Trek. I love Star. Trek. My mom and I, in particular, love Star Trek, but I think my brother and father are also subjected to it, and actually my dad loves to sail. This is a really niche Star Trek bit, but the name of the enterprise, the registration number, is NCC-1701. And so that's what's the name of his sail.
07:03
No way.
07:04
I think it's tribute to my mine, but no, I love, as I said, I love science and math. That was always the case. I prefer numbers to words and I yeah, I loved physics and I loved space. So I became an astrophysics major and I had a wonderful education at Williams College, which is a liberal arts degree where you really get to get a quite a broad education. So I wouldn't say that it was a very narrow astrophysics degree. It was much wider and I took art, history and all sorts of things. But I loved it. I had a small department and we just.
07:38
The final bit of being an astrophysics major is that our recently deceased but wonderful department head, Jay Pasikoff, who's one of the world's leading experts on solar eclipses, would always take the majors to study the solar eclipse. So this was my first trip abroad. I had to get a passport for it, but we went to Zambia and we parked ourselves on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka and set up temperature experiments so you can study the sun while the moon is blocking it, essentially. And so astrophysics oddly led me to Zambia, and I was just reviewing my journals from that time and I realized that I was much more interested in the culture and being in a different place than I was in the science.
08:25
That's amazing, it was a wonderful trip. Yeah, I can imagine just about anyone with a hint of curiosity would want to be on that roof. It was very special. So you graduated and became a teacher. Did it come to you naturally? Was there a moment or a trigger where you just realized the love of camps and the idea of imparting knowledge to young people? Did anyone particularly open up that path for you?
08:53
No, I'm not sure they did. I think that my early steps in my career were much more serendipitous than anything else, and I do a little bit of teaching at Yale's Jackson School for Global Affairs and I teach master's students, and that is a lot about looking at career path and how you make decisions about your career, and I think there is. My journey is not one of planning. Neither going into teaching nor going in to Turquoise Mountain was anything except saying yes to something. And in the case of teaching, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I like being a summer camp counselor.
09:28
I thought about being a rowing coach because I loved rowing and Teach for America, which is an incredible institution that brings people into teaching, was recruiting. So I went to a recruitment session and then I got a job offer from Teach for America. I got it from New York City to teach in Harlem and I deferred it for a year to go to Honduras, but then came back and did Teach for America in New York City and then worked for a charter school teaching eighth grade science outside of Boston and I loved it. I mean, I felt such a passion for teaching but it wasn't a sort of long-term plan. I found it and I liked it.
10:11
It's interesting, I find, at least in my life. I find that my early 20s were very much the same. It was like, oh, that.
10:20
Yes.
10:20
Yeah.
10:21
And I also. The reason I think it's worth noting and not just a wait that's not helpful is that I think that people, when we're young in particular, we like to think about the world in terms of sort of sectors. What I mean by that is you want to be a lawyer, or you want to work in maternal child health, or you want to work in sustainability. That's a great one. Now I want to work in sustainability. That is terrific, have a passion, but it's completely useless if you're thinking about what kind of job you want to have.
10:52
If you're working in maternal child health, you could work for your home government, live in that capital city and write the strategic plan for maternal child health across the world in those development programs, travel a little bit, but basically live in your home country and never meet anyone that you actually support. But you're moving big amounts of money and thinking really big. You could work for the Gates Foundation, live in the States, maybe, travel a bit to the field a little bit closer again quite large amounts of money outside of government. You could run a maternal child health clinic in rural Paraguay and speak Spanish every day of your life and know every single person that you work with. They're completely different lives. They're all within maternal child health.
11:44
So I think, a that's a weird way to look at it as the sort of sectoral but B you actually don't know until you try. You have to figure out whether you like managing people or whether the chaos of management just makes you break out in hives. It's really hard to know until you try it right. Or, if you like, if being in somebody else's country is a sense of adventure and you love looking at the cultural differences and learning language, or if you just feel frustrated and impotent because of it, because you can't communicate properly and you don't like this different food. So I do think that when we're young we've got to try these things out and see what fits us.
12:22
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Such such a good point fits us. Yeah, thanks for sharing that Such such a good point. I had a follow-up question about the fact that you were saying yes. Were you always a yes person growing up? Did it come to you naturally?
12:35
Yes, I think I've probably been quite. I think I should probably say no, a little bit more yes.
12:40
I'm a yes person.
12:41
I'm a yes person.
12:42
That's interesting. So how did you say yes to Turquoise Mountain? I can't say that word, sorry, let me say it again.
12:49
You and everybody else.
12:50
No, because I'm trying to say it with a French accent and then that just comes out awkward Turquoise. So how did you come to say yes to Turquoise Mountain?
13:05
So, again, total serendipity I was teaching and my partner at the time was doing research on Afghanistan, so I tagged along on an adventure and got a job volunteering at this new organization that had been set up earlier that year, and I got a place to stay in exchange for working and I stayed. I ended up getting a job as a sort of fundraising assistant and then took the place of an outgoing deputy and became the deputy and then eventually took over.
13:30
Now I've heard you tell the story of what it was like, what the site was like and what the work was like when you first arrived. Now, bearing in mind that some of the people who are going to listen to this, I'm hoping that they're going to go and watch your TED Talk and discover some of the other talks and interviews that are out there that you've done, which are so incredibly colorful because you really take us on a journey Would you attempt it, though over these airwaves and tell us what that was like? What was your first day like?
13:58
Sure, first day was, you know, you arrive at Kabul airport and it's a different temperature than when you left and all the things that are the case when you arrive in a new country. But I was then picked up by my who knew then but would be my driver for about 15 years Zia, and arrive at the front gates of this huge mud castle. It looked like it was a fort. This was an 18th century fort with huge towers in the corners. The name of it is the Kalai Nuburja, the fort of nine towers. Actually, only four of them were still standing because half of it had collapsed. So I go in and there is there are a pair of peacocks, there are calligraphers, there are masons plastering mud on newly rebuilt mud walls. So I walked into this sort of very beautiful, very romantic fort in the process of being rebuilt, with all these artisans and craftspeople running around everywhere.
14:58
That was the beginning, and I was shortly then taken down to the, the old city area, which really is our permanent home in Afghanistan, and that's an even more extreme need of rebuilding, which is that if you picture any capital city, really you have the historic, traditional architecture of that place and in the case of Kabul, that is, courtyard buildings.
15:20
So you have they look like mud boxes from the outside and on the inside they have this incredibly ornate carved wooden colletades and so you walk in and you're surrounded by this beautiful woodwork. But actually, in this case, the neighborhood that we are working in, Muradhani, essentially was 40% collapsed because after at that point, about 30 years of war and fundamentally just not having a functioning government to maintain things and not having people to maintain things, everyone had fled. These mud buildings, when they sit against snow and standing water, just collapse into a pile of mud. So this neighborhood was incredibly beautiful when you got a glimpse of mud. So this neighborhood was incredibly beautiful when you got a glimpse of what was standing but was half collapsed. It was just it was six feet of mud with garbage bags in it. So we just employed everyone in this community and more widely to just dig this stuff out and drop the street level back down to where it was and then begin to restore the buildings.
16:30
I'm glad you explained how that collapse happened, because I did see the before and after from your talks and it was hard for me to even imagine why and how Can you get six feet of mud and debris and garbage to move, to actually recover the original architecture and then even just attempt to envision what could come back?
16:57
Yeah, the why it happens is because, as I said, when a mud house collapses it makes a house-sized pile of mud, but the rebuilding bit of it because it is a lot. So we cleared 30,000 cubic meters, which is like probably 15,000 truckloads of this out. But what happens is you sift the mud through a sort of a grate and then the mud out the other side you can use because it's pure, and then you take out the garbage, the plastic bags, the cups, the whatever else, out the other side. So actually quite a lot of it was reused to build new buildings in this place.
17:40
That's amazing. I was wondering what would happen to 50,000 tons of mud on the outside of Kabul.
17:46
Nope, the beautiful thing about traditional architecture, about mud architecture is that most of the money is in labor wages, because the materials are all around you.
17:55
That's amazing. What does Turquoise Mountain mean? What's behind the name?
18:02
So it is the name of the summer capital of a great dynasty which ruled over Afghanistan and more widely. But it was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and the last remaining monument of the dynasty of the city of the Turquoise Mountain is the Minaret of Jam, which is a very special Afghan monument in the middle of Gor province, in the middle of the mountains of Afghanistan, but it's the only thing left, and so the name was given by my husband, rory, who set up Turquoise Mountain. The name was given to evoke a great civilization lost to history, which is what we're trying to prevent in trying to preserve cultural heritage.
18:41
That's beautiful. While you're touching on this, can you tell me about the foundation, how it was set up and how it came to be to the point that you got there?
18:52
So we were set up again. Lots of serendipity, I'm the official poster, woman poster child for no planning. So His Majesty the King, as the Prince of Wales, was hosting the Afghan president at the time, hamid Karzai, in London, and they were at what was the Prince's School of Traditional Arts, and it's an incredibly beautiful institution just very high quality work and an emphasis on Islamic art. And the president is saying how much he would love to have a school like this in his country after 30 years of war, with these traditions disappearing. I think most people are like oh, I'm so sorry, your country has been at war for 30 years.
19:37
But the Prince of Wales is like wait, let's start one. Entrepreneurial doesn't cover it. Entrepreneurial doesn't cover it. So he then sends Rory to go and see what's possible. Go on a reconnaissance mission, fly to Kabul He'd been there a lot, see if we could set something up. Go and see the president while you're there. So he goes and he finds this neighborhood, murad Hani actually and thinks maybe if we put this art school in the center of the old city and use it as a way to regenerate things, as a sort of beating heart to a regeneration project, this might just work. So we were born.
20:16
Wow, it's so impressive and, just as you said, most people will be like oh, I'm so sorry, I love that someone, especially for someone in part of the British royal family to just go okay let's, but it's.
20:30
One of the wonderful things about his majesty is that he really wants things to be done. He really. He is not one to do things in a token way, and so he means it when he says I want to set up an art school in Afghanistan. Obviously, one can only have so many of those ideas a day, week and month, but the projects that he set up over his life are products of that. They are products of him seeing something that he thinks needs doing, or someone has a meeting of minds of two people, and he is the instigator for that.
21:02
That's beautiful. That's super inspiring. I'd like to ask you what did you think you were going to become when you were a kid?
21:08
No idea.
21:09
No idea.
21:09
Absolutely. Do you have a little fantasy?
21:16
I cannot emphasize enough to you how little. No, because I wonder what five-year-old or 10-year-old Shoshana would have said to if you'd come back and said you will be working in Afghanistan for a foundation set up by the future King of England will be working in Afghanistan for a foundation set up by the future King of England.
21:26
Yeah, it wouldn't have made any sense at all, it wouldn't have made any sense at all. No, I didn't. I think this is a much more international life than I could have imagined and I loved where I grew up. I wasn't trying to leave it, but I found so much and I think, again, this is very personal. People have to figure out whether this is what they are also like, but I just fell in love with being in Afghanistan. I just loved learning about it. I loved trying to figure out why there are words that don't translate between Dari and English. You know why?
21:58
I was mesmerized by the concept of hot and cold foods, which really doesn't have anything to do with temperature, it's. I still don't understand it perfectly, but I'd be eating watermelon. The fruit in Afghanistan is unbelievable. I'd be eating watermelon and drinking coffee and our head engineer would be like stop, you cannot put those together. One's a hot food, one's a cold food. But it was something like the watermelon was the hot food and the coffee was the cold food, but you can drink watermelon. The coffee was the cold food, but you can drink watermelon. You can eat watermelon with tea. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I love that. I could spend hours asking about what this spirit of food and drink is that isn't about temperature.
22:37
That sounds fascinating, so I'd love for you to tell us what you did with the team over the course of your tenure there, because you have now been at Turquoise Mountain for how many years? 18 years 18 years.
23:07
That's spectacular. Tell us about what you of artisans, a community of artisans, and by that I include traditional builders and woodworkers and jewelers, and calligraphers and carpet weavers. And in that neighborhood that I described, we restored 150 buildings and we put the institute at its center. I described, we restored 150 buildings and we put the Institute at its center. So I was in Afghanistan about a month ago with my husband and our kids actually, and the Institute is in a set of buildings so the students come in and out every day. But that's right next to the community clinic which we set up and all of the residential houses that everyone lives in, and those are houses that people from those families restored themselves. We essentially would come to a house and say, do you want a job and do you want to work, and shall we fix your house? So we do that. So that's what it looks like in More Than Honey. And the other thing back to our origin of creating a school of traditional art that could preserve these traditions that was created and that still runs today.
24:05
But the thing that we realized very early on is that you can't.
24:11
It's great to pass these things down and train the next generation, but it doesn't work if they can't get a job, if they can't support themselves and that's much more cute in Afghanistan than it is in Britain and so we had to learn how to sell. We're a charity. How the heck are you going to sell Afghan products? So we started selling them locally but realized that the larger markets were in export. We had to figure out how to do that. So that probably is the, I'd say, the bigger hurdle in the first phase of things was the monumental lift of restoring 150 buildings and getting the water supply and sanitation and electricity hooked up, and all that. The biggest lift over the last 10 years has been about markets, and I have an unbelievable pair of people, both of whom have lived in Afghanistan, toby Ash, our commercial director, and Talia Kennedy, our creative director, who basically work day in, day out to find markets for the artisans that we work with, and they've really done it. There's a wonderful hotel in the center of London called the Conalt Hotel.
25:14
I love that hotel.
25:16
It's so wonderful and we've had a relationship with the Conalt through a designer called Guy Oliver, who basically convinced the Conalt to make an entire Afghan suite. Over 10 years ago that was our first big commission. So we built a huge four post carved walnut wood bed, all the doors, the window bays, and installed it, and you can still stay in it today, suite 518, it's called the Prince's Lodge and then he convinced them again this year, called the Prince's Lodge, and then he convinced them again this year. So we and so Talia and her team, along with Guy and his team in the Conalt, put together the most spectacular suite. It's called the King's Lodge.
25:54
Anybody can look it up. It is really beautiful. It's one of the things I'm most proud of that we've ever made and it is brings together a hundred artisans from essentially across the regions of conflict that we work Syrian, afghan and Myanmar artisans, along with British and Indian. And it is this most spectacular a Mughal love story put into a room. So you have these incredible Mughal arches and mirrored woodwork. I'm looking at it. It's amazing, it's totally spectacular.
26:27
It looks like you're in another country.
26:30
Yeah, it does, it does. So that's been the bigger feat over the last 10 years, in which we have much, much more to do, which is about figuring out how to match what is a growing market in craftsmanship, authenticity and sustainability. That is hospitality fashion. It's how we met, through Pippa Small, that people do with disposable income. This is not everyone.
27:02
People with disposable income increasingly want to buy things and spend their money and stay in places which are a reflection of their values, in which they feel positive about the story it tells and that they can tell about that. And so if that's about your earrings and telling about the lapis lazuli and where it comes from in Afghanistan and the women's own business that makes it, that's a reason that people would buy that jewelry, and I think that's increasingly true. But the people who will make for that, the artisans, do not speak the same language as the people buying. They're very far away. They're sometimes in sanctioned countries, which is true of many of the places in which we work, of many of the places in which we work. So we form that bridge to connecting people who want to buy with the artisans who they want to connect with.
27:52
Now, before we go further down the story of how you become that bridge and what you're working on now, I wanted to ask you to tell me about the elderly craftsmasters that you brought out of retirement, because I found this a particularly touching story. I wanted to know what did it mean to them to come back and teach again, and how did it resonate with the community around them.
28:22
So essentially, especially in Afghanistan, where you had a period of 30 years of war, if not more, you had the older generation, had these skills and had not passed them down. Other places where we work with Syrian artisans, myanmar artisans, it hasn't skipped a generation, so it's less sort of basically elderly men, but in this case it was, and I think they were probably pretty bemused in the beginning, like what are these crazy foreigners? Why are they asking me to get my tools out? And, by the way, they're not sharp and I don't have them anymore and whatever else.
28:56
I think teachers are teachers and I think that to have students under them, you could see it breathe life into the room, and I also think that the crucial thing to making it work was really about getting the quality back up to where it was historically, because nobody wants to do something. That's okay. It doesn't feel good, and so I think, for those masters. But I think this was very difficult and frustrating for them too, because in the case of Ustad Abdul Hadi, who was our most senior master, he was very old, his hands would shake, he would get very cold, and so trying to put in a support structure around him so that he could teach the methods but not actually have to move the saw back and forth all day long himself. We very early paired a wonderful man named Masood with him, and Masood is still teaching and running this department now because Hadi passed away years ago now after passing on his tradition to hundreds of people.
29:56
So I think it was probably in some parts wonderful and in some parts very difficult to come out of retirement and do a physical job. But I think the most fun moments in relation to them has been when we show around our most grand dignitaries, but Afghan dignitaries. So when you have remember when President Karzai visited, he and then Abdullah Abdullah visited and then President Ghani visited, and when they meet the Astats, the masters, it's just total reverence and they knew who he was and they kissed his hand and you thought the whole thing that was what it was for is that moment when the president comes and defers to these great masters. And I think there's an incredible love of tradition in Afghanistan in many places. But I think the further modern big glass buildings we go, the less we are connected to that.
30:49
But my goodness, that's a good way to describe that. Yeah, yeah, we were talking about embroidery with a friend and how most people would not understand the value and the cost of embroidery because it's just so far from skills and skill sets that we see in my region of the world. Yeah, that we see in my region of the world. Yeah, now, one of the things that I was keen to hear you talk about, because, for anybody else out there who's either working in a similar field and who is supporting a community, I was fascinated by the fact that you ended up building a school and a clinic.
31:29
Yeah, that was a surprise to me too. So we're working with a community day in, day out, and literally every family in Morit Honey has had at least one person employed by us for many years because we needed everyone to work on buildings and nobody's going to school and nobody's going to doctors because they're in the beginnings of service provision. There's all sorts of international funding UNICEF is running schools and the Afghan Ministry of Education is running schools and et cetera. But the school that these children were assigned to was across the river, so there's no way that these little children were going to go there. Their parents weren't going to go there, their parents weren't going to bring them. It wasn't happening. And these are it's incredibly mixed community, because these are all returned refugees and so there's only sort of 15, 20% of the people living there were actually landowners. Everyone else was just staying there, and so it just didn't work. The public service match was not happening, so you just deal with it. And we set up these little little classes on requests. They had asked, community asked for them, but when they worked we lent into them and we made them bigger, and so the clinic. The clinic saw 29,000 patients in the last 12 months, two thirds of whom are women and girls, because it has a maternal child health focus.
32:48
And it was very interesting how much that mattered, particularly when the Taliban took over, because in that day they were not the government in the morning and then they were the government in the afternoon. It was very clear transition. There had obviously been very bloody fighting in the time leading up, but on that day Kabul was taken without a shot fired and everyone was petrified, frozen, petrified. But the next day the Taliban went around, in particular to medical institutions, and said come on, everybody out, let's go, the war's over, we're doing this, come out and serve your people. To the doctors and nurses.
33:30
So we thought in that moment God, if we're going to stay, if we're going to work, we got to open now because you can't say no and then open later, you can't come back. It's not a thing. So the clinic was very much the leading edge of the way that we met the Taliban and the way they saw us and it was in very direct service provision and was just sitting in the middle of the community and the leader of the sort of council of elders, sardar, and our country director Shaqib, like they, went out and talked to the Taliban who were around and said okay, you mean it, should we open Yep? And the very, very brave doctors and nurses came back and it began. So, actually, these sort of community services, which are not naturally a part of cultural heritage, which is what we do, have, I think, been the more difficult moments, have been the most important.
34:24
What a story. Where were you when that happened? Were you in Afghanistan or in In Scotland?
34:29
Nope, basically, almost anyone who could leave left in the week before.
34:33
Yeah, I would imagine Now at which point did you go back to London to study a little bit more?
34:39
Yes, so I was in Afghanistan from 2006 to the end of 2011. And I was exhausted.
34:49
I had spent five years stomping around building sites, a management job like that when you have hundreds of staff members, government that you deal with, you're raising all the money. It was a very intense job still the most intense job I've ever had in my life and probably the most wonderful. Actually, I was essentially the country director, it's just that was our only country. So I finished that sort was essentially the country director, it's just, that was our only country. So I finished that sort of cut the ribbon on finishing those buildings, putting the institute there, handing it over to to be a local Afghan institution with a separate board of trustees, etc. And I was just like, ok, I got to go back to school or something, because I don't want another job. I was genuinely exhausted and so I thought, ok, why don't I get another degree as a way of taking a little bit of a rest? I also didn't want to just leave, because this is what I. I loved it.
35:40
So I handed over to my Afghan deputy and I went halftime and so I decided to get a business degree and I was beginning to see that the next challenge was about getting products to market. That was the thing we hadn't quite figured out yet. So I thought why don't I, rather than getting like a master's of public administration or something which is more to do with the charitable sector, why don't I learn about the stuff side of things? So I certainly wasn't worried about that and I'd been running the accounts and our audits for five years. So I I knew that I liked that side of things, but I knew that I wasn't trained in it. So I went, moved to London, did an MBA at the London business school, which I loved and kept running turquoise mountain halftime over the course of that sort of year and a half.
36:28
I really appreciate that. You went to learn what you didn't know, and that's how you were able to support. But, as you mentioned before, you had a hint that the next problem was going to be developing the markets and getting into the business of things. Now, when did you meet Pippa?
36:45
I met Pippa in 2008.
36:48
Early early.
36:50
As we were beginning to work in jewelry, a wonderful woman named Sophia Swire was helping to get our jewelry school off the ground and she knew that we had to get things to market. So she somehow connected to Pippa Pippa in her way, got on a plane and came to Afghanistan and and designed a collection, brought it to Paris. Paris Fashion Week started selling and the relationship's been like that ever since she's flown. She's come out to Afghanistan about twice a year for 16 years and to a lot of the other places we work Myanmar, the West Bank, jordan and she's so wonderful because and this is, it's true of Guy Oliver as well this is why designers matter so much and design in general matters so much to the future of craft and the future of these traditions and artisan livelihoods.
37:43
Because she comes, she sits with a group of Afghan artisans and they'll push gemstones around on the floor and draw things and she'll have an idea coming in, but it'll get changed A few days later. She gets on a plane and goes home, but she places an order. So she's placed basically two seasonal collections of orders every year in three countries for 16 years and then she brings those things to market and then she buys more and it's an incredible route to market, of course, but it's also a mentoring relationship because she forms particularly relationships with individuals and she also has gone way above and beyond and she runs design classes online. She's brought a group of these young designers pieces actually to her shop in Notting Hill in Westmore.
38:35
Grove. I know they're gorgeous as well. I've seen the pictures.
38:39
So it's an incredible mentoring relationship and I think, particularly for artisans who are isolated by conflict right now, that is a lot more than it's almost everything, because picture for any of us if we were struggling to leave our house or our community for various reasons. To be able to have a professional interaction and for that to lead to an income for your family, but also to be able to stretch your mind and be challenged and have an equal conversation within a profession is priceless if you're really just sitting at home.
39:16
Yeah, I've seen pictures, many pictures, of Pippa. I haven't traveled with her, but I've seen many pictures of her sitting somewhere pushing stones around, so that feels like a familiar sight. But I also want to stress to our listeners and I will make sure to add as many links as we can relevant links and exciting links, so that any of you who want to see images of the jewelry we're talking about that you'll be able to discover it. I want to say in particular that Autumn, winter 24, is spectacular. It's really beautiful and I saw it in Paris during fashion week in March and it is so good.
39:54
So she's going to crash. She's an unbelievable.
39:57
As you said, it's also the connection. I think that connections mature and designs evolve and also I feel like, for this particular collection, it feels like they're also in the tight guys. They're there, the pieces fit in where we are, which is really exciting, definitely. So you expanded from Afghanistan to Myanmar and Jordan, to the Levant and Saudi Arabia, and I wanted you to tell me how did that happen, because that's a whole bunch of countries. How many of you are working on this project, by the way?
40:26
So we have about 500 staff members and we will work with about our sort of our people. Our community is about 8,000 artisans this year across all those countries. How we did it was again I'm going to say it serendipitous, which is that what happens is it, and I've been asked to look at, or I've had people ask if I would come and work in lots of different countries. So this is the group that we said yes to, which is a combination of a sort of need, which is that you.
40:58
In the case of Myanmar, I visited there in 2013,. Really as a visit, actually, my husband was speaking at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival, and it was the moment when Myanmar was really opening up and there were these incredible historic buildings and craft traditions weaving lacquerware and I thought, oh, this looks familiar and that also has to match with somebody who's willing to pay for it. So you need to find a donor who's willing to seed fund it and you feel like you can get it off the ground in Myanmar. And then next was Saudi Arabia, and then Jordan, where we work with Syrians, jordanians and Palestinians, but more recently setting up in the West Bank, in our home in Bethlehem.
41:38
How has that been going?
41:40
Impossible to say really, it's not a, it's nothing okay about the situation in any way.
41:47
really, but Bipa managed to launch the first collection with you in Turquoise Mountain this summer.
41:53
Yep, absolutely. There's an incredible jewelry tradition around Bethlehem where you mold gold or silver onto olive leaves. There are a number of artists and families who do it Nadia, abogatas, the Katans, tawfiq and Samar, his son and when you mold the gold onto the leaf disappears so it can only be used once. So, by definition, every leaf is totally unique. So you're taking a little piece of Bethlehem with you, and so I think Pippa is hoping to just bring people's attention to that wonderful Bethlehem tradition, that wonderful Palestinian tradition. Get it out into the world.
42:38
It's beautiful and it's incredibly romantic. Obviously also olive tree right.
42:44
Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and I think so many artisans are so connected to the natural world around them. I think that's obviously a very natural thing. But the olive tree and the olive leaves are very important, and I lived in Jordan for two years, until last summer, so it was always surrounded by olive trees and it's an incredibly important part of food, and everyone's got their own olive tree, even if it's one or two trees. They bottle their own olive oil and it's the most pure olive oil you've ever had in your life, which you can't even buy in Britain or America. But you go over to their house and you get a bottle of their olive oil and it's the most amazing thing you've ever had.
43:23
That's gorgeous. I've not had the chance to go, but I would like to Do, and I actually have a good friend who is a jeweler based in Jordan. She's currently in Shanghai, but she has an atelier in Jordan.
43:37
Jordan is the most wonderful country and was a great home to our family and our kids. It's an unbelievably friendly it's a sort of silly word, except that it is. You feel safe walking around, and Jordanian society loves children, so there there's no problem with kids being in restaurants and everything else. And in the middle of such an incredibly interesting, wonderful region, jordan plays home in a very gracious way to so many people, to Syriansrians, to Palestinians, to Iraqis, egyptians, jordanians and a lot of people are intermarried. And so you have Salma, who's our lead design and production director, who was responsible for all the woodwork that you see in the Conalt. She is Jordanian but her grandmother is Syrian, and if she were talking about the traditions that she's representing, she speaks very beautifully about all of these roots and how these are interconnected traditions.
44:43
This is all of this is us together, and it's not a sort of blanket everything's the same and we're all the same. It everything's the same and we're all the same. It's more a sort of embracing of the connections and the nuance, and that you can have a Syrian woodwork tradition which is very Damascene. You can tell it's from Damascus and it's not that anyone in southern Jordan would say that it was made there, but there is a sense that this is. I am part of Bilad-isham, greater Syria. But then you have embroidery tritons, which are done across the Levant, but you have very particular stitches. You can tell we're doing a beautiful embroidery project project piece in Bethlehem. Right now Our designer, george, is putting it together with five different weavers from five different Palestinian cities, with very particular stitches that represent that place and the way that they relate to each other. So the sort of nuance, the interconnectedness, the communal love of these things, while recognizing the differences and the nuances, is really the vibe of certainly what Selma and our team in Jordan are putting out.
45:51
That sounds absolutely beautiful. But, as you're talking, there's one thing that I was wondering, and I remember having this question not very well formulated at the back of my mind. But from one country to another, let's say, the craft tradition is not all female or male. It's very specific to ceramics somewhere and jewelry somewhere else. Is there anything that you want to enlighten us about that, any particular areas? Because I feel like there was one country you told us about amazing ceramics, but I think the women were painting. I can't remember.
46:25
Yeah. So if you look at Afghan ceramics, they do pottery and they do tiles. So if we look at pottery, it's focused on one village about an hour north of Kabul called Isdalif, and they do this incredible turquoise glaze, which is a traditional glaze made from a plant in the mountains which is processed lots of different grinding, baking, grinding baking, again mixed with quartz, et cetera, and copper oxide to get the blue-green spectrum. In that tradition, which is still very much carried out in Istalif, there are a number of families who do it. The kids have been on the kick wheel since they could walk. There's a very clear delineation of responsibilities the men gather the clay, throw the pots and glaze them, and the women decorate them with all the designs. And that's just how it's always been and we don't have to do things the way things have always been. But it's all right. Also, in that case, we do.
47:21
You've got other examples, where I was in Jordan about a month ago and there's a wonderful new generation of students graduating from the woodwork training program in particular, and there's a woman named Farida who has only been doing this for six months and seems to be making near masterwork. I still don't understand it, but you have Jordanian, syrian and Palestinian women coming into what has traditionally been seen as a man's craft wood. You need to be strong, you need to push these lathes along. I obviously say that ironically, because I'm a six foot tall, very athletic person who has no problem pushing a lathe across wood. But I think women are finding that is that woodwork works for them very well, and so you have a number of women coming into that tradition in Jordan, which is fun.
48:13
That's very cool. I can't wait to see what she does Now. I wanted to pull back and come back to a talk that you gave seven years ago and I think it was at your alma mater, london Business School, yes when you talked about the international community and how they look down on the work of the artisans that are trained and supported and championed by Turquoise Mountain, and I remember I picked up this quote because it really resonated with me. You said, on a good day they call this work with artisans creative industries, but most of the time they call it basket weaving, and this is, let's say, a bias that the international development community has on crafts and artisan.
49:06
Has this moved on a bit? Can we do anything to help? Yes, I think it has moved on a bit and I think, first of all I think that my feeling about the way that the international development community looks at the countries in which it works and these traditions still stands. But I don't think it's a personal thing. Nearly everyone I've ever met who works for large government development agencies or implementing partners. They themselves are not particularly condescending about the communities they work with, but the structure of the whole thing is, yeah, this place is poor, underdeveloped. We got to fix it. That is the reason you're spending money in the country and it's just a sort of natural part of that. That doesn't feel great, but I don't think that comes from the individual so much. But I think the experience over time from those development projects working with artisans has typically been kind of basket weaving-ish, and I'm using that as a placeholder for something which is nice and you might buy it because you like the story, but then you don't know what to do with it when you get home.
50:08
Absolutely.
50:09
It's a combination of it not being high enough quality and also not having any interaction with the design tradition of the place where it's being sold. Yeah. Because you can actually make you and I probably have a basket that we've spent money on.
50:24
I can tell you I absolutely do yeah.
50:26
Exactly. I also have right. But it may be that the particular place that you're in and the season that you're buying it, we're in cool tones and we're not using handles and it's a sort of big, chunky, floppy thing that you put next to your desk. The basket weaver can actually make that. But that final step of that design element being put into it and quality control and making it at a price that will work for the person who's selling it to us is fundamental. So I digress on that for a reason, which is that most people don't take the final step because it's very hard.
51:02
So most development projects working with artisans is about just working with them there to develop better products and put them online and sell them in local trade fairs or possibly warehouse them somewhere and have them shipping out of New York or out of London or out of wherever. The problem with that is twofold and we have taken the step to move beyond that, but it is not easy. We spent 10 years trying to build something that does actually connect artisans to a larger market. So the problems are twofold with and why I think typically these things are looked down on because they basically don't work very well If you don't go the extra step. It doesn't work because there's no sustainability in their incomes. They're not connected to a real market. So the first problem is a customer problem, which is that I don't know if you've ever tried to set up an e-commerce site.
51:58
Yeah, I've worked with people who do that.
52:00
Yeah. So it's really hard to find customers because nobody's browsing. In that way, nobody's going to find you. You have to actively go out and find them. And also, by the way, who is your customer? Is it in Geneva, is it in London, is it in Dubai? And what are we selling? We're selling jewelry.
52:18
Okay, if we're selling jewelry, the design and the price point that you would need to put on that site in Dubai is fundamentally different, different than in Geneva. So that requires that the person running the craft project learns about the jewelry trends in Geneva and or Dubai, which is not going to happen. So that's the first issue is customers. We've learned that you have to work with people who already have customers and know who they are. So Pippa knows exactly what her price point needs to be and she knows exactly who her customers are, and she's doing Lotus flowers this season. So she's going to come to Myanmar and she's going to talk about Lotus flowers and they're going to work together to figure out what that looks like, but she knows where she's headed.
53:05
So the first thing is customers. The second thing is design. You cannot design. It's related to the first point. You can't design in a box, and so when people are just trying to make something, trying to design and market products that are based on the traditional stuff they see in front of them. They're designing based on what they would like. It's not in any relation to who the customer is.
53:28
That's why I think the development industry has not typically found success, because they're not looking for the preservation of cultural heritage. That's a very niche bit of the international community's interaction with other countries is supporting cultural heritage. There are some amazing organizations that do it ALIF, the Alliance for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Conflict, the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund, the American Embassy's Ambassadors Fund, the Goethe Institute. There are a lot of different, but they're quite small in relation to the large development budgets. But I think that what they're actually looking for is jobs, and you cannot successfully create jobs for artisans unless you connect them to the international market, and that takes a really big extra step of being serious about how you product development, sample design and connect to market.
54:21
Yeah, when you speak about this, it makes me feel obviously I can see why Pippa is such a perfect fit for you, because I remember, as I got to know her and started working with her, I asked her several times about her early beginnings and what happened, and she noticed the same thing. She was like, oh, people were like, can you please sell my basket in London? Sort of thing. And she was in Southeast Asia and she thought I'd love to help you, but I can't sell that. And hence the development of the design and the creation of a platform and the relationship with artisans.
54:55
She was an anthropologist. She came to design. I had forgotten that she came to design for exactly that reason.
55:02
Exactly. She came to design exactly for the same reason. It's interesting the work that you've done. There's so much that has been accomplished since the beginning of the project with Turquoise Mountain and under your leadership and the guardianage of now King Charles. What is the next steps? What is the next challenge that you're trying to solve? This challenge?
55:25
I'm looking for another job. I think that you know it's been a very tough four or five years for our community. What I mean by that is it began with COVID, which was disproportionately terrible for people without a social safety net. Then the Burmese military took over in a coup in Myanmar. Then the Taliban took over in.
55:49
Afghanistan and now the war in the Middle East. Taliban took over in Afghanistan and now the war in the Middle East. You figure out really quickly whether what you do works or matters to anybody, because if it doesn't, in that kind of situation nobody's going to do it. It just stopped, nobody cares, and what we found out was that it not only still worked, but it seemed to matter more to people. And the only thing that I can observe is that when everything goes wrong, when security disappears, when your sense of the future disappears, when public services stop working, you need to be able to feed your family.
56:24
So the economic bit of what we do has to work. We have to be able to sell. Pippa's got to keep selling jewelry, guy's got to keep finding hotels. Who will buy a suite from us? Right?
56:35
But it isn't just about money. There is something special about making. It is the therapy of using your hands and the mindfulness of that. It is connecting to your heritage, to your inheritance, passing it on to the next generation and, I think, the pride and community that goes with that. Possibly it's about bringing something beautiful into the world where there is so much ugliness around you. So it is amazing. So I feel like at this moment, as we sort of as an organization really settled out in the midst of basically three crises an organization really settled out in the midst of basically three crises my challenge now is to stay. That's what we found, is we don't leave and I am recommitting myself to the communities that we work with, because this is a very difficult moment. So I think, if we're here five years from now, and hopefully things have gotten better in those three places, that I'm not looking for another place.
57:38
That's a good point. Yes, yes, yes. I hope that this comes to be that you're still here in five years and things have settled down and that things in life is easier and that war has hopefully disappeared from each of these beautiful countries.
57:55
The thing is, I don't think it will. Of course, I have hope and I have to believe that it will. But in five years, who the heck knows? And I think the thing that I've learned about ourselves is that this is what we do, this is our community, these are our places and we're going to stay come what may community.
58:17
These are our places and we're going to stay come what may.
58:23
I think it speaks to the relationships that you, your teams, have developed with everybody on the ground.
58:25
I can't imagine what it's like, although I can a little bit, because, having worked with Pippa's team really up close and having supported them on a couple of fundraisers for Turquoise Mountain and Afghan Made Jewelry, I also got to know that everyone in their team just loves the people they work with and they're actually on WhatsApp together and I think the sweet thing is it brought it home for me. I felt like I was a part of the team because I know the guy's name right, yeah, and so for anyone listening who's wondering about the impact and the opportunity, I think that there's really a possibility for us as a consumer, to seek out designers, hotels, environments where our values are represented, when we feel that sense of resonance and that somehow, even though you may not end up knowing the person who's made the jewelry or the beautiful lacquer tray or any other piece that you can purchase through Turquoise Mountain, that there is a connection actually between us, and I think that's really super precious.
59:32
I think it is super precious and I think the thing that I've realized about over the last four years is the sort of superpower that is cultural heritage, that when things get really bad, it has an amazing ability to transform people's lives. But not just that also to connect us all, as you say, because it connects us as equals. We just have curiosity and interest in the piece and the person who made it. And my hope is that if somebody buys a piece of Afghan jewelry and they've heard the story of those stones and perhaps even the name of the person who made it, those stones and perhaps even the name of the person who made it, that the next time they think about Afghanistan they'll picture like a color or a name or a metal will pop up in their mind alongside all the things that they're reading in the news. But you form a different relationship with a place through a personal connection to a person and a tradition.
01:00:28
Absolutely. Before we go to my closing questions, I wanted to ask you if there's anything that you want to add, anything that we haven't covered that you would like to pass on to our listeners.
01:00:40
Thank you, no, I think that's wonderful.
01:00:43
Okay, great. So, as you may remember, the podcast is at the crossroads between business and mindfulness, and I use that word to represent something, let's say, wider. I don't want to just talk about business. I'd like to talk about who we are as people and the difficulties that we go through, whether it's personal or professional, and everything that may be in the middle. And I like to talk about life beyond business and living with intention. And I like to talk about life beyond business and living with intention, and so this frames why I asked my guest to share how they stay grounded, present or what practices help them day to live their best lives, and that can be literally anything and everything that works for you.
01:01:33
So could you share what keeps you mindful, grounded or any of the above Sure, when it manages to work? Yes, I think exercise is a huge part of my life. I've always loved it and I do various forms of it in various hotel rooms or whatever. I have recently found stretching, which I absolutely adore, and I use the Peloton app and this unbelievable stretching guru named Hannah Corbin and I will just put on like a 10, 20 minute session and just sit there and stretch and I find it's mindful is the only word for it. I absolutely adore it.
01:02:07
That's incredible. That's absolutely gorgeous. Have you ever tried meditation? Because I think I remember you telling me that your husband is a devoted insight meditator.
01:02:16
Yes, I struggle to meditate. I should try more. It feels like such a lift to me to get into that quiet space, and it's less of a lift to me when you're feeling too buzzy and anxious, which I do feel often. The idea that I have to do something that's really hard for me is confusing and I just haven't done it enough to be good at it, I suppose, to feel comfortable with it. Whereas Rory is. He does 10-day silent meditation retreats and really finds solace in it. And we're the opposite. In exercise he doesn't. He would. It would feel like to go for a run. He loves it when he's doing it, but it takes a while to get up for it. I, with exercise and with stretching, I can see relief instantly. So I just do it. So I think meditation could work. It's just not something I've found for myself. May I find it someday.
01:03:13
May you. But you know what I studied with a. I just had a guest lecturer in one of the programs I followed with a Buddhist nun called Annie Pema, and she had a really lovely joke. She said you know, it's really hard to meditate off the street, Like I don't think anyone's supposed to come out of their work and just sit and like drop into a deep meditation, Want to go through a practice that is going to go through the body first. That's why yoga was invented in the first place. I really admire people who don't need movement before they settle down.
01:03:43
Yes.
01:03:47
So here are some of my favorite questions, which I ask all of my guests. I know some of them are a little bit difficult. Take your time to answer. So the first one is what is your favorite word, and by that a word that you could tattoo on yourself theoretically or live with for a while?
01:04:07
I don't know, I struggle with this one. If it's something that I wish the world had a little more of, I think it would be humility, but I'm not sure that's something that I need to hear. I think I probably need to hear something more like light or fun, because I have lots of fun, but generally I think I'm moving around too much and doing too much and I would probably like to lighten the load a little bit what does connection mean to you?
01:04:47
I think that connection happens between people when there's a sense of mutual trust and vulnerability, that you feel like you can say something honest whether that's positive or negative or whatever to the other person, that they could do the same to you. And I think only when that's tested do you have a real connection. I don't think you get a real connection over having a fun coffee and talking about the jumpers that you just bought.
01:05:16
Thank you. Now that one is technically supposed to be the hardest, what song best represents you?
01:05:29
I have no idea. I love music. I love music so much I'm not sure I've ever felt like a song represented me particularly. I've been loving listening to Taylor Swift. I'm a new Swifty, oh that's so great. My children like it too.
01:05:46
Perhaps think of one particular song of Taylor's that you love.
01:05:51
Shake it Off maybe.
01:05:53
Nice one. Now what's the sweetest thing that's ever happened to you?
01:06:03
I think that I don't know if it's the sweetest, but it's what I thought of when we had our first son, sasha. I have children very quickly there's a name for it, I can't remember what it is, but they come out very quickly. It's a good problem to have. So he was born in our house on the bathroom floor before the ambulance even managed to get there because the whole thing accelerated very quickly. But my husband helping me through that was the most wonderful experience because we met working together. So we have a gear. We've worked together through so many difficult situations, so it's not unfamiliar.
01:06:46
But we just clicked into it and he just took control of the situation, called 999. They told him to tell me to get on the floor and then he and I felt total and everyone always asks me wasn't I terrified? I wasn't at all, because I knew he had it completely and I was just going to do the thing that I was there to do, which was the hard thing, which is obviously to push the baby out. But all of the other atmospherics was there something dangerous happening around me? Was I in the right position? Is the baby going to fall into a dirty floor or whatever? Like all that other stuff was taken care of completely. I had total trust that it was going to happen, but it's a it's an irreplaceable moment when you have. I had total trust in him and it was just. It was the two and then the three of us. His first moment on earth and it was. That was the sweetest thing I think anyone's ever done for me.
01:07:33
That's beautiful, and imagine that for Sasha to have his dad there as well as his mom.
01:07:40
Don't think he noticed.
01:07:44
That's okay, the pictures will show him later. Absolutely Now. What is a secret superpower that you have? And by that I'd like you to tell us about something or a skill that you haven't told me about already.
01:07:56
What's the secret superpower? I have a very good memory, so Rory calls it my spidey sense, and so he'll be like where did I leave my AirPods? And I'll be like they're on the right side of your bureau because I will have seen them in passing and took a little mental snapshot. I don't have a photographic memory at all, but I just have a memory for where we forgot stuff, though I can really tell when I'm under pressure and not settled because the spidey sense turns off, I leave my stuff behind. I can't find any of it, but we know that I'm back in the zone when I can tell where everyone left their stuff.
01:08:41
That's amazing.
01:08:42
That sounds like a true superpower yeah it's a superpower and I feel a little rush of oh yeah, still got it.
01:08:51
What's a favorite book that you can share with us?
01:08:56
The Hobbit? Oh yay, I love the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
01:09:00
Oh wonderful, no one's said those yet.
01:09:02
Actually, I don't know why I said that Harry Potter. Either they're in competition. No, sorry, philip Pullman, his Dark Materials. You can see the theme here. Oh, I love Children's fantasy, children's fantasy, children's fantasy. Sorry, we're going with His Dark Materials.
01:09:19
We're going with His Dark Materials. I respect that choice.
01:09:23
In fact, our younger son I often call Pantalaimon, who is the demon of the main character Lyra and His Dark Materials.
01:09:35
How old is your son? He's now seven. Okay, that's hilarious. What is? Let's see where you go with this one. Where is somewhere you visited that you feel really had an impact on who you are today? Afghanistan?
01:09:47
It's so obvious, but my life has been completely changed by that country. I and I feel, I feel a deep sense. It's not my country, so it's a silly thing to say, but I feel a deep sense of like genuine gratitude to the place because I found myself there. I found any superpowers that I have I found there. I found that I could do so much more than I ever thought and the people I worked with were fun and willing to teach and patient and willing to let me tell them what to do. It was just an amazing. The spirit of that place has always captivated me and has really become my entire professional life and obviously much more.
01:10:39
That's gorgeous. So this brings us to my last and favorite question.
01:10:45
What brings you happiness? My family. I do love them very much. My kids and my husband are a great source of joy for me. Yeah. Lots of other little things too. Yeah, exercise food, I love food and I love my work. I absolutely love my work. It's also a lot of stress, so I think it's more complicated, but pure happiness my kids and husband, I think.
01:11:09
That's wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm so excited that we had this conversation today. When I had the pleasure to sit with Bipa's PR and start working on the event that we put together last year in November, and I found out more about your story and I listened to a couple of podcast interviews with you, I was very motivated to be someone else who can put more of your story and the story of Turquoise Mountain and the work you do out in the world. If people are interested in getting in touch, if they want to follow your work, what is the best way?
01:11:42
Thank you. Thank you for having me on and for wanting to help bring the story of these artisans out into the world. I really appreciate it. If you want to be in touch, definitely on the website you'll see contact them. But also, I think a good way to get to know us is Instagram, turquoise Mountain, and you'll see pictures from all these places and then you can get in touch with us from there. There's a where to buy button on the main website. We don't sell directly for all the reasons I said before, but you can find our stock as people who hold what we make.
01:12:12
That's perfect. Thank you so much, and so I will add as many links as possible. I will probably hit you up for a couple of other lengths of things that I may not know where to find. I'm very grateful for your time and I hope that we'll have a chance to see each other in the future. Shoshana, thank you so much. Thank you, bye. Thank you, bye on Instagram Anne V Muhlethaler on LinkedIn. If you don't know how to spell it, the link is in the notes.
01:12:59
Out of the clouds, where I also share daily musings about mindfulness. You can find all of the episodes of the podcast and much more on the website outoftheclouds.com. If you'd like to find out more from me, I invite you also to subscribe to the Metta View, my weekly newsletter, where I explore coaching, brand development, conscious communication and the future of work. That's the Metta View with two Ts themettaview.com. So that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to Out of the Clouds. I hope that you will join me again next time. Until then, be well, be safe and take care.