Billie Madha and her mother left Myanmar (then Burma) in 1976, when Billie was 15. They thought they’d never see their family again. And it was a big family. Billie’s mother was one of 18 children.
More than 20 years later, on her first sabbatical with Arrow Electronics, Billie got to take her mother back to their home country. Many of her mother’s siblings and their spouses and children were waiting at the airport. It was a family reunion on a grand scale.
Billie describes this sabbatical as a “much needed event in my life.” She’d recently been through a divorce, the death of her father, and a big wake-up call on her health – cancer. She’d kept a 60-hour pace at Arrow for too long.
Sabbaticals – Billie’s been on two now – have been a respite and a light for Billie. She saved for a long time to make sure the first one – taking her mother back to Burma – could happen. And the day she returned from that first sabbatical, she started saving for her second (a long sojourn in Italy and then nesting at her home in LA), which would occur seven years later.
In return for its sabbatical offering, Arrow gets in Billie an uncommon level of dedication. “I’ve had opportunities to go work somewhere else with more money,” she says. “At the end of the day, when you slice and dice everything, there’s no other place that will give you this opportunity. It makes you want to stay.”
One week after the devastating cyclone hit Myanmar on May 2, Billie still had no information about the safety and whereabouts of her family there. In an email she sent to friends, she wrote: “My family and I have been glued to CNN getting little updates and trying to comfort each other.”
For those of you with upcoming sabbaticals who are interested in volunteering for relief efforts, making a direct impact is difficult because of the Myanmar government’s controls. Check out this blog dedicated to the country’s cyclone relief. Here’s a blog with a list of relief agencies that working on the cause. And CARE also has good information.
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