milk on the table

Hey people,

Last time I wrote I was about to enter a wind technician training school in Vancouver, WA (US not Canada, contrary to what I originally thought). The six-month $11,000 school laid a solid foundation of electrical, mechanical, hydraulic and programmable control systems and a brief overview of how wind turbines work. In case you’re interested, as I was, how wind turbines turn wind into electricity I’ll explain:

The wind blows and spins the rotor of these 300’ tall turbines. In popular designs, the rotor has three blades. The blades range between 90-180’ in length. Each. They are big. The spinning rotor is attached to a low speed shaft. This shaft enters a gearbox inside the nacelle. (The nacelle is the big box that rests on top of the tubular shaft.) The gearbox transforms each rotation of the low speed shaft into 70-80 revolutions of a high-speed shaft. This high-speed shaft plugs into a generator. Inside the generator, the rotating shaft has a set of magnets on the end. These magnets on the rotor (called rotor for “rotating piece”), rotate a few thousandths of an inch from a stationary set of magnets (called a stator for “stationary piece”). This movement causes flux. Flux is the movement of free electrons that jump from the rotating magnet to the stationary magnet. This is electricity – the movement of free electrons. Copper wires are wrapped around the stationary magnets. These wires garner and transmit the electricity 300 feet down to the ground. At ground level, the electricity is converted into a usable current in a transformer. The usable current is sent into the electrical grid.

Wind to shaft to magnets to electricity. Power generation is all about harnessing and transferring energy. In the case of wind, turbines transform the natural movement of air into our power grids. Pretty cool stuff. So that’s basically what I learned at school.

There were 21 guys in my class. Ages ranged from 18-52. Some guys were laid off from their last job, some wanted to try something new, and some, like myself, still hadn’t chosen a career. They were machinists, excavators, electricians, HVAC journeymen, nuclear technicians, butchers, construction managers, truck drivers, teachers, car washers to name a few. Altogether a really solid and talented group of individuals.

It’s weird how fast you get to know people; I knew these guys for six months, but the way we acted in class you would think it was much longer… at least I felt that way. In getting to know my colleagues over the six months, it seems like they all wanted the same thing out of a career: they wanted to put milk on the table. And if it was in a promising new industry like wind, that was all the better. I think this is the same for just about everyone – people want to make enough bread for their family and themselves. And if they can enjoy their job too, that’s icing on the cake. It’s too bad this is so hard for so many people. Myself included.

A company called Granite Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, offered me a job a week before graduation. The job is as an installation and receiving turbine technician. The potential new hire before me failed his background check and I was next on the list. Unfortunately, I was one of only two people out of 21 in my class who found a wind technician job before graduation. The rest of the guys in my class have now returned to their previous jobs, filed for unemployment or are waiting for that phone call. Our Career Services people told us that up to 800 people apply for positions posted online on sites like monster.com or windjobs.org. While I did have dozens of resumes floating the Internet, I still consider myself very lucky.

While I surely grieved with my colleagues in the lack of secured entry-level positions, I prepared myself for the tremendous opportunity to work for a part of General Electric. I packed up my stuff, drove my parents car back to Atlanta from Portland and flew to New York for training. I am now two weeks into a four-week training program at the GE Learning Center. My position, as an installation and receiving turbine technician, will take me all over the US. I will help install new wind farms. It’s been mostly safety courses so far… I’ll learn more about the job later on in training and once I get out to site.
gidddddyup. Homeboy’s goin corporate!


Outside of class in Vancouver, I couldn’t lay off of this whole Peace Corps thing – the potential of this organization continued to intrigue me. How would one, step by step, help develop Peace Corps into a more serious organization? I spent a great deal of time thinking about this when I was a Volunteer as well as in those months right when I got home. In fact, I kept and still keep a little notebook to jot down ideas. I usually have it in my pocket in case I think of something I want to remember. One day in my electrical class, I noticed I was nearing the end of my notebook. I flipped to the beginning to reflect on the kinds of things I was thinking some months back. The notebook started that previous May, about the time I was running around Praia looking for a job. I had a few sketches of a Peace Corps website idea I thought might be good. This website would allow Peace Corps Volunteers to post project information onto a central database, share their work with other volunteers and family and friends at home as well as allow them to solicit donations for in-service projects.

I then flipped to the most recent page. The night before I had sketched out essentially the same idea. The same idea – six months apart. I thought, this was eerie. I also thought it showed consistency in how my mind was working. Consistency is good. I took this as a sign to invest in this idea. In the following days, I finalized a proposal and posted it on elance.com, a website designed for finding talent and posting job proposals for computer related stuff. After 24 hours, I had 21 bids. Buyers market baby. Cybernetikz.com made me a great offer. They are a team of web developers from Bangladesh. I awarded them the project. We would communicate via email.

My readjustment allowance from Peace Corps covered the initial expense. I got a job as an assistant teacher in a local elementary school special education classroom to help pay for the website development. This job kept my head above water.

For two months, I worked, went to school at night and oversaw Cybernetikz’s development of www.pcprojex.org. The tagline is “projects that change communities.” The site functions like Youtube – Volunteers can upload project information, including documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, etc. The site counts project views, allows for ratings and comments and arranges the projects by sector and location. As mentioned above, this website allows Peace Corps Volunteers to post project information onto a central database and share their work with other volunteers and family and friends at home. It also allows them to solicit donations for in-service projects through the Peace Corps Partnerships Program.

I emailed the website to my colleagues in Cape Verde, the National Peace Corps Association and the Peace Corps Partnerships Program (PCPP). PCPP is the Peace Corps program associated with micro-lending projects – a major theoretical component of pcprojex.org. Everyone seemed to like the idea. This made me happy. However, I wanted more than an applause. I wanted people to use it. If Peace Corps Volunteers would use this site or if Peace Corps would mandate Volunteers to use this site, it would be a comprehensive database for grassroots community projects happening around the world. It could be used for training purposes, inspiration for potential projects, etc. It could be phenomenal.

Easier said than done. PCPP people arranged a conference call two months after I emailed them. When they called, the other end of the line sat the PCPP program director, marketing director as well as a few regional and administrative PCPP people – some heavy hitters. They said many nice things about the website. This made me feel good. Then they asked me what I wanted to do next – I threw out about half a dozen ideas. They rejected every one of them because of “policy.” I then asked if they would be interested in financing a second phase. They laughed. After the phone call, I felt weird – on one hand five administrative people spent 45 minutes talking to me about how they liked pcprojex. They didn’t have to do that. But they did. On the other hand, they were completely uninterested in exploring any further ideas. There wasn’t even any need for a follow up call.

When I snapped the phone shut, I stared out the window of my apartment. I didn’t feel angry. Actually, I sympathized with them. They work for the government. They are strapped with hundreds of pages of policy designed to keep calm waters… to resist change. It’s a matter of values – our current government values adhering to what is in place rather than taking risks. With no risk, there is no change. With no change, systems eventually become outdated… Even though the PCPP people outright rejected me, they may have been trying to tell me that to bring change I must continue doing what I was doing. Whether or not this assumption is correct, this conclusion suited me fine.

One of the additional ideas I mentioned during the conference call was to try and organize the type of work Peace Corps Volunteers do in the field. I thought I could tackle this issue as a continuation of pcprojex.

What do Peace Corps Volunteers do? Imagine you were to divide the US Federal government among two sectors: military and non-military. If military is security and defense, would the non-military half of the government be peaceful? Perhaps the work scope of Peace Corps Volunteers would involve to some degree the non-military elements of our government. I considered this. I originally got this military/non-military idea from wallstats.com, a website I have referenced several times on this blog. After some time thinking about the wallstats poster, I came up with this list of work sectors: water, food, waste, health, youth and family, shelter, education, transportation, environment, energy, business, technology. These are what I call the twelve elements of community. Loosely prioritized based on need, they identify some of the basic and advanced elements necessary to build and sustain a community. This list is designed to be universal – independent of culture, religion, socio-economy, etc. It may not be everything; think of this list as a starting place. Here is a short video that describes how I arrived at this list in further detail: http://www.prcprojex.org/projects.



If this list captures some of the major components of community, I think the next step is to identify how people relate to each one of these elements. For example, what is man’s natural relationship to water? Where do we get water? How do we use water? How can we most sustainably procure and conserve water? I’m trying to think about this objectively… like, naturally speaking. I think there are patterns in nature. And I think it is important we identify and follow these patterns, causing as little harm to nature as possible. For some places, like the US, this may mean we have to take a few steps backwards. In other less developed countries like Cape Verde, we may be able to avoid the same mistakes richer folk have made in recent history.

I’ve completed three of the videos so far if you’d like to check them out. I’ve gone to great lengths trying to make them visually appealing, entertaining and informative. If you disagree with something, please tell me. I enjoy debate:

Water - http://www.prcprojex.org/water



Food - http://www.prcprojex.org/food



Waste - http://www.prcprojex.org/waste



I understand this project is turning out to be kind of a massive undertaking. Oh well. If someone has another plan, I would love to hear you out. I’m continuously frustrated with how difficult some things are these days. This project is my outlet for this aggression. It’s fun though. This gives me something to think about in my free time. I think it’s always good to explore new approaches to the same old game.



Okay, so that’s my story up to now. Thanks for reading.
brian