14 May 2009
by Craig Clark, Clyde Space CEO
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference at the Gleneagles Hotel, which is a fantastic hotel here in Scotland. I had the privilege that evening of staying at the hotel and enjoying a little bit of a break from the office. It was a business conference and there was a fair bit of networking involved with some very successful and inspiring business people from all across Scotland.
The following morning, I got up, had breakfast, then left to head back to Glasgow to go to work, walking past the Aston Martins, Ferraris and Bentleys to get to my car in the car park. Before I headed in to work, I had to pick up a prescription for my hayfever from my doctor's surgery. I live on the edge of an area of Glasgow that has some serious social problems, and my local health centre is in the middle of that area.
After handing in my prescription to the pharmacy in the doctor's surgery, I sat and waited for it to be ready. In the meantime, a boy of about 18-20 years of age walked in with his prescription; there was hardly anything of him. His clothes were hanging on him, he had no colour to his face; he was like a walking skeleton. At the pharmacy desk, the pharmacist said that he'd need to wait for his prescription for about half an hour, but that his friend would need to come back later. At this point, I noticed that another poor soul was sitting at the back of the waiting room. The two boys are undoubtedly severe heroin addicts, here for their methadone prescription. I had never seen anything like it before. Everyone has seen a drug addict, but these boys were so young and so far gone that it was such a tragic sight. For me, having just come from one extreme of life in Scotland straight into the other extreme, I found it heartbreaking. What a waste of life. What drove these boys to drugs? Was there anything that could have been done to prevent it? Is there anything I could do to prevent it happening to others?
I was talking to a business woman at the conference who has specifically set up businesses in deprived areas in the UK in order to generate jobs there. She told me that she had recently read that 1 in 10 teenagers think that life is meaningless (article in Metro). If you are reading this, then you are probably fairly educated, perhaps an engineer, or something similar. I wonder if we, as people who have had more opportunities in our lives to understand where we fit in and to make a contribution to the world we live in, were to spare some of our time to go into schools to talk about what we do, would it help our young people to understand the world a bit more? Even if one young person had their perceptions changed, I think that would be worth it.
I hope that this hasn't sounded all righteous, but I was truly shocked by what I saw. This year I am going to try to visit one school per month. If we all did the same, I wonder how much of a difference we could make ...
Craig that is a great idea who knows how many people you could inspire,i hope it is a big success good luck