Gabriele Conrad - Supporter of People
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NAME: Gabriele Conrad
AGE: 63 LOCATION: Goonellabah, NSW, Australia Community Sector worker and editor To start with a summary: I live an amazing life, live in a great place, have awesome work, both as an employee and being self-employed, and I get to travel each year attending Universal Medicine events, either in Vietnam or the UK, or both.
Of the good things in my childhood I remember most, was an absolute certainty and knowingness that everything is as it should be and that what shouldn’t be or didn’t fit in would work itself out eventually because, hey – who can resist the beauty and absolute order that we are surrounded by and bathed in, every minute of everyday . . . a place I knew as a child. A lot of things were jarring and incongruent, but I had this overall feeling that this is not who and what we really are, and that people were innately decent and great and some just needed a wake-up call and be reminded of the fact.
I was very academic and got two scholarships quite early, one in high school and one at university. And thus I went to live in the USA and in France to attend school and later university. I threw myself into life, held down an array of jobs from kitchen hand to teaching adults and school kids and travelled whenever I could. My early schooling was in Germany and I then lived for extensive periods in the US, France, Japan and the UK and visited many other countries on the way. I traversed what was then the Soviet Union by train, did the same in Canada from Toronto to Vancouver, stayed on a remote island in the Philippines, ate potentially poisonous fugu (a top ten dangerous food according to Time Magazine) in a country inn on Kyushu island, stayed in lavish hotels in Paris, flew to Milan for the afternoon to safely deliver documents. I attended many sales conferences all over Europe translating from Japanese English to either French and German or supported the ease of sales talks between Japanese English on one side and Italian and French English on the other
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Gabriele Conrad
I have always had a love of languages and my school essays used to be read out amongst the teachers during recess. We learnt Latin, English and French and before my HSC I also took on Russian as an elective and tried my hand at Hindi in evening classes. I didn’t sustain the latter very long, displaying an early tendency towards enthusiasm and possibly taking on too much? Studying French or English at university felt like too boring a thing to do after school so I enrolled in Slavonic Studies and Social Sciences and tried to come to grips with Russian, Polish, Old Church Slavonic and Romanian of all things, on top of a full curriculum for social sciences. I also worked part-time right through university, not wanting to be dependent on either my parents or government handouts.
And that is one of the main reasons I love working so much: it gets me out from behind my desk and I end up in the most interesting and, because of the nature of my work, at times challenging situations. And every situation is a gem and great opportunity to learn more about myself and humanity at large, about what makes us tick. And I absolutely love writing about things that matter to me – articles and blogs about love and truth and about the way forward in the new era.
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