It is with much love and deep gratitude that we get ready to send off our dear friend and volunteer, Melissa Fischer, as she and her husband, Tom, move to Mexico for the next chapter of their lives. Melissa has been a steady presence in the office 3 days a week for the last 10 years. Her commitment is a vital part of ensuring that Gangaji's work can be made available to future generations, and she leaves behind a legacy of love for the next team of volunteers to build upon: 800+ meetings with Gangaji converted from old tape to Blu-Ray Disc.
Back in 2016, Melissa had retired from a career in bio-tech, working in a lab as a cell biologist. She and her husband, Tom, had settled in Oregon, and he supported her in offering herself as a volunteer for a completely new kind of work. She had no video editing experience, but she was detail-oriented, used to working on computers, and ready to learn.
The job: the daunting task of digitizing thousands of hours of meetings with Gangaji recorded on obsolete, old-format tape, stretching back to the early 1990s. The plus side for Melissa: she got to watch every Satsang in real time as she did it.
The training: Under the very excellent tutelage of Tom Hoffman, our AV manager, Melissa became an expert in using meticulously maintained old-format tape players, from Hi-8 machines to DVCam players to VHS and Cassette tape players. Primarily focusing on the Hi8 tapes (the oldest and most likely to be lost to time), each tape was captured, transcoded, and converted to a modern format, then archived to a Blu-Ray disc. While many of the old tapes were transcoded without drama, Melissa learned how to spot and solve some of the typical issues that occur with deterioration over time, like fixing "oxide shedding," which looks like a snowstorm, or splicing together two parts of a recording where something has been damaged.
The results: There are now 800+ Blu-ray discs of digitized meetings from old tape. That is approximately 1200 hours of Meetings with Gangaji recorded between 1992 and 2001 on Hi-8 that have been saved for posterity by Melissa in real time. This represents almost every recording from that era (and approximately half of all meetings that still only existed on old tape formats).
Along the way, we've installed purpose-built shelves and draws to house the tapes and discs, and every meeting transcoded and digitized is also copied to a backup disc in a separate location.
Clip curation: As Melissa watched in real-time, she also had the pleasure of identifying hundreds of clips that she judged especially good, and many of those are in the With Gangaji Media Library.
The future: As we contemplate the future, and are finding ways to use new tools that we had no thought of even ten years ago, one thing seems likely: there will always be an appetite among certain spiritual seekers to find Gangaji and devour everything she ever wrote or said. When none of us are here and Gangaji is long gone, we want to be sure we leave behind a true, searchable archive of her work. The transcoded tapes are vital to this process, and they can now be easily uploaded to a server by another team of volunteers yet to be discovered. In other words, this work that Melissa has dedicated herself to is the essential building block for a future generation to find true fulfillment through Gangaji's teaching.
What the future holds for Melissa is another story. She and her husband, Tom, are both retired now, and they've put their lovely house in rural Oregon on the market. Their next step is a move to the Todo Santos area of Mexico to be close to their two grandsons. We wish them amazing luck with this and send them on their way with deep love and appreciation.
—Barb, Cat, Harriet, Tom, Zubin, and Gangaji
