Ryan Oftebro and I recorded this episode a little over a month ago - I’d wanted to interview Ryan over a year ago about this topic because Ryan is Principal and CEO of Kelly-Ross Pharmacy group here in Seattle. Kelly-Ross remains one of the few independently owned pharmacies in our area and Ryan, as the incoming president of the WA State Pharmacy association, has some unique visibility into the number of opioid prescription and overdose in our state. I knew generally that Ryan had lobbied in Olympia to fight Opioid addiction, and that he was somewhat of an expert, so he became my guru in my quest for education.

In this episode, I’m going to cover a topic that I find extremely uncomfortable, especially as a mother of a young daughter. This week’s subject is human trafficking. This topic is so layered, with so many different faces, and I wanted to tackle it because as parents and just as humans, we cannot continue looking the other way when we drive down the street and see this happening. We have to educate ourselves and our kids and we have to do it now. We have to shine some light on what’s happening in broad daylight right in front of us.

My guest, Ellen Kuwana, started We Got This Seattle.org herself on March 13th. It was a bit accidental as her initial intent was just to gather some funds so she could donate a meal to the lab technicians and scientists at the UW Virology lab. Ellen’s background is in labs - she’ll tell you about it - but she wanted to do something simple to show gratitude to the people who were on the frontlines of the pandemic working around the clock to process the first Covid-19 tests. And as most genuine things do, her effort snowballed. Fast forward 6 months, Ellen has single-handedly raised over $75,000 and fed over 18,000 frontline healthcare workers mainly with the help of her daughter’s friends who are home from college.

Listen to Dan Felton from Assorted Goods and I grow a conscience while discussing all things Amazon.

Larkin Temme is the young principal of Holy Family Bilingual School in Whitecenter - just 10 miles south of Seattle.  We are separated by a short stretch of I-5, and a long stretch of socioeconomic circumstances.  The students at Holy Family are diverse, bilingual, and from backgrounds very different than the kids in NE Seattle.  I wanted to Ms. Temme educate me about how she’s pivoted her community to digital learning with no full-time Technology staff, how that was possible knowing that so many families don’t have basic internet access, and whether or not she’s concerned about this achievement gap created by internet based learning.  Spoiler alert - she is. 

I wanted to circle back with Dr. Drake after a couple of months to get her pulse check on Covid-19 and where we’ve arrived after two months sheltering in place. The week after our last interview, She co authored an op-ed that was published on the Hill.com.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/491693-now-is-the-time-for-a-national-public-health-reserve

The two epidemiologists outlined what I thought was a really smart plan to create a reserve army of Public Health care workers to begin contact tracing efforts and I wanted to know how the article landed.

I’m struggling to understand a lot of things as I know we all are, and as it turns out, so is Dr. Drake. Testing, going back to school, summer - all these things remain murky. So much is murky. I find myself wanting to talk to the person with the answers only to continue to realize there isn’t that person. They don’t exist.

I talk with Dr. Drake about my extreme level of confusion and how conflicted I feel about what’s happening. I know I’m not alone. Dr. Drake and I talk about fatigue - Zoom fatigue, home fatigue, all of it and this interview turns more personal. The bottom line is that we miss each other. We miss our life. This is difficult. But I always enjoy Dr. Drakes practical take on how to handle continued social distancing - I find her empowering and her advice is practical. I hope you take something away from our conversation.