globetrottr

Village12

2011-09-28T10:16:00.001-07:00

Check out Village12, an Volunteer Training organization in Haiti ! I'll get more information on here when it's all ready.

In Dominican Republic, relaxing after some months in Haiti

2011-09-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,
So last summer (2011) I had a long break from my wind job. I found an organization building schools in Haiti called All Hands, hands.org. Thought I'd check them out and see what Haiti was like. In the first couple weeks down there, I realized how passionate I was for this kind of non-profit type work... so I took a leave of absence from my wind job and stayed in Haiti for four months.

So I decided to take a break from Haiti and check out the Dominican Republic. This place is beautiful. Interesting how much more developed DR is than Haiti. I'm hanging out in a little bunglow in Puerta Plata thinking about what I'm going to do with myself. I'm down here with my friend Andy. He has a business in transcription services. His business offers transcription services in the UK, New Zealand and the US. So if you need any transcription services done, check him out.

Here's a pic of our bungalow in the jungle. haha, life is tough...

Moving Along

2010-12-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

Yo. whats happenin people?

So I just spent the last couple months in Bismarck, North Dakota. The job is good, I’m feeling more comfortable with what is expected of me. It is very corporate – meaning I have a very limited number of responsibilities. And all of my coworkers have limited responsibilities. And all of the transportation, manufacturing and even mining people around the world involved in making these wind turbines have limited responsibilities. It’s the corporate model – to make an awesome product like a wind turbine, you divide the work among thousands of tightly defined jobs and conquer. And they do. Of course, while I can appreciate this business model, I think something is lost when you teach people only to focus on one task. It is so important to educate people on how the whole system works. Although this kind of education is counter to capitalism because this invites competition. Oh competition. Anyway…

North Dakota is very small townish, as you might have imagined. The people are super nice and speak with a slight North Dakoooodan accent. I lived in a house where my landlord/roommate never locked the door. Pretty safe place. It wasn’t too cold when I was there either – its frozen over now. I got out just in time. Oh yeah, I also didn’t see any people mulching machines. Thanks Fargo movie for the false assumption :)

I left North Dakota a couple weeks ago for Brazil. My friend from college, Drew, got married to a Brazilian girl he met during a work abroad program 5 years ago. A bunch of friends and I went down there for the wedding. It was memorable. There’s something about just being in another country that excites me. It’s like everything is different and there’s so much to take in and appreciate. I always return home from being abroad with a kind of whole feeling having widened my perspective on the world. I was also hungover – a week of heavy drinking and getting little sleep can wreck you. ahh, good times.

As for Peace Corps … my country director forwarded the “To Make a Village” video (the one about how to make Peace Corps better from the last email) to some of the top dogs in Washington. I have since had several conversations with the Deputy Director, the Africa Regional Director and some other change-makers in Peace Corps. They asked me to read and respond to their “Vision” paper – a report describing their ideas on how to change Peace Corps. And, in few words, I feel their hands are tied by rules, regulations and general complexity of change… to enact change. So I have taken these crumbs of information and decided that real change comes from engaging and gaining support from the public. So, I’m building another website that aims to do this. Shouldn’t be too long till it’s done. It’s like, you can get really angry at “the system”, or you can channel that rage into figuring out how to do it better. Column B keeps me occupied.

Tomorrow I leave for Lincoln, Maine to bear the winter on a new wind project. Yikes.

Brian

PS – Have you seen the movie Inside Job? I highly recommend watching it. Great insight as to why the US is in a recession. In short, for the last two decades our country’s economic policies have been directed by, and are still directed by, shortsighted cowards. The answer? I think all we need to do is make responsible loans – go to prosper.com.

some pics fo ya:

wind turbines in wyoming

2010-08-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

I'm well into this job now. After a month of classroom training in New York, I was sent to Illinois for a few weeks for on-the-job training and now I'm Wyoming going full time.

As for what I actually do in my job - I'm settling into a "Technical Advisor" position. You may have seen large wind turbine components sailing down the highway. First, these wind components arrive on the construction site. GE sends inspectors to greet the drivers and inspect the loot for damage. If it is badly damaged, they send it back to the factory. If it's good, the construction company will offload the component with a small crane.

Once all these pieces arrive in good shape, my coworkers and I step in and inspect the components to make sure all of the ladders are intact, bolts are torqued to the correct value, all of the bus bars (the aluminum rods that carry the electricity down the tower) are in good shape, etc. We make sure everything is installed to specification. Then the construction crews erect the towers. One medium-sized crane will set up two tower sections and build the rotor on the ground. Then the next day or so, another big crane (350 ton lifting capacity, 500 ton by weight - that's a 1 million pound crane) will come along and "top out" the tower - finishing out the last tower piece and setting the nacelle (the box behind the rotor where the electricity is generated) and the rotor.

My coworkers and I will do another inspection from top to bottom once the tower is built. We make sure the turbine is perfect - all parts are accounted for, are installed correctly and are clean. Once we finish our job, our commissioners plug her into the grid, hook her up to a GE-wide ethernet system and finally turn her on. If all goes well, she'll purr like a 21st century, $3million, 1.5MW cold-rolled-steel kitten.

Some numbers on the models we're erecting in Wyoming:
Each turbine is 80m tall. The rotor diameter is 77m wide.
Each turbine costs $3 million.
The output potential is 1.5MW. This is equal to the power consumption of 400-600 homes.
The expected lifetime is 20 years and the payback rate is 5-7 years (ie 13-15 years cool profit).
So bottom line, it's a clean energy cash cow if you have $3 million laying around.

(btw - These are my estimations coming from conversations I've had with different people in the past few weeks. They are not official numbers from my company. I'm just throwing something out there to wrap your head around if you're curious or want to spend $3M on something awesome.)

Anyway, I don't mean to over inform, I'm just trying to offer concrete information for anyone interested. I think my job is pretty awesome. And I'm certainly grateful for this opportunity to work and learn about this stuff.

Above are some pics from the job site.

I had one great video of the construction crew flying the rotor. It's pretty cool to watch... so I decided to put some more photos in there to show more of what's going on:

Also here's a link to my Peace Corps Manifesto, if you will, called "To Make A Village". It's a slathering of ideas on how to make Peace Corps better and simpler. And how to integrate new technology into the program:

okay well, I hope all is well with you good people.
until next time,
Brian

milk on the table

2010-04-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

Stickwoman's twelve points of culture

2010-01-31T09:08:00.000-08:00

All things have an opposite. Yin and the Yang. Stickman's twleve points of community is the science. That is the physical developments of a community. Stickman's lovely counterpart, whom I'll call Stickwoman... she's good-lookin, huh? She meditates in the middle of the twelve points of culture. This is the art. The Yin and the Yang. The art and science of a generic community. It is everywhere.

In the same sense of quantifying work in a generic community, the same can be done for culture. There are a limited number of cultural elements that are present (or could be) in every community. I deduced these elements in the same manner as Stickman's 12 points of community: I thought of a website that put form to culture. I thought of Ten Thousand Villages. Ten Thousand Villages is a successful non-profit company that purchases arts and craftwork from artisans in developing countries and sells them in retail stores in the United States and Canada. I went to www.tenthousandvillages.com and looked at how they organized their merchandise. If you rollover the “shop” button on their main webpage, you can observe the twelve divisions of merchandise they sell. I copied those elements into a WORD document and mulled over how they could align with the Peace Corps experience.

I then reflected on my own Peace Corps service. Having returned from Cape Verde, Africa in September 2009, my experience is still fresh in my mind. I asked myself, what are the things that were present in Cape Verde, that are everywhere? I made a list.

I compared the two and arrived at the twelve points above, coincidentally the same number. The last category, personal, I felt pertained more to people as individuals developing their own personal philosophy… an equally important element of culture that perhaps deserves it’s own category. But for now, I thought it would be best to leave it as part of general culture.

Anyway, these diagrams go for simplicity. Simplicity is the first step toward progress.
oh stick people. you are good people.

Stickman's twelve points of community

2010-01-26T13:13:00.000-08:00

Here's another stickman cartoon. These are the 12 essential elements of society that allow individuals to survive and prosper.

I deduced these 12 points from mainly two places: the Federal Government and Peace Corps. First, I analyzed our Federal Government's non-military expenditures from the ever-intriguing "Death and Taxes" poster. This poster can be downloaded or purchased from wallstats.com. 67% of the Federal Government is spent on military. The other 33%, if you think about it, represents what our government is doing to build and sustain our communities. Department of Education, Health, Energy and so on.

Then, while developing the peacecorpsprojects.org site, I pulled the work sector information from each of the Peace Corps host countries from peacecorps.gov. I wrote them all down and simplified them as much as possible.

Comparing the two, I got the list down to twelve. I then sketched simple diagrams for each sector and decided to draw them around a person who looked happy... because if you have all of these elements functioning properly... you should be happy.

Imagine this diagram as a clock. Each sector is loosely prioritized - starting at 12 o'clock with water. Now, the order of these elements are largely subjective - each has to almost develop simultaneously. However, think of this as a start.

This is by all means a work in progress. If you have suggestions or don't agree with something, drop a comment and state your argument. I think establishing a universal foundation for what a community needs to survive and prosper should be first and foremost in... umm, trying to improve upon the system we have going for us now.

Peacecorpsprojects.org

2010-01-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

Throughout my service, I felt many Peace Corps Volunteers were doing good, important work but had no central place to share this information. Since I returned last September, I drew a brief sketch and contracted the job out to cybernetikz.com, a small programming firm I met on elance.com several years ago, and built www.peacecorpsprojects.org.

Think of this site as the Youtube of Peace Corps Volunteer's projects/newsletter articles. It is designed to collect, organize and display Volunteer project information, direct donors to the Peace Corps Partnerships Program (PCPP) site, a Peace Corps funding program, and allow Volunteers to post articles they write about their experience.

It is intended to improve coordination among volunteers working on similar projects in faraway places, generate more interest in the micro-lending possibilities of PCPP and promote Peace Corps on-the-ground efforts to a broader community.

Note: Peacecorpsprojects.org does not accept project donations. This site transfers donors directly to the PCPP project donation page.

I pitched this website to Peace Corps Volunteers and Peace Corps admin, hoping they will post projects and articles and be willing to collaborate, respectively.

Now, the waiting game.

The Daily Routine

2009-10-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

Read the bottom first. I don't really know what the point of this sketch is... this is just one of those things I was thinking about one day and thought it would be good write down.

Kutiman - Thru-You

2009-10-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

I always like it when people figure out new ways of doing things. Here, Kutiman takes different musician's individual Youtube recordings and mashes them up to make original music compilations. I think this is truly breakthrough how he makes original music using the relatively unknown faces on Youtube and his own mad video editing/music making skills. Check out the whole album here: http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/

summer vacation

2009-09-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

After much deliberation, I decided it would be best to come home. I had hoped to stay in Cape Verde and be the hardcore white lightning that would save Africa. Then near the end of my service, I realized I wasn't yet prepared to do that.

I started a company, prior to my decision to return home, that would both import renewable energy system technologies - mainly solar panels, solar street lights and small scale wind turbines - and educate Capeverdeans how to assess potential sites, install and maintain these new technologies. The overall goal of the company would be to help the country achieve it's goal of having 50% of the country's energy come from renewable sources. The company is called Desol, Limited. Once I registered the company, I sweated through my button down shirt day after day in sticky hot Praia trying to schmooze with influential people and figure out where to start. One day, I weaseled my way into a one-on-one meeting with the Minister of Energy and Industry. He listened to my business plan. He said he liked the business plan. He then told me to give him a price for how much it would cost to get Chã das Caldeiras, a zone in the middle of a volcano on the island of Fogo, converted to 100% renewable energy. I said, "Awesome. I'll get back to you shortly." 15 minutes later, I realized I didn't actually know how to do that. Plus I had no money.

Three days later I found myself browsing the internet looking for renewable energy courses. I found the Northwest Renewable Energy Institute, www.nw-rei.com. It is located outside Portland, Oregon and opened this past May. I applied and got in. Classes run October to April and focus on electricity, mechanics, hydraulics and rigging - all the meat of machines, electricity and engines... the important stuff I don't know about. If I pass the class, I will become a certified windsmith (a wind turbine technician, the person who installs the 200' tall wind turbines). pretty cool stuff. soooo... back to school for this guy.

The business strategy I proposed can be found here. Please contact me (bri.newhouse@gmail.com) if you have comments on the plan. While I'm in school this fall and spring, I hope to explore this strategy a bit more to see if it would actually work. Then later on when the time is right, I hope to meet with Mr Lopes again and make headway on his offer.

So anyway, back to Peace Corps. During my service I trained 140 high school students to design and draft a local government approved 1:100 scale house plan. The course is posted online here. You know, there is nothing like overseeing a classroom of students, quietly working on something they enjoy doing. I always thought this quietness was the sound of learning. Education can be a wonderfully powerful tool. Also, not related to education, if you want to get into some small scale renewable projects, check out the people to water cycle wiki page. It is some projects my colleagues and I were working on, plus some additional projects we found online to complete the cycle so to speak.

Final thoughts on Peace Corps? I think Peace Corps is a profoundly interesting and important organization. As a Volunteer, I learned a lot about the essence of communities and what people really need to live. Peace Corps takes people who have had, and capitalized on, those things we take for granted - like schools, jobs and good health - then sends them to live among people who haven't had all of those opportunities. I think cultural understanding is recognizing the commonalities among people, sympathizing with them and working with them to create incentives using their available resources.

Another cultural understanding I learned is making an effort to take life at a more relaxed pace. For example, often times plans I arranged with Capeverdean friends or colleagues would fall apart. Sometimes I would stress out about it. Rarely would a Capeverdean stress out about it. I think the ultimate objective of the Peace Corps experience is, in these circumstances, to have both people meet halfway... where the American learns the value of not stressing out over everything and the Capeverdean learns the value of following through on new ideas.

As an institution, Peace Corps needs to be more open to change. When my colleagues and I tried to introduce reasonable program improvements to our administration, we were met with great resistance. I think this is foolish. There are a multitude of great ideas out there that can be implemented at minimal cost. But get these ideas moving in the current organizational structure will require the open ears of Washington bureaucrats.

Another problem is the large disparity between volunteers and the administration - Peace Corps admin seems to regard volunteers as liabilities rather than assets. If the contribution of volunteers was respected a bit more in general programming, the organization could have huge impact on developing countries. HUGE. But right now, this isn't the case. It's too bad because the losers in this situation are not the volunteers or the administration, it's the citizens of the 89 host countries. How can Peace Corps become a more serious development organization? Not a day goes by I don't ask myself that same question.

Thanks for reading.
Brian

El Hierra

2009-08-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

Within the next year, El Hierro, the smallest island of the Canary Islands, hopes to become completely energy independent.

After 10 years of planning, the infrastructure is being put in place to transform the island (with its population of 10,000 inhabitants) into a fully self-sufficient zone. There will be no back-up power connection to other islands or the mainland.

A variety of renewable energy systems are being used, with an emphasis on wind and solar. They also plan to implement hydrogen cars and ban oil completely from the island.

Everything you think is true

2009-05-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

This simple phrase succinctly summarizes what I think about this life. Although probably coined by someone else, I first heard Prince drop the line prior to his musical performance at the 10th annual Webby Awards, the Internet Oscars, in 2005. I randomly caught his performance on Youtube a few months after the show. When those words came out of his mouth on my computer screen, I froze. It immediately became the centerpiece to a philosophy I can’t let go of, yet still can’t quite coherently explain. It goes something like this:

Everyone lives in two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. We enter both worlds the moment we are born. Our physical world consists of our family, our friends, our homes, our buildings, our cars – essentially everything we can see and touch. And our mental world consists of everything we think, everything that goes through our mind. It is a collection of our experiences and thoughts we continue to build upon as we live our lives.

The quote is a reminder that what we think is equally as important and real as what we see. Surely, people have solidified a solid foundation of knowledge based on many assumptions about our physical world, but there’s a lot we haven’t yet uncovered. There is still a lot we don’t know about this life, we still have war, we still pollute… we haven’t yet smoothly adapted to the forces of Mother Nature.

In a day where our highly structured Western society forces us to conform to an often well-justified degree, we’re still a bickering, polluting, destructive species. Until we do (adapt to the forces of Mother Nature), it is important we continue to question, debate and consider alternative lifestyles that see fit so that both our physical and mental worlds may reside in harmony.

If there is anything I’ve learned in the last year and a half as a junior/senior high school teacher, it’s that young people still believe they can preserve their idealism. An optimism shines in their faces. It sucks though when people lose this luster when our physical world is too difficult. Often times the people without the luster control the optimists and squeeze them out. That’s frustrating. These people make everything all that much harder for young people to keep the faith.

And I’m trying to make that statement here – keep the faith. Everything you think is true. What you think is as important as what you see. And if you think that what you see could be better, it is your God-given responsibility to humanity to let us know. You must let the world hear the voice of opposition. If you do choose to fight the status quo, you must use reason to make your point. Reason is the single most influential tool any man can use.

Youth must have patience though. Youth must wait for reason to break into the commonalities of an unreasonable world. At this time, reason will once again return as the centerpiece of good conversation and the central point of reference to deciding the course of human development.

The world must focus on an agenda, possibly an agenda that works to lessen our dependence on each other and lessen the impact we have on our planet. This would lessen the destruction of inevitable human error.

This revolution is about independence, it’s about learning how to fend for yourself and use your available resources to increase your independency. It’s about growing food and raising livestock locally. It’s about producing your own energy with the wind or the sun or both. It’s about walking more, biking more, constructing and using public transportation more and driving less. It’s about rethinking our lifestyle and retooling the machines that are supposed to make our lives easier, machines whos impact are in sync with nature.

Of course, this is what I think. The lobbyists, the communists, even the drug dealers – they all have their point of view and they are all equally right to some degree. Because of the impenetrable presence of our mental world, we are granted the freedom to believe what we like. In the end though, the point of view that matters most is the voice that influences the greatest body of people – be it through political will, military personnel or a drug that makes you feel damn good. Be it as it may, in 2009 most people don’t have the social pull it takes to influence a large body of people. This, however, is where we sit back, stretch out our legs and wait for the Internet to mature.

So while we patiently wait for our antiquated system of public affairs to become more efficient, youth must believe that everything they think is true, use reason to make those thoughts a reality, and try to make the physical world a better, more pleasant place to live.

So thank you Prince. You are truly an individual – as a musician and as a person. In an effort to influence your mood for the next few minutes as my cousin Mark often submits in emails to friends and family, I will leave you with the music of a man whose originality won’t likely be matched in this lifetime or the next. I give you Prince.

From Debt to Dirt

2009-05-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

photo: Dave Trainer

Our lifestyle today is a lifestyle of debt. Even just sitting in our house, we accrue debt. We turn on lights, we create a debt to the electric company. We get hungry, we have to buy food. We want to do anything, we need health insurance. We live a lifestyle that is very dependent on the social structure. Our lifestyle keeps us tied to this structure by keeping us in debt, all the time.

We know that even as we sleep, the moment we wake up, we will have to pay off this debt we owe society. Subconsciously, this debt slowly erodes our integrity. We don’t realize this though because we’ve grown so accustomed to this lifestyle of debt accrual.

The problem is, is that we have grown unhealthily dependent on our social structure. I imagine a life that is a bit more self-reliant given the means provided by the government. What are those means? I’ve figured out where I stand on that. Check out A Steady Job.

Something I hope to do in the mean time while the government is working itself out is to live a lifestyle that get communities in motion. To get a place in motion, it would make sense to start at the house – we all have a house, that’s a thing that many people have in common - a house.

The house I would want to live in would be one where I wake up to the sound of water running through my house, dripping into the roots of plants I’m growing so I don’t have to buy food from the store. A house where the slightest wind or solar rays are absorbed by modern machines built into my house so that I have no electric bill to pay. And in fact, if the renewable energy produced from my rooftop exceed my overall consumption, I would get money back from my electric company. I imagine going upstairs to my roof and grabbing eggs from my small chicken coop to make breakfast. Then I imagine taking a hot shower, where the water was heated naturally heated by a solar water heater also on my roof. When the water runs down the drain in the shower, I imagine the water… now greywater, running into a filter in my basement that would cleanse all of my greywater into water clean enough for my plants outside. Then, when I poop, instead of flushing X gallons of water back into the public plumbing system, I would throwing a handful of sawdust into my composting toilet. When I fill a 200L barrel with poop and sawdust and lime, I would cap the barrel and let it age for one year, afterwards producing fine fertilizer for my crops.

Even so, if you’re not the blue-collar farmer type of person, there are tremendous improvements that could be done to public utility lines in every city, town and village around the world that could make our lives easier.

I’m anxious to get started.

In the House

2009-05-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

We spend our lives in two stages: you are either sleeping or you are awake. If you are sleeping, you are passing through some psychological realm people still don’t completely understand. If you’re awake though, you’re doing one of two things: doing something or not doing something.

If you’re doing something, you either like it or you don’t.
If you like it, you could either keep doing it or not keep doing it.
If you don’t like it, you could stop doing it, do something else or do nothing at all.

If you end up doing nothing at all, you either like it or you don’t.
If you like it, you could continue doing nothing. Or if you don’t, you could do something. Then you be back where we started.

The point is that there is no point. Unless you count keeping a conscious meter of how happy you are gauged by the things you do, as a point. I would count that as a point. Or I guess I should say, that is what I do when I’m awake, which may be something or nothing depending on who you ask, but I guess you’re asking me because you’re reading this. Either that or you’re just being nice.

Ka-Blam! a solar panel installation video

2009-04-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

Here’s a video about a Peace Corps Partnership Project in a small village of Hortelão. Two volunteers, Sarah Mendlesohn and Andrew Vernaza collaborated on the financing, purchasing and installing of two solar panels to bring electricity to a small village for the first time, ever.

Solar still phase III results - 2.25L, glass bottle project - on hold

2009-04-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

After some weeks getting bar/restaurant people to save their empty beer and wine bottles and obediently shuttling them to school to be broken down in the electric concrete mixer, it turns out the fist-sized cobblestone we need to crush the bottles in the mixer throws off the rotation of the motor, producing a brrrr brrrrrrrr sound like we were sending the motor to the graveyard while it is still a somewhat new machine.

What to do now? We could crush the bottles by hand or use some other means to break them down or I always enjoyed the thought of trying to connect the motor to a bicycle – let people ride a bike to spin a metal concrete basin which would break bottles into shiny sand-sized particles. This would solve two problems at once – recycling empty glass bottles and saving their disappearing beach problem. Alas, it’s not smart to push the mixer until it burns out. Plus, I’m tired of the legwork. So be it.

Another project on standstill for various reasons is the solar still. This may partly explain my reluctance to update you all lately – results are weak. The third model distills about 2.25L/day, somewhere between the first and the second model.

Why? It could be because the surface area of the water is about half of the other two. Or you could say the pressure decreased with the open drain and freshwater catch tube. Whatever the reason, it was a huge blow to my ego when the results came through – I really thought we were onto something big.

In the last few days, a few other mechanical teachers have agreed to help build another model out of sheet metal. We’ll see how far we make it. But, judging from the about 10X shy production-cost ratio we’re at after the first three models, something in the back of my mind tells me if this country wants to get serious about solar desalination, it should look abroad and import. The Chinese are exporting probably-cheaply-made but very reasonably-priced solar desal units. I’ve also corresponded with several companies in Denmark and Switzerland who are ready to export large-scale units. So, while I thought a few lowly Peace Corps Volunteers and a group of Capeverdean students and teachers could invent something revolutionary from a grassroots effort from brief Internet research, conceding to globalization and forking out for the export for the yes, more educated research, may prove to be the better option. You best believe this message is being passed up the line.

R & R

2009-04-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a little vacation to the two most very tranquil islands the country has to offer – the metropolitan São Vicente and rustic Santo Antão paradise. Cool, cool places. Good people up there too, Peace Corps Volunteers and Capeverdeans the same. It’s all about the people, baby. Here are some photos:

Absurdly difficult

2009-04-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

I’m now in my last trimester at school and within four months to the closing of my Peace Corps service. Up until about two weeks ago, I was super all about staying in my community and trying to push these projects forward. At the end of the previous trimester though I had a bit of an epiphany – I realized I cared more about these projects than anyone else in my community… by a long shot. It takes a lot to get people interested in new ideas or thinking outside the norm or, to refer the general theme of Bananadog, to try new things. Bananadog was a solo project though. That only took the ambition of essentially one person to get that started and finished. But when you try to take that energy and focus it into a community that isn’t used to trying new things… it is absurdly difficult. Of course, working with people anywhere is difficult. This is probably why we have conflict and war - it’s always easier to try to eliminate that which is different than you are, than to try to make amends. Well, go Peace Corps! That’s what it’s all about – you come here, you live your life like you’re used to living, then you get frustrated because people here don’t think like you do, but you suck it up and deal with it for two years. Then move on and hold on to these two years the rest of your life.

I’m not sure where I’ll move on to from here. But I have four months to figure it out.
Time’s a ticking.

VerveEarth

2009-03-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

VerveEarth recently contacted me and informed me about their new website to "plot the content of the internet on an interactive map of the world. VerveEarth is an entirely new way to surf the net. It shows spatial and geographic connections that a blog search engine could never reveal."

The site is www.VerveEarth.com.

Once on board, you can easily claim your blog a place in the VerveEarth world. The site is free to use and a way to drive new traffic to your blog.

Five Words

2009-03-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

“Hey Elector, it sticks to the wall.” Elector was giving a test to several students on bathroom plumbing. He paused and looked up.

“Really?” A small grin emerged from his often-doubtful looking face. He quickly realized the large scale potential of those five words.

Who would have thought when you threw fifty beer and wine bottles into a concrete mixer with a few cobblestones for an hour it would produce smooth glass particles, safe to touch, that cuts the amount of sand you need to make stucco… in half.

I returned to the wall outside the practical lab and smiled to myself. The small patch of stuccoed wall glistened in the sunlight – a fine selling point to aesthetically pleased Capeverdeans.

Inside the practical lab at the technical school in Assomada, several other students, teachers and I are running makeshift tests to determine the relative strength of glass as an alternative to rock and sand, the typical concrete aggregate used in Cape Verde. Given the smooth composition of the glass, the initial tests have shown glass, even when finely ground, doesn’t adhere to the concrete as well as rock and sand. This means that if you were to use purely glass aggregate instead of rock and sand around a concrete pillar, it would lessen the load bearing capacity. It would crack.

However, despite the crushed glass’s success in load bearing tests, the fact that it sticks to the wall means several things:

First, Cape Verde has no shortage of empty beer and wine bottles. So anything cheap and simple to reuse glass would be worth investigating. It might give a little relief to the landfills and street gutters. Second, if this project were to be increased to a community-wide recycling program, it would create jobs. Nothing revolutionary, but something where there was nothing before. Thirdly, there is a major sand problem in Cape Verde. In the middle of the night, women notoriously steal black sand from their own beaches to sell to construction companies. A lessened need for sand might drive those midnight sand hoarders into a new profession. Of course, it might not. But it’s worth a try. The only question is where to start.

A solar water heater, crushed glass and one reason never to throw away cardboard

2009-02-07T04:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a solar water heater I built at my friend Carlos’s house. He has had some trouble hooking up his water pump to actually test it… but umm, it at least looks cool right? The top picture is on his roof and is connected to the bottom picture from inside his house. I took the general design from a website called Greenpowerscience.com. This guy, Dan Rojas, does great experiments of green energy. Thought his idea was spot on.

I'll get a schematic of how it is supposed to work up here shortly.

Here's a picture of my recently acquired classroom. Some students misused expensive drafting tables when the school first opened 8 years ago so they closed the drafting room. When I found this out a few months ago, my students and I went in and cleaned the place up. If you check out the photos, I’ve put some drawings on the walls for students to observe and made a model house to scale out of cardboard to give them a visual representation of the house we’re drawing in class. Next up in my new by-the-book desenho técnico class (technical drafting), observing modern architectural designs and drafting a model house of their own.

Finally, one day a few other teachers and I decided to see what would happen when we chucked about 50 empty beer and wine bottles (provided by myself and collegues after many long nights of intense research) and some fist-sized rocks in a concrete mixer and let it tumble for an hour. The results? Different sized piece of glass that are safe to touch (see pic below). The tumbling in the mixer dulled the edges of glass. Right now we’re running some experiments to test the strength of broken glass as an alternative for concrete aggregate.

If you have any criticism to help push any ideas further along, please don't hesitate to contact me, bri.newhouse@gmail.com. I think we’re onto some quite plausible clean energy ideas here. The more collaboration we can get, the faster we’ll get to a finished product ready for community distribution.

Although it’s been quiet on this end, I still feel I have the same energy as always. As many Peace Corps volunteers told me my first year, volunteers tend to slow down their second year after seeing how slow things move. Word, apathy spreads fast. I guess that’s all the more reason to go lift some mind weights so I can handle muscling ideas through the wonderful bliss we often call… civilization.

A Steady Job

2008-11-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

“Mas um, toma.” Brimus handed me another shot glass filled with grogue.
“Okay, okay,” I said, as if he had to ask me twice.

“Mas um, toma.” Brimus handed me another shot glass filled with grogue.
“Okay, okay,” I said, as if he had to ask me twice.

It was about midday on a nice Sunday afternoon and I was comfortably positioned on a rock, half drunk and quite full after eating corn and kachupa. Brimus, a friend from Assomada, brought me to his sister’s house situated on a mountain, a steep 20-minute climb up from Achada Igreja, the central zone of Picos.

About the time I was dozing off from drinking grogue and eating all day, a guy came out of nowhere with a huge bag over his shoulder. He spotted my pale face and asked if I spoke English:

“Yea.”
Immediately, “s!#@!! I hate climbing this damn mountain. What I do everyday sucks.”
“Whoa, whoa. Calm down man. What’s up?”
“Look at me man. I have to climb up here to sell this bull[exp] out of this bag. I hate my life.”
“I’m sorry it’s like that man.”

Every Sunday, Alexandre climbs up the mountain to sell things like soap, combs, sandals and watches to people far from town. He came to Cape Verde for work, like many other West Africans, about 16 months ago.

“On good days, I’ll eat rice in the morning and evening, and drink a cup of tea before I go to bed. Sometimes I eat nothing.”
“Can you really not make enough money to eat?”
“Between paying rent and supporting my mother back home in the Gambia, it’s very difficult. I mean look where I am. I’m selling sandals and bedsheets to people who live in the middle of nowhere.”
“What would you need to make life better?”
“I need a steady job.”

People depend on several things. These are the same things no matter who you are or where you live: security, health, education and gainful employment. In Alexandre’s case, he is lacking a steady job. He has his security, his health and enough education to know how to sell things for a living. But even Alexandre’s ability to speak five languages has not helped him find a better job.

Now, if Alexandre grew up as an American in the US – he could walk around the US feeling relatively safe, he probably wouldn’t be as hungry or thirsty or sick as other parts of the world, he would probably have gone to school (90.7%1 of Americans graduate high school) and, he would have had a decent chance at finding a job (unemployment rate 6.1%2).

If Alexandre was born in Cape Verde, he’d also feel pretty secure. He’d likely be in decent health though he probably wouldn’t have as high an education as in the US. Where he would struggle is finding a job – unemployment rate is 25%3.

To me, coming from the United States, 25% unemployment is high. But for Alexandre, this place is a paradise of paid labor. The unemployment rate in the Gambia is an estimated 77+%4 by some accounts, although it is reported unknown in several official documents.

While the level of healthcare in the Gambia is lower than Cape Verde or the US, at least Alexandre doesn’t live in a place like Sudan or Pakistan. Forget health or education or jobs – when you’re not sure if the 12 year old kid walking down the street has an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder or if an 18 year old will park a truck full of explosives on your front lawn and detonate a bomb that will blow out windows of houses two miles away, it must be difficult to find any joy in your day.

We don’t know fear. Not me, not my friend Brimus, not Alexandre. When you don’t have security for your life, life sucks.

But you know it must be rough where Alexandre comes from. He’d take his life in Cape Verde – hiking around mountains on Sunday so he can take care of his mom and put food in his mouth – over whatever the situation was like at home.

Then you have Capeverdeans who tell me they have it rough when they hear about the kind of life people live in “America”, mainly with the jobs and the cool stuff Americans flaunt.

And Americans, well, Americans really have nothing to complain about. And if you asked them, they’d probably tell you they’re relatively well-off. They’ve got their security, their health, their education and their employment. It could be better, but it’s no doubt better there than most places.

Alexandre sold a bedsheet to my friend’s grandmother at a bargained price of about US$9. This put him in a good mood, “this job sucks, but I believe God will make my life easier someday.”

“You and me both man.” As he walked across the mountain to the next house a few hundred meters away, my tight belly swelled. I looked at my empty glass and couldn’t help feeling guilty.

That one man – a person struggling day-to-day to make ends meat – represents the majority of the people in the world who can’t do much to change the situation. While I – a person with nothing to complain about – represent the small minority of the people in the world who can. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, coming from a relatively well-off place, I’d like to think I’m having somewhat of an impact on my small community in Cape Verde. But to make life easier for people like Alexandre the world over, it will take much more than 8000 Peace Corps Volunteers and the few tens of thousands of other peace-seekers living abroad trying to improve the living conditions of the less fortunate.

It will take nothing short of an army of millions of committed people with an entire political administration behind them, both working selflessly, to provide everyone the basic means of survival. What this means, is that the most fortunate people in the world may have the most work ahead of them.

Looks like we all have a mountain to climb.

1 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004938.html
2 http://www.bls.gov/
3 http://www.ine.cv/ (final stats from 2005)
4 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107560.html

Heroes

2008-11-04T05:37:00.001-08:00

Flexibility + Money = Happiness

2008-11-03T08:12:00.001-08:00

When you're in charge of a government, I would imagine you want the people who work for you to be very good at what they do. You want talented, articulate, knowledgeable people in their field in charge of the oversight of that department.

How do you get talented people to work for you? Well, what do you need to be happy in a job? Money and flexibility.

If this is true, let’s put their sum equal to happiness:
Flexibility + Salary = Happiness

If your flexibility in a job goes up, the amount of money you need to be happy goes down:
(Flexibility + X) + (Money – X) = Happiness.
(Flexibility + infinity) + (Money – infinity)(0) = Happiness.

So if you give people enough flexibility in their job, you wont have to pay them at all. In fact, if they’re ambitious enough, they would figure out how to make money themselves.

Numb

2008-10-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

“Teacher, can we please learn how to design a house? If we go to university next year and they ask us to draw a house, we’re not going to know anything because all you’re teaching us are these solar projects.”

I froze. Natalino tracked me down in the praza. I had just gotten out of a hiace coming from Praia. For the last 24 hours, I had spoken at length with several big people in Praia about the progress of several solar projects Nick started last year and I had continued to develop in his absence.

My head was swelling from the good response I received. However, what Natalino said to me changed everything. “We’ll talk tomorrow in class. You have no idea how much I appreciate you telling me this.”

My student pulling me aside outside of class to ask me to change the curriculum tells me several things:
First, he cares about school and about preparing himself for university. I can’t imagine he’s the only student who feels like way either.

Second, I’m wrong. I was so obsessed with imposing these projects on my community and teaching people how to build them, I forgot about my primary objective at school – following the state-mandated syllabus.

This realization was devastating to me. How simple my mistake and how terribly out of place I have been in the last few weeks.

The next day, my director sat me down and said essentially the same thing. “You’ve got to follow the syllabus. These projects you want to do, they are extracurricular. Your job is to prepare students for university and these projects do not fit into that paradigm.”

Rightly humiliated, I spent the rest of the day upset at myself for having lost sight of my responsibility.

While most Peace Corps Volunteer’s service involves experiencing life in a completely different environment, my service has been quite different: I have most of the amenities available in the US – electricity and running water (most of the time)… even the Internet in my house. Also, the semi-urban/rural Assomada setting is a lot like the Atlanta suburb I grew up in the States – not quite a city, not quite the bush.

What I’m getting most out of this experience is how to work with people: Americans and Capeverdeans. To work in an organization, there are certain rules you must follow. If you have anything more to add, it is extremely important to bring those ideas to the table at the right time and the right place.

The relationship between my community and I is like the relationship between a client and a business. I’m here to serve my community. It just so happens the ideas I’m presenting to my community are things they’ve never heard of. And, before a year ago, neither had I. But, just as a business can’t impose it’s new ideas on their clients, I must be very strategic at how I present the ideas I wish to bring to my community. They must accept the ideas for any success to come of them. If they don’t completely accept the idea, the idea has little value.

In the Peace Corps, this concept is monumentally more difficult than your average business/client relationship. For example, if people have water coming from wells or desalination plants, why should they consider a new way to get water? They already have water. In this example, we are challenged with first convincing the community that water supply is a problem, research the technology to see what design works best, convince people it works, teach them to do it and finally watch them do it on their own.

With the solar still project, we’re somewhere between step 1 and 2. People kind of think understand there is a problem, and they’re somewhat interested in helping research. But because of the scale of work involved, there’s not much more interest above helping out or watching.

This theory is applicable in almost every situation: both the problem and the solution must be conveyed to people who don’t even see a problem.

You’re presenting a new, untested in some cases, technology to people who don’t even understand there is a problem. So it’s like your telling your client he should buy something for reasons he doesn’t understand.

In this case though, my clients are right. I was wrong to skip over the state-mandated curriculum. I need to get creative in how I present these new ideas. I guess it's back to the drawing board.

Google Fellowship

2008-10-08T02:53:00.000-07:00

My submission to the Google Project 10^100 $10M contest to come up with a good idea. My idea is basically to create a website that allows people to submit ideas with the opportunity to be awarded a Fellowship/Grant to develop your idea. Winners could be chosen by both an Internet users voting system and a decision by the Google Board of Directors.
wheee!!!

Bananadog Theory

2008-10-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

Religion has never worked for me. I like the idea of believing in something, but once your religion becomes exclusive, it is flawed. Work, too, is something that is appealing to me, but when I first entered the workforce after college I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

As a result, I found a job on the Internet in New Zealand. The following August I was on a plane headed for Christchurch to work for a woman I’d never met and only talked to a few times on the phone. Ten days in, I gave her the finger. She didn’t give me the time of day despite me having flown around the world to meet her.

Three months later, I started riding $35 bicycle that would take me 3200km around the country. During the ride, I figured out an explanation of life that made things easier. The theory first came to me one night about 2/3 of the way through the bike trip:

7 of the 24 hours of film from the Bananadog movie were from Yann, a friend of mine who followed me for the first 28 days of the 97-day experience. Yann was making a documentary about five travelers around New Zealand and Australia. I was the second of the five.

After four weeks and about 1300km miles together, me on my bike, him in his van, we planned to split. Yann would go up to Motueka to pick apples. We arranged a time to meet each other and copy each other’s footage to use in our respective films. A month later, I arrived in Motueka and we got down to business.

To copy the film from one tape to another, we had to playback every minute of film. For several days, we went to different cafes and reminisced over the four weeks we spent together. As the tape scrolled through each part of the trip, I noticed I could remember everything that was going through my head at the time. Because I was so focused on what I was doing, I didn’t realize the mental growth I was going through. It wasn’t until I watched the tape that I recognized the infinite number of frames of thought that make up our lives. I thought, without every one of those mental slides, each of us wouldn’t be where we are at any given moment.

Twelve months later, I thought I had put some pieces together…

The experiences we have throughout our life are stored in our mind. We refer to those memories every time we make a decision. Sometimes our decisions turn out the way we thought they would. Sometimes they don’t.
Every time we try something new, regardless of how it turns out, it serves as an opportunity to learn something we didn’t know before. When we learn something new, our brain stores that knowledge in our memory and helps us make better decisions in the future. As long as we keep trying new things, we’re in good shape.
Now, to allow many people to live among one another and continue trying new things, we have to establish order.
A long time ago, we figured out that if people agreed on a set of rules, many people could live in harmony. We then found out that not everyone always agreed with the rules. Then we had problems.
As we have evolved, we’ve had many disagreements over what our social order should be. Those disagreements have turned into conflicts and those conflicts have turned into wars. We all agree we need to set boundaries, but we’ve never been able to agree on where the lines should be drawn.
When we finally sit down and decide what our boundaries should be, we have to communicate with one another. To help us better communicate with one another, as individuals, and remind us about where we’ve been, as a society, we’ve developed things to help us remember what we have learned. What we use to document our experiences serves as a medium to convey ideas. For example, a person writes a book about his life. You read the book. You imagine the story. The book is a tangible medium that conveys an idea from the author’s mind to you, the reader. Whether or not it physically happened, is beside the point. What matters, is that the idea is communicated from one person to the next.
Over time people have become more efficient in conveying their ideas and emotions: language, music, books, television, movies, etc. Each medium of communication brought about new ways to transmit ideas between people.
As people get older, they are more likely to accept the ideas they’re familiar with as how things actually are. They are less open minded to new ways of thinking. For example,
A few hundred years ago, people thought the world was flat.
A few decades ago, people thought we’d never get to the moon.
A few years ago, people couldn’t imagine something like the Internet.
If you thought otherwise, people might have thought you were crazy.
When the Internet hit the public in the mid 90’s, it initiated one of the greatest economic boosts in history. People figured out that communicating on one network was, at the very least, a good thing for the economy.
Whereas earlier methods of communication transferred ideas from person to person, the Internet makes it possible for infinite people to contribute to both ends of an idea. Thus eliminating the communicative barrier between groups of people and individuals.
The Internet is the first perfectly democratic network of communication. Individuals can gather around a particular idea, anytime, about anything. And there is always competition for organizations to identify with clientele because they compete on the same platform.
On the flip side, the Internet gives individuals the freedom to explore anything they can imagine and document anything they want.
Perfect social order and unlimited personal freedom. Never before have both of these concepts coexisted at the same place.

A traditional republic is structured such that elected officials represent the interests of a larger group of people. They do this by creating boundaries that ideally best suit the people they govern.
This system is naturally flawed.
It is impossible for a small group of people to accurately address the needs of a large group of people. A consensus of a group of people can’t be made without representation from every person.
On the Internet, people have the ability to freely and fairly share their ideas on websites. Conversely, people choose to visit whatever idea/website they please. People can speak for themselves and listen to whom they please. No authority, no bureaucracy.
The Internet embodies what a government is supposed to do: facilitate ideas to provide structure for a group of people. The structure of an Internet political system would be built on ideas. Whoever comes up with the best idea would ‘win the popular vote’, so to speak. In other words, people would be rewarded solely for their ideas.
If the Internet could potentially provide a governmental-type structure to a group of people, where would we start?
Well, what do people want?
Identification seems to be pretty consistent anywhere you go. Since we started creating order, we’ve organized things by association using names and symbols. As we’ve become more advanced, we’ve come up with things like Passports, ID badges, and ringtones to identify ourselves with our nationalities, affiliations and favorite songs.
Identification is the root of organization. As we pummel through time, we continue to invent ways to establish our individual identity.
‘Social networks’ deserve more credit than we give them. Professional networking, connections, hookups, favors, friends, friends of friends, even dating… Networking is essentially the fundamental basis of social structure. Within social networks, we break down elements of our persona to further categorize and define our identities.
Online social networks have quickly become an industry worth 10-figures. In a very short time, many young people with access to the Internet, have made it a habit to explore the increasing number of facets within social networks. The ability to create a personal profile allows people to further explore their own identity and easily share it with friends. Furthermore, right now social networks are tapping into cell phones and email accounts making them an even better point of communication among friends. Young people can’t get enough of it.
Sure, people can create false identities or lie. But as the Internet world is becoming more transparent, our false identities are becoming increasingly difficult to hide.
The user-generated content comprising online social networks probably define its users more accurately and thoroughly than any form of identification we’ve ever come up with.
Now, people can create an identity for themselves and are willfully sharing that information with other people, all over the world. The only disconnection is between those with the Internet and those without the Internet.

The utter simplicity of microfinance has rocked the way people think about poverty. Everyone wants to ‘help the poor’ but the problem is that when people donate to large humanitarian institutions, they have no idea where their money goes. Just like any organization, there is a percentage of money that is wasted through the inefficiency of business. Not to mention corruption.
Microfinance institutions, such as Kiva.org, send field partners into impoverished areas seeking people with ideas for business whom are just short the money to get started. The partners create online profiles for the entrepreneurs on the microfinance website. Lenders, internet users who visit the website, can lend all or part of the money the entrepreneurs need to get their idea off the ground. Once enough money has been lent and the loan is fullfilled, the microfinance institution pays the entrepreneur through a local microfinance bank. The entrepreneur starts the business and pays off the loan, normally within 24 months. Then the money gets funneled back through the line and ends up in the bank account of the lender.
At each step, the field partner writes a short summary of what is going on and notifies the lender through email.
The only liability is that the entrepreneurs will pay off the loan. In my research, I haven’t found a microfinance website with less than a 96% payback rate.
A long-term goal of microfinance institutions is to offer interest on the loan, similar to a savings account. I believe this money would come from convincing the local microfinance bank for a share of the interest.
With microfinance institutions climbing up the backside of the financial world, modern business practice looks like it might meet them halfway.

Capitalism worked well for the West. The idea built solid communities, a well-rounded education system, tons of businesses, even Professional Wrestling. Through capitalism, individuals develop and implement ideas into a group of people. When an idea works, the person is rewarded with money so he may perpetuate his idea and his lifestyle.
Money is important in building a society, but only to a certain point:
Below this point, money = opportunity,
Above this point, money = trouble.
When a person has an idea, he needs money to be able to turn it into something. His focus should remain on expanding the idea and figuring out how to sustain it within a community. Once he values the money more than the idea, bad things happen.
In recent months, the media seems to be discussing two major types of business. Let’s call them ‘old’ and ‘new’. Old business sticks with its rigid bureaucratic hierarchy and rewards tenure. New business tries to identify new ways to think about things and rewards creativity.
When I think of the two, two things come to mind: Enron and Google. (Of course, I’m biased, but I don’t think I’m wrong.) Old business constantly feels pressure from investors to report profits. Businesses, like Enron, are doing anything they can to do this, even lying. Google, on the other hand, came out of nowhere and has quickly amassed unbelievable amounts of money by implementing their own style of marketing.
In short, old business values money and new business values new ideas.
We’re realizing the bad things money can do to society at the same time we’re recognizing the value of new ideas. The developed world has reached the peak of capitalism and is in a state of transition.
What does this mean?
We discussed two ideas that can further explain: microfinance and new business.
First, microfinance does more than help the poor. When a lender provides an opportunity to someone less fortunate, he receives an intangible emotional gain.
From an economic standpoint, emotional gain counts for nothing. As microfinance institutions try to make their idea financially profitable, people are realizing the finite value of money. People want what’s best for themselves. New business philosophy (essentially not selling out) is an example that people are starting to comprehend the value of emotional gain. If this continues, the intrigue of microfinance could potentially erase the dichotomy between the rich and poor.
Second, new business is about new ideas. It’s about discovering new ways to think about things.
If money talks, as the saying goes, and the value of money may be under reevaluation, what else is it trying to say?

The physical world is a place where many people try to learn new things and try to live in harmony. The virtual world is where they can.
I believe when we are born, we become conscious of two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. The physical world is what we see and the mental world is what we think.
For all of human history, we have been trying to live together in our physical world. The physical world is the science, the order, the government, the ideas of life.
At the same time, we have been trying to explore our mental world. The mental world is the art, the expression, the religion, the emotions of life.
The two worlds have always coexisted together: art and science, social order and personal expression, government and religion, ideas and emotions. Each can’t exist without the other.
The two coexist through time.
Over time, we’ve continued to share ideas, concerning, to some degree, a combination of both worlds.
Over time, one entity from each world has clearly become a frontrunner of plausible social structure: government and organized religion.
They are equal and opposite.
Governments manage social order and follow, to some degree, a moral code. Organized religion follows a moral code, and has, to some degree, structure.
Right now, the world is in transition: the two major players are at odds and our two worlds are coalescing on a virtual platform.
The open platform of the Internet is revolutionizing business as we speak. Social networks are reshaping the way we observe a group of people. Microfinance is bringing new value to money.
As far as security goes, all problems stem from some combination of social and personal restriction. The more we use the Internet to identify with what we need, the less reason people have to make trouble.
Over time, our two worlds could potentially coexist in peace.

Over time… hmm.
Where is the Internet? Can we touch it? Is it a thing? A computer is tangible, but like a book, its influence can’t be physically touched. The computer is just the medium between you and the thoughts of another.
If books can convey a story, and computers house the Internet, what then are people? Are they not a conveyance of thoughts as well? They are tangible. They can be used for many things.
Just like a book, just like a computer.
The mere presence of everything in the physical world, including the human form, is a product of our imagination.
As we’ve cruised into the 21st century, technical communication and the Internet have continued to be more of an influence in our lives. Aside from the impact the Internet has made on the economy, just observing the amount of time I personally spend on a computer is worth noting:
10 years ago, I only used computers for typing papers at school. Say maybe 4 hours a week. Now, if I had it my way, I’d probably spend no less than 4 hours a day on a computer.
So, 10 years ago, computers took up less than 3% of my life. Now, they take up almost 17% of my life.
In other words, 17% of my life I spend sitting in one place, exploring my thoughts and the thoughts of other people using my fingers, my eyes and my mind.
Other than using my fingers to type and my eyes to interpret what’s on the screen, what other purpose does my body serve when I surf the Internet? The more time we spend exploring our mental world, the less we depend on the physical world.
17% of my life sitting in the same place.
That’s a significant change in lifestyle. Will this percentage continue to increase?
Over time, we could strike a peaceful balance between our two worlds.
Over time, we could decide one world is better than two. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen.
With each of us spending increasing amounts of time in the virtual world, will our physical world one day become obsolete?
If we are in fact living in two separate worlds and it is possible they will coalesce, what should we do?
Well, our natural resources are drying up, most of the planet is still underdeveloped and the boundaries we’ve drawn in the developed world are dangerously tight. Since order is the one thing we never seem to have gotten right, it’s likely the best idea would prevail if we were to put our faith in an open source democracy.
What is in store for us next, we can’t be sure. What we can do, is hypothesize:
There are four perpetual beings of life in our physical world: earth, virus, species and intelligence.
There are four possible threats to our physical world: natural disaster, disease, ego and a new world existing only in our mind perhaps a completion of the physical world.
How will our story end?
Well, how did it begin?
I guess first it was the earth. Then maybe some water. Then virus’s and organism’s came together. Shortly after, humans stumbled into the picture.
The earth has been around a long time. We’re at a point right now where we may have figured out why it is we’re here. This is the most exciting thing ever. Ever… in the history of the world. It would be a shame to see billions of years of evolution wasted on civil dispute.
Over time, we will have no time.
So this story will end as it began. With a statement as simple to understand as it is to follow through when you believe in something,
Everything boils down to this: the things we know and the things we don’t know. To figure out the things we don’t know, we have to try new things.

Americanism

2008-09-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

In the few political clips I’ve seen this election campaign, everyone – politicians and journalists both – claim to know what Americans want. But before you can really answer this question, you must first understand what an American is. What does it mean to be an American?

I think many people living in the United States have forgotten the country was founded by immigrants. It was founded by the type of people who took chances, the ones who said, “I want to take a chance going to a new place to provide a better life for myself and my family.” (for the most part)

Hundreds of years later, immigrants still feel that way. Despite its poor reputation in the world and increasingly dismal domestic issues, it is still without question, the most sought after country to live in the world.

What happened? When did resident Americans gain this sense of entitlement that America is theirs to offer?

America belongs to no one. In fact, America is not even a place, it’s a state of mind. America, in its purest sense, is the most successful, well-grounded religion ever established. It is a place that grants people the chance, through ambition, innovation and hard work to earn a way of life of their choice. It also says to anybody who tries to tamper with that belief, that they will be destroyed.

Believing in America also means to never forget we are all immigrants and that the door is closed to no one.

After 9/11, we closed the doors to most immigrants. 9/11 was the day the American government had the opportunity to reevaluate how the United States went about pursuing its way of life. The government seemed to know what America wanted – it shut its borders down and stopped listening to its citizens and its enemies. At that point, the belief of America began to dwindle.

Seven years later, America found two presidential candidates who undoubtedly symbolize the spirit of America: a man who in a time of war set his own freedom aside until it was granted all his men, and a man who came from little and earned his freedom through hard work and determination.

A war hero – who defended the American spirit,
and a self-made man – who pursued the American dream.

Now, the issue is not about the character of the two men running for office. They, in their own actions at one point in time, truly exuded the spirit of America. But, as with any religion, it’s near impossible to put that spirit into words.

I believe in America. I believe in a place where ambition, innovation and hard work can bring happiness to ones life. Even with two people like the opposing truly American presidential candidates poised to lead America next, judging from their gross inability to know what I, as an American, want from my government, I believe our flame is not about to burn any brighter.

As the current administration has eloquently shown us over the last eight years, no one is responsible for this. It is both – the government’s miscalculation of what Americans want and the population’s inability to tell them what they want – that is undermining the integrity of our great nation.

In order to restore our nation to what it once was – a place of prosperity, growth and unparalleled innovation – Americans must figure out what they want and communicate this message to their government.

So, what is it we want? Or how about, what are the specific beliefs we hope our priests and rabbis carryout in the belief of Americanism?

Detroit KAbuverdianu - 265-11111

2008-09-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

Introducing Detroit, a 5 member strong hip hop group from Assomada, Cape Verde.

(Named in order of appearance in the video): Jon, Giro, Bruno, Ade and ED-Young rap about Assomada (265 is the local area code) and being kings of their thriving city (11111 is for each of the "cinco re", 5 kings).

"What's up Detroit?! That's what 50 says to get the crowd hyped up, you know?" says ED-Young, Detroit's front man, in reference their inspiration for the group name. Heavily influenced from American hiphop artists such as Lil' Wayne, TI, Young Jeezy, 2PAC and of course 50cent, Detroit KAbuverdianu is part of an impressive number of hiphop artists on the rise in Cape Verde.

For more Capeverdean artists, including the multitude of other genre's comprising an unusually diverse music selection of this small island culture, check out www.sodadeonline.com.

What you need to do everyday

2008-09-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thought about what people actually do with themselves everyday?

Everyday, people need to do a few things to be happy: rest, exercise, eat, learn something and talk to people. We also have an obligation to not cause injury to any other person. If a person were to carryout all of these things everyday, I think people would be in good shape.

What are people looking at on the Internet?

2008-09-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Internet is popular. What are people looking at?

Top 25 Websites (2008, US only)
1. Google – explore
2. Yahoo! – explore
3. Myspace – socialize, express
4. YouTube – socialize, express
5. Facebook – socialize, express
6. Windows Live – explore
7. Microsoft Network (MSN) – explore, express
8. EBay – buy/sell - marketplace
9. Wikipedia – learn, educate
10. AOL – explore
11. Craigslist.org – buy/sell - marketplace
12. Blogger.com – create, document
13. Amazon.com – buy/sell, marketplace
14. Go – explore
15. Photobucket - express
16. CNN - Cable News Network – learn, educate
17. ESPN – entertain
18. The Internet Movie Database - entertain
19. Flickr – express, network
20. Microsoft Corporation
21. Comcast.net
22. WordPress.com – create, blog
23. The New York Times - learn
24. Weather.com - learn
25. AOL Instant Messenger - network

What’s this mean? Lots of searching, socializing and learning. It's like we, people, are going back to school for the first time. We're walking around trying to get our bearings, meeting new friends and figuring out how to keep in touch with the ones we already have and sitting in a virtual classroom feeding ourselves whatever information we want to know. Yeah, this internet-thing is a whole new ballgame baby.

Influence, where dat come from?

2008-08-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

What influences people?
friends/family, school, newspaper, television... and of course the internet. the problem with traditional media (newspaper, TV) is that there is a totally captive audience. if you think what you are learning is bullshit, you only have X channels to turn to, or have only X sources of literature. this is where Internet has flipped education. there is no longer a captive audience. instead of people having to sit and watch shows that are on TV, internet site creators have to continually please their customer.

Another source of education is school. And I think, from my own experience, school is so removed from the application of theory, the system is crumbling in on itself. instead of shoving traditional theory down our throats at college, schools should involve youth in the application/business of the theory from day 1. Had they done this in the Building Construction program at tech, i bet the entire housing crisis could have been averted. Sure, a bit grandiose. But it’s too easily overlooked how youth can bring new ideas into old business. This should be respected. I think this instance is indicative of the downfall of the economy - failure to innovate.

So media needs to adapt to the customer (and is doing so on the internet) and school needs to adapt to business (o-o-o, wait for it, o-on the Internet).

Philosophers will be kings

2008-08-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

There are three perpetual beings of life on this planet:

Earth
Virus
Species

Earth would include dirt, water, plants – anything involved in the solar cycle
Virus would include diseases, cancers, or illnesses that any sort of plant or species could contract
Species would include any living organism, including most importantly, humans.

Each of the three perpetual beings can work to the detriment of life by either the forces of nature or carelessness of humanity, through:

Natural disaster
Disease
Human conflict

In the event of one of the aforementioned catastrophe’s were to occur, it is the responsibility of the government to intervene and provide:

Relief for natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina,
Healthcare for preventable diseases/illnesses,
And security from continual human conflict – during times of war or in maintaining law and order.

Beyond these three responsibilities, a government must serve to educate its people how to prevent these three catastrophe’s from happening. Thus you have a fourth, and endlessly subjective, responsibility of government: education.

You cannot specifically define what people can or should learn. You can only offer them the opportunity to do so. So the more opportunities a place offers to learn, the higher the chances citizens will prepare themselves for the future.

I think a smart government would promote opportunities to learn how to live a low-impact, healthy lifestyle and work with people to promote appeasement rather than conflict. What would those opportunities look like? Going by the theory of the Wisdom of Crowds, if you asked enough people, I think you’d find your answer.

Time and money

2008-08-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

Time and money to spare:
If you have both, you must be bored.
If you have neither, you must be happy.
If you have one, you have the ability to change the world.
To do so, you must be willing to gamble.

movement, take I

2008-08-13T03:12:00.001-07:00

Below is a diagram of many of the projects Nick and I have been kicking around in the past year. If you were to put them together, in theory, you could piece together an entire lifestyle that consisted solely on solar energy.

Malaria dream

2008-08-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

so we gotta take malaria pills in the rainy season, right? they give you crazy dreams... like, i had this dream last night that these guys were testing me to become part of the cia. badass stuff.. like i was doing all this undercover stuff, like passing codes and stealing documents and stuff. i made it pretty far in the test, then they wanted me to go into a house of prostitutes and screw some bitches. they made a list of stuff they wanted me to do to some women. i was thinking it was gonna be some kind of collateral or something and was like fuck that and i threw the cell phone back at the agent. then i woke up with a smile on my face. those bastards cant get nothin on me...

Vote for Snowball and the three-day week

2008-08-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

I just finished Animal Farm. Man, that book was good. When it was first assigned to me in high school, I wasn’t nearly ready to handle that kind of reading. But now that I have a better understanding how the world works and don’t worry (as much) about who I’m going to sit with at lunch, I’m at an age where this kind of reading really turns me on.

For those who haven’t read the book or forgot some of the details, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story about this group of animals on a farm that were treated badly by their master, Mr. Jones. In response to their faithful leader’s dying wish, Major, the animals rebelled, kicked Jones off the farm and took control.

After the rebellion, all of the animals fell into different roles. For example, horses worked harder than others, the chickens hung out and laid eggs and the pigs, the cleverest of all the animals, took to making the major decisions for everyone. In no time, Animal Farm turned into a beautiful paradise, where all the animals were free. At the helm of the decision-making, two of the pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, were always at odds. After some months, there came to be a heavy debate on whether the animals should build a windmill, as suggested by Snowball, or not.

The animals forged themselves into two factions: the ones who believed the windmill would save enough labor so they wouldn’t have to work as hard and the ones who felt like they should increase the food production to make sure they didn’t starve to death.

Snowball’s campaign slogan was, “Vote for Snowball and the three-day week.” Napoleon, his opponent, snuffed in opposition then unleashed a group of dogs, chased Snowball away and, thereafter, turned their paradise back into a dictatorship.

I think the moral of the story is two things: if you want to get rid of some oppressive force, you must learn to take care of yourself. The animals did that. The second part is learning to defend that freedom. If only Snowball hadn’t been run out by that sonofabitch Napoleon. Had he won the election, I bet the animals would have built many other life-made-easy projects to cut their three-day week even shorter. Think how easy life would be if we allowed the forces of nature to do our legwork.

Here’s a diagram of some of the project ideas Nick and I have been kicking around in the past year. If you were to connect all of these projects together, you might be able to create that paradisical lifestyle Snowball dreamt of and, if Napoleon set the dogs on you, choose to defend that freedom as if you had no other reason to live. I just may.

What is wisdom?

2008-07-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

Life is so cyclical. You hang out with some people for awhile, then you go weeks without seeing them. You eat the same food for awhile, then you get sick of it and try something else. You do lots of things right in a row, then you get cold and look like a fool for some time.

While life certainly goes in circles, is there anything that is constant? What stays constant while our relationships and our moods and our agenda continues to change? Time.

With each time we go around the cycle in this constant medium of time, we mature. We grow, we learn more about our surroundings and how to manage this inevitable cycle. So what is gained as we mature?

Would it be the percentage of time that we are happy? No matter what cycle you are in, you can always put a value on your happiness. And I’m trying to argue that one of the things we can get better at in life, is better managing our cycles, is keeping our overall happiness as high as possible for the longest period of time.

So in fewer words, those who are happy for the longest period of time, are wise.

Nobody's ever made it the first time

2008-06-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

You remember that part of the Matrix where he tries to jump between buildings? I had a dream about that the other night. I was watching people try and jump then falling flat on their face. I never tried it in my dream - I was trying to summon the courage to jump, but never quite did. I’m not sure if I can fly. I’m also not sure if its something you just do. I figure as long as im thinking about how to fly, then this must be a good thing. Maybe that’s what flying is… always thinking about if you could fly and what you would need to do to prepare yourself if you had no other choice.

What if our elders used reason?

2008-06-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

About that last post on youth culture -

Current politics, education and even business don't identify with youth culture as much as it should. I think we have to try too hard to live a good life. I think young people everywhere, from the US to Afghanistan, are all struggling to believe what our elders say, be it religious or political or whatever. At least I am.

Congruently, how many media reports mention something like, ‘without any significant changes to current policies… insert horrible future projection here [like “by 2025, 67% of the world’s population will face water shortages unless significant changes are introduced in water resource management. And by 2030, global food production will have to increase by 54% to meet increasing population demands.”]’1

To seriously tackle these issues, it will require nothing short of a change of lifestyle. A shift of values. Coming moreso from people who still have a choice of what their values will be - people who have their whole life ahead of them.

Young people do. Young people still care. We haven’t yet decided what we believe, so we ask questions. We haven't firmly decided on what we value and we fight the system because we're not convinced it's values are what we want.

If our elders used reason (like the facts above) to inspire young people to help solve some of the world’s pressing issues, I think we’d see those significant changes we’re waiting for. And, in doing so, I think we’d all be a bit happier.

Being practical about how significant changes could change our lifestyle, the quickest solution to this will probably come from the top. Which, in turn, only adds to the profundity of the upcoming election.

In the June 7th issue, The Economist (2) nicely summarizes the character of both candidates: “[They] have their flaws and their admirable points; the doughty but sometimes cranky old warrior makes a fine contrast with the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary.”

This election is old versus new - tradition versus innovation. From what I've read about the two candidates, I bet we’ll see that significant change a lot faster with the young guy in there. America, though, will decide whether we get there in the next four years or have to wait longer until we have a leader that recognizes the immeasurable potential of human ingenuity.

In time though I think we, as humanity, will understand how fundamentally important it is to reach our youth and how, if we don’t make significant changes to our lifestyle, it could prove to be fatal. Outside of politics, if Obama doesn’t get elected, with the Internet growing at its belligerent pace… would it really matter? In other words, will the Internet both, approach youth culture and address world crises, before politics does? I can't wait to find out.

1 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data
2 Economist, 7 June 2008, America at its Best, p13

Nova Força - Country Stars

2008-06-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Here's an 8-minute film about a youth group from Fonta Lima, a zone just outside Assomada. Several nights a week these kids get together to dance, act and learn a little English. Aristides Vaz, the founder and President of the group, says "it keeps them out of trouble."

Well, these kids may sober and not pregnant, but they bad when it comes to dancin'!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MPeyexnBNZM

Youth man, shouldn't youth be the focal point of all of the crises happening in the world? Is there any other way out of terrorism, global warming or poverty (to name some big ones) other than inspiring our youth to do good things?

If anyone has any objection or opinion on this issue, think of this as me trying to stir debate...

Fans of cement, some quotes

2008-06-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

Fans of cement like to point out that it is the most widely used substance on the planet after water.
-The Economist, Concrete Proposals Needed article, p104, December 22, 2007

There was truth and there was untruth and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
-1984

Nothing great is easy.
-Socrates, Republic

If you’re lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he’ll never come off the field second.
-Vince Lombardi

Internet growth = 21.8% of the world has access,
2000-2008 – 300% growth

There are two ways to live your life. As though nothing is a miracle. Or as though everything is a miracle. -Albert Einstein

By the power of truth I, while living, have conquered the universe.
-V in V for Vendetta

One definition of maturity – Thom Keel, I know… quote – is one’s reluctance to indulge in instant gratification. Meaning we’re patient, we’re faithful, we’re frugal.

The ideal government is an order that works against itself. It’s existence is designed to abolish its existence. That is the government I want to create. It’s purpose is to train people to become self-sufficient.

Blind Spots

2008-06-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

You know, in the past year and few weeks respectively, I’ve gotten to know two organizations a little better. The US Government and the Mormon religion.

I’ve noticed two similarities: they both operate on very rigid rules and both talk about great things. The Government talks about this fantasy of actual work, instead it throws theory at you until your head rings and make doing anything productive that much more difficult.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon Church, on the other hand focuses so much on the past and on the story of their church, they wouldn’t see Jesus if he happened to come back like all Christians think he will.

If the Peace Corps wants to be a progressive organization, or if the members of the Mormon Church want to see if Jesus actually ever does come back, both organizations need to be reasonable and see the whole picture.

Theory is for children.

World Population

2008-05-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

If you listen to powerful people, it seems like someone’s always trying to convince people how they should live their life. The good ones use reason to convince people to be good, to try new things, to appreciate what they have or to just simply be happy. Of course, no one has figured out one way that suits everyone because we still have war. To propose yet another set of reasons why we should be good, let’s do some math:

According to this website,
106,456,367,669 is a rough estimate of the number of people who have ever lived. Granted, we’ll never know, but instead of just saying they couldn’t know, this random website I found put a little formula together and came up with this number.

The estimated world population in 2007 was 6,377,600,000 (The Economist Pocket World in Figures)

So, right now, every living person represents just under 6% of all of the people who have ever graced the earth.

In other words, every living person represents 16.69 people, almost 17 lives.

Whether we do ever figure out some kind of moral code that suits everyone, all we can really do is reason. We don’t know how many people have ever lived, and we don’t really know how many are living right now. However, if I can convince myself that my presence here on earth represents the lives of 17 people who spent their life working to provide for their children, ultimately me, that’s enough reason for me to wake up everyday and try to live the life they wouldn’t shake their head at.

What makes me shake my head? Whenever I do something dumb, I stop and kind of curse at myself. I try to ingrain in my memory not to do it again, or how to avoid this problem the next time around. I try to realize this as an opportunity to learn something and possibly improve my life.

Hmm, opportunity. How many people in the world have opportunity? Or what about how many people have the opportunity to provide opportunity for other people? How many people are wedged into the human system such that they, if they chose, would have a chance to reasonably influence a number of people? Not many.

What do you need to influence people? Power, money, yeah… no. That’s how you impose influence. How do you influence people?

What about consistently being good? If you’re consistently a good person, I think people will mirror your behavior, just as they mirror bad. They will respect you and show you that respect in their actions and kind of reverence of you.

I think though because the way our society is structured, it’s difficult for truly good people to get money and power. It almost takes being ungood to reach those levels of authority. And, subsequently those people with authority can distort people’s image of what being good is.

What if people with power and money were good? It’s possible but we need a system of checks and balances to keep them straight. It’s difficult for leaders to consistently be good because when people have an opportunity to sacrifice their morals for personal gain and get away with it… at some point, they’re likely to do so. Because they are human.

Things are changing though. People’s lives are becoming more transparent. We’re dumping more of our lives online and allowing people to know more things about us, voluntarily. And those things we don’t want people to know about, well, count the number of powerful people who have been politically disabled because of the transparency of the Internet. I think this kind of transparency is what the world needs and will depend on in order to consistently put good people up front and keep them honest.

In fact, instead of ever proving morality through mathematics or a perfect government or something, will the ultimate argument for morality be allowing everyone to choose their influence? Will it be for each of us to create our own argument for how one should live their life and not be imposed on by taxes? Will our social authority, or the direction of our taxes, be commanded by where Internet users choose to spend their money? In other words, will people of power be the ones who have the best ideas how to spend money and consistently spend that money wisely?

In the near future, influential people will be selected by the populace and can be replaced the moment the populace believes they aren’t telling the truth. Until we get there though, all we can do is to try and imagine ourselves as leaders of the 17 people who stand behind us.

40 minutes, some words that grabbed my attention and why

2008-05-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

If you can’t do anything right, do a lot.
-philosophy of Mao Zedong
I don’t like to hurt people, but I think Mao and I are on the same page when it comes to what we do

Pride is something God Almighty greatly dislikes, as it arouses a man to feel superior.
-Osama bin Laden
I don’t like pride either. At least in the sense Osama describes here. I think the values of the West, pride (and ego) easily being among them, must be reevaluated for Americans to see any significant progress in the Middle East. That, in addition to, both sides ceasing the religious and political justification of killing innocent people. Okay, yes... it is complicated.

Nao existe fé sem obediencia.
(Faith doesn’t exist without obedience)
-Biblia da Igreja de Jesus Christo
(from the Bible of the Mormon Church)
Mormon’s don’t ask questions - they obey their system of beliefs. That is what they do (as far as I understand). I think there’s something admirable about that. What system of beliefs does your average American unquestioningly follow?

Peace Corps, small and symbolic, might be good public relations, but a Peace Corps that was large and had a major impact on problems in other countries could transform the ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD.
-Sergeant Shriver, the agency’s first director, 1961

The energy in sunlight hitting the Earth every 40 minutes is equivalent to the world’s total annual energy consumption.
- 2007 Scientific American article
What are we waiting for?

Alvenaria (masonry) in Cape Verde

2008-05-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

Ricardo, Faustino, Zico, Edimilson and Vladmir - a group of my 11th grade Civil Construction students at school had an assignment in their Construction Technology class on masonry, obviously about the masonry in Cape Verde. They asked me to help them make a film about it.

This 20-minute presentation covers local techniques for setting foundations, laying block and stone, and pouring concrete pillars. They were ecstatic when they showed it to their class. I was too.

Note: The students filmed 100% of this presentation. I only edited and gave some filming tips.

2024

2008-05-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

In George Orwell’s 1984, the author paints a picture of what could have been the future. Written in 1949, he chose a not so distant date in the future where government, or Big Brother, controls every aspect of your life. It watches you sleep, hovers over you at work and arrests citizens if they hint they might have a thought that went against The Party.

So throughout the book, Winston, the still-rational-thinking main character, sought out a way to beat Big Brother. He was eventually caught and at the very end, loved and truly believed he loved Big Brother. He fought the whole book to go against the system, then when he figured out Big Brother’s motive, he caved shortly thereafter. Big Brother’s motive, is power. God is power.

He gave up though. That’s the profound moment in the book. Could his admission of defeat be his acknowledging of God? Or something, like we need God?

Winston didn’t have the resources we have nowadays. There are some people who will pick up the fight Winston recognized. I’ll be crying just like him, because I’m gonna love the perfect system we’re about to create. Yeah, its gonna be pretty awesome.

There are two sides of business

2008-05-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

There are two sides of business: the buyer and the seller.

It’s the responsibility, or in the best interest, of the buyer to know what specifically he is buying.

Now, the bigger a company is, the more you divide the money among middlemen before you end up at the actual product. In many cases it is cheaper to go through the big business. For example, in a successful business such as Wal-Mart, it is cheaper to go through them than actually buying a t-shirt from the person who made it.

At times though, going through the middleman (or the company) isn’t worth the money. This is inefficiency.

Traditionally, governments are inefficient. Meaning that if your tax money was better, more efficiently managed, citizens would get more value for their tax dollars.

I’m suggesting creating a website that shows people exactly where their money goes. I want to create a website to post public projects that people can donate money to (investment opportunities too). For example, building a community sized solar still in Cape Verde, or a technical school in Chad, or even improving the street in downtown Atlanta. The site will require the people posting projects to provide all information including a detailed budget. Afterwards, they can prove all of their expenses on the website to the funders to see.

Every project would have a webpage. And the financiers, as project sponsers could have advertising space on the webpage for free.

If a tax-exempt donation means if a taxpayer pays you, the non-profit, instead of the government, they have to pay less taxes, what if you created a system that identified the specific needs of a community and presented it in such a way that you identified exactly where the money would go.

Meaning, you see what you pay for before you even donate. The way PCPP (peace corps Partnerships) handles posting projects, is that you must plan every penny you plan to spend in your proposal, including labor, then show with receipts once the project is finished. If an organization gains a reputation, it’s more likely to be offered the cash for the bigger projects. Or profits. Then you decide what you earn, your value.

Still update

2008-04-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Correction to the Tampa Bay statistics last time. Yeah, we don’t stand a chance against the desal plants in production:
Desal plant: One day 25M L, two days 50M L.
Still: One day 2L, two days 4L…

Even with the 10M in annual costs for the desal plant, we can’t compare in output. All I can say, is that the price of oil doesn’t look like it’s going down anytime soon. So… hey TB plant operator, we’ll see you in 50 years chubby.

Lots of movement with the solar still project. About three weeks before we were to start the second phase, an improved still model and copper pipe solar hot water heater, the school said they didn’t have sufficient funding. Bummer.

Nick and I considered submitting a Peace Corps Partnerships Program Proposal and ask you all to help fund the $1000 second phase. At the last minute, Nick followed a contact from our boss Yonis, and convinced the Luxembourg Cooperation to foot the bill. (The Luxembourg Cooperation built and still funds all four of the technical school’s in Cape Verde.)

In the last seven weeks of school, along with our seniors and other Civil Construction professors, we’re going to build a copper pipe solar hot water heater, to increase the temperature before it enters the still, and an improved still model, designed by Nick. The new model has three small steps raising the saltwater basin so the water vapor doesn’t have to travel as far to catch on the glass.

The attached proposal includes design plans, materials list, and brief plans for the future. We’ve set a goal to design a model (including hot water heater and still) that sufficiently distills enough water for one person per day, 20L.

This week the project was accepted at the 2008 EuroSun Solar Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Looks like Nick and I are takin a trip baby!

This week the Centers of Business and Professions, a 6-12 month institution offering classes on various subjects ranging from auto mechanics to the Internet, agreed to fund a pilot lecture/construction program in conjunction with the second phase. Sometime in May, Nick will give a 20-hour lecture on solar distillation and use the continual construction of the second phase to demonstrate the project’s simple construction to qualified teachers at the Business Center’s.

Along with the director’s of the Center’s, we are considering starting a new program on smart energy projects and/or connecting these ideas with existing programs like hydroponics. Either way, in the first lecture, the information will be divulged among bright, ambitious Capeverdeans who could potentially take this project to the community level.

Well Trained Students

2008-04-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

Here’s my 11th grade student’s schedule:
Six days a week, they study Physics, Mathematics, Discrete Geometry, English, Portuguese, French, Resistance of Materials, Construction Technology, Drafting, AutoCAD, Phys Ed and 8 hours of construction practical labs.

In my high school, we took four subjects per semester, one of which was usually a joke. The fact these kids are held to such a high standard… is impressive.

Four of 131 students last semester failed my class. Other teachers condemn me for being too easy on them. My argument is that they don’t need to be held back to get better, that you need to let them go and have them figure it out on their own. The fact is, they have few places to go if and when they do graduate. That’s where the improvement needs to be. It’s not that they need to understand discrete geometry as a 16-year-old kid, it’s that there’s no job market if the information does in fact get through.

All said and done though, for a country that has a pretty poor job market, Cape Verde is breeding exceptionally well-trained students.

Just moving

2008-04-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

If you were to stand outside my door, you’d think Alex was still around. Since she moved to Praia a week ago, to start her extended third year in Peace Corps working with a public radio station, the conversation has continued as if she never left.

Have you ever thought about how much of one’s day is filled with conversation? When I wake up and make myself decent, I converse with myself about what I have to do that day -- I plan, I note, I make something to eat. Once I walk out the door, I’m prepared to speak with people - prepared to put my own thoughts on pause and make conversation with the people I will see that day.

“Modi ki bu sta?” How are you? I ask everyone on the way to work.
“So na moviment, bo?” Just moving, you?
“Sem, mi tambe, so na moviment.” Yep, me too, just moving.

When I get to school, I converse with my students, then dilly around with the solar project – talk with other professors, get materials, plot with Nick how we’ll will attack the next step, and so on.

After the sun runs its course, I return to my house. Earlier, I would prepare myself to talk for hours on end about my feelings, why people act like they do, or something else aspiringly intelligent with Alex. But now things are different. I come home prepared to go head first into an evening of meditation: hours of self-directed thoughts reflecting on the day, preparing for the next, thinking how simple life can be and how complicated it sometimes is, and thinking about how awesome it’s gonna be when the young open-minded Internet-savvy generation makes their way into the workforce. Basically, I sit around and chew on the things that enter my head.

So if you happen to be within earshot of the green apartment in Achada Riba, don’t be shocked if you hear me talking to myself. I’m just a peaceful resident trying to respect the thoughts that are often times not listened to enough.

A long day, Island Money

2008-04-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

I think I had the busiest day of my life today. If you were anyone I talked to though, you probably wouldn’t have thought so.

My eyes opened automatically at 630 because I knew I had many things to do.

At nine thirty, they were half an hour into the technical drawing class and my students were clearly bored with the lesson plan. I was teaching them how to take corresponding two-dimensional planes, connect them together and draw the figure in an isometric perspective, or three dimensions. I switched my game plan and had them cut out a hexagon figure with six connecting sides. It would be easier to show the top, front and side view.

The front office grudgingly let me borrow scotch tape to tape the sides together. and it took the students awhile to understand how to cut something out without sissors. When they figured out I was giving out tape, they swarmed the desk. The assignment was completely forgotten about and it turned into a fight for who could rob teacher of the most tape.

I got angry at first, then I laughed and took a deep breath. They completely forgot what they were doing when something more appealing, in this case an opportunity to take something from their teacher, presented itself. The bell rang, they couldn’t leave the classroom fast enough.

At eleven, Nick and I had a meeting with the other civil construction professors. We were trying to convince them to stick to what they said about letting us build a solar hot water heater with their students during their practical lab. One of them was fighting us, complaining that he had many things to teach that semester and couldn’t give us the time. The other two seemed indifferent.

Break for lunch at noon: fish and rice. At one I had to meet Carlos to look over a report for Alex then at two I had my seniors for their first day of the trimester.

Island Money, April 12
The first question I ask my seniors the first day of their last trimester was, “can anyone explain what is going on in Iraq right now?”
They paused, surprised by the seemingly irrelevant question.
“Bush gosta de guerra!” Bush likes war!
“Jobi pa Osama Bin Laden.” They’re looking for Osama Bin Laden.
One of them in the back laughed while he responded, “yeah, they can’t find him.”
Then, “Petrol!”

That’s right, OIL! I drew an ignorant map of the world focusing on the Middle East.
“In the year 2000, Saudi Arabia exported more oil than any other country in the world. Now, what country was and still is the biggest consumer of oil?”
“Estados Unidos!”
“That’s right. Basically, the government of Saudi Arabia realized how much money they made selling their oil to Americans and valued the protection Americans gave them against opposing forces. Over the years, the Saudi’s valued the oil and security more than they valued the respect of their people. Congruently, the American government also realized that the American people were very dependent on oil and made sacrifices to maintain that constant source of energy. Thus, oil has (arguably) become more important than accurately representing the best interest of their citizens.*

(*Some of the facts came from the beginning of the movie, The Kingdom.) more importantly though, after a long debate with my brother, I now recognize there are many reasons, in addition to oil, why the US entered Iraq in 2003… I was ignorant and oversimplified)

“In 1990, Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s horrible dictator, took his army and entered Kuwait, a small country also with lots of oil. He wanted in. The Saudi’s said, no. You can’t do this. Two groups of people offered help: Osama Bin Laden and his army, Al-Qaeda, who recently fended off the Russian’s who invaded Afghanistan in the 80’s, and the Americans, who armed Osama Bin Laden’s army during that war.

Osama wanted to defend Arabia from horrible dictatorship and George Bush Senior wanted to help out his friends. The Saudi’s went with the American army and told Osama they didn’t need help.

Osama got upset. He was mad he wasn’t given a chance to defend Arabia and had reason to believe there was major corruption going on within the Saudi Government.

Throughout the 90’s, he started bombing people. Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen… then… do you all remember this date?” They whispered the date as I wrote 11/9/2001 on the board.

We, us, all of us here will always remember that date. Until we die, we will always remember this date. This was when Osama attacked America. He took down two of the biggest buildings in America.
“Yeah, with planes.”
“Teacher, why did he attack those buildings?”
“Because those buildings were the World Trade Centers. That was where lots of business was done. Lots of buying and selling, lots of money changing hands. Osama thinks that when people make a lot of money, they get corrupt and lose sight of their core responsibilities as individuals. He’s delusional though because he’s taking out his anger on innocent people instead of the figureheads responsible for the wrongdoing. (yeah, this was more opinionated than anything, what isn’t nowadays though?)

“Now, when the US investigated the events from Sept 11, they found 15 of the 20 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

“In 2001, Bush’s son was president. He too liked the relationship his family had with the Saudi’s and didn’t really want to stir up anything that would put that relationship to chance. In 2003, he decided to start a war to remove Saddam from power. He came up with some reasons about weapons and involvement in 9/11, but they ended up not being true.

“So now in 2008, five years into the war, America has dislodged a somewhat stable, although atrocious, government in Iraq, not caught Osama Bin Laden, the guy suspected to be responsible for the 9/11, and waits for the next explosion to take the lives of any number of innocent people anywhere in the world. The borders are tight, the economy is struggling and the price of oil is dramatically increasing… last week, do you all know the price of oil even went up here, in Cape Verde. How much does it cost to go to Praia?”

“220 escudos.” It used to be 200 escudos for the 45-minute ride in a Hiace to Praia, the capital city.

“My point is this: what can Cape Verde do to help the situation of the world right now?”
“Americans can stopover here on the way to Iraq to fight.”
“Nooo, no, no. Why would they want to do that? It’s peaceful here. You shouldn’t want to bring war here.”
They knew that. They didn’t know what else to say. Since Cape Verde won their independence from Portugal in 1975 fighting a war with Guinea-Bissau, in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde has been a peaceful country. And every Capeverdean is proud of that.

“So what can you all do to help this situation? What can we do to help heal many of the open wounds in the world today?”
Pause.
“Okay… where did this whole story start?”
Short pause, “petrol.” Yeeesssss….
“Exactly. And what is petrol?” Pause. “Petrol is energy. It’s what the Saudi’s sold to get rich, what the Americans use more of than any other country and comprises 78% of the total energy consumption in Cape Verde. People predict the world’s oil supply will run out before we die – some estimates predict we have about half a century. We must begin to look for other sources of energy.

“So, how can we, out here in the middle of the ocean, help the situation in the Middle East?” Pause. “What do we have a lot of here?”

“We have lots of sun and lots of saltwater. And wind.”

“Correct. What can we do with those natural resources.”

“Fazi dessalinizador solar.” Make solar stills. They either said that because that’s what they thought, or because that’s usually the answer to anything off topic I talk about in class.
They continued though, “wind, solar, water… wave.”
“Hell yeeaah. Energy. We need to ween ourselves off our dependence on oil. We can do that by focusing on projects that use the natural resources we have around us: sun and saltwater. Look, there are jobs in this profession, there are people with money ready to pay us to build projects like the solar still. For anyone to try and tell you there is no job market in Cape Verde, tell them they are wrong.”

Nick and I have continued to expand the project. I wanted to etch into their minds how seawater and sun can be turned into jobs, food and money - thus lessening the country’s dependence on oil and giving young people a reason not to leave the country. On the board, I drew a diagram from start to finish.

It goes like this: dump the saltwater into a basin, have it trickle through a solar hot water heater, trickle that into a solar still. Collect the distilled water from the solar still. Use the distilled water for either drip irrigation or a hydroponics system. (This trimester they will draw plans for a hydroponics irrigation system.)

By the time I turned around, they were already copying down what was on the board. This never happens.

Theory, meet practicality. I think you two will get along well.

An experiment, April 12
After class the day I gave the energy lecture, I had my best students post their solar still designs from the second trimester in the hallway. Then the class gave them a round of applause. A group of 11th graders then grabbed me on their way out of class. They had asked me the day before to help them film a project for their construction class. I couldn’t say no to that. My eyes almost welled up when they ask me.

On the way to the site, they told me I needed to “experiment” with a Capeverdean woman. I told them women aren’t worth it. They’re not worth the stress in the head. Then they said I should have a baby. Two of them, about 18 years old, had one. One had two. I told them that would be more work. One day I’ll get to that, but right now my work is school. They nodded in approval.

Two hours later I was back in my house. 6pm. My head was thumping.

Zé buzzed. He is my friend from Guinea-Bissau who’s been here long enough to refer to himself as Capeverdean. Zé just opened a bar down the street and was expanding it into an Internet cafe. He had a crush on another Peace Corps Volunteer. Last weekend, he had me send her an email from the bar when we were both half drunk. She hadn’t yet replied.

“Brian, when I do things, I like to finish them. I like to do one thing and finish it before I move on. I can’t get past this thing with Katie. I can’t move on until I hear back from her.” He leaned over, almost bent in half, and took a deep breath. “Ahhh man. Life is difficult.”

“Ze, dude. She’s a woman. She doesn’t think like you do. You have a job and you do your job. It’s not the same when you deal with women. It’s tough, but you gotta shake her from you man, you’re not yourself.”

Women and money - men have to be cautious with both of them. If a man has too much of either, he feels falsely powerful and might do something irrational - like father a child before he’s ready or start a war over documents that never existed. If he has neither, sometimes things are harder than they should be - like respecting down time or buying food. Even the most powerful of men have struggled with women and money at one point in time, if not at the same time.

So, if you can’t live with em and can’t live without em, I guess men need to figure out a way to live with both, women and money. Until I decide to sacrifice my professional ambitions for the comfort of a relationship or have money be an incentive to work, I plan to keep myself obnoxiously busy doing what I’m doing. This way I won’t miss what I don’t have.

You know what the best is?

2008-04-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to be the best. Everyone wants to work hard and get serious about something. But in the world I grew up in, nobody really knew what that was. Some people tried to argue the college they went to was the best, but most people knew deep down it didn’t really matter. Then when my friends and I graduated, everyone got jobs. Nobody really compared those, because jobs don’t really matter either. There’s really nothing you can do to compete with other people.

Business though, has always had competition. Up until now, competition in the US, was to make the most, buy the most, be the biggest, the most prestigious… that was being the best on a certain level.

I think things are changing though. It’s no longer about who makes the most, but who can make the most and use the least. It’s efficiency. The outcome is less important than the input. If you have a truck that can haul a cruise ship but you get a mile a gallon, people aren’t impressed anymore.

With Nick and I, our results are vague. We have no idea how much water we will distill. The intrigue of this project is how much we need to invest to figure that out. We need just a few hundred bucks to test this idea. If we make lots of water, we’ll be successful. If we don’t, no one’s really holding us accountable.

Use as little as you can (money, energy, stress) to make the most. This is the future. You won’t be broke, you won’t be tired and you won’t burn out once it’s over. But if you make any progress, you’ve succeeded.

The people who win at life aren’t the best at anything. It’s the people who use the least to make the most who bring home the trophy.

Who is a customer?

2008-04-01T10:47:00.001-07:00

Who is a customer? The customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of of it. He is not an outsider in our business, he is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

-Mahatma Gandhi, from The Economist, p13, Feb 16th special report on technology and government

Tampa Bay Desal Plant

2008-04-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

My parents mailed me this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At the bottom I cranked out some math to compare our's with their's:

Tampa Bay Desalinization Plant
(from Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb 17,2008)

Largest in the United States
Cost: US$158M (opened five years late and $48M over-budget)
Annual electric bills: $8-10M

Daily output (average): 25M gallons/day = 100M liters/day
Note: it takes 44M gallons of seawater produce 25M gallons of drinking water (leaving 19M gallons of salt concentrate)

TB Desal Plant
$158,000,000 construction cost / 100,000,000 liters/day = $1.58 per liter per day (not counting maintenance or fuel)

CV Solar Still
Our prototype made 2 liters and cost $213. Or $106.50 per liter per day (not counting maintenance)

So,
TB Desal Plant
$1.58 per liter

CV Solar Still
$106.50 per liter

Surely the cost goes down over time and maintenance is a huge factor, just trying something to size up the competition.

Another way to think about it - the closer we get to a dollar per liter the better off we are.

Normal People

2008-04-01T10:34:00.001-07:00

You know how it’s sometimes difficult to really live in a moment? Tough to really appreciate where you are, what you’re doing, how you’re spending that exact moment?

Look at this picture. This student is doing an assignment I gave him in class. What’s going on in his mind? I have no idea. He could be thinking about his family at home, how school is boring, about some girl he wants to make out with or how awesome 50 cent is. What if he’s wondering about that girl on the cover of his notebook?

If he was, he might be thinking, “she’s probably in America. Man, that’s gotta be awesome there. Nice days, lots of rain, lots of fun people, good schools… I bet 50 knows her. Yeah, she’s got it made.”

If that girl was real… picture a pretty girl going running on a nice day... you think she’d be thinking the same thing? You think she’s thinking, “man, America is awesome, we have lots of rain, jobs, education, I’m from the same place as cool people like 50 cent? Life is great.”

Nah, nobody does that. The girl in the picture, if she was real, might be thinking… “America is too stressful, I wish I could go to some island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to get away from this mess. Away from my 60-hour job, away from the traffic, the competition, the crap on TV… okay, forget about it, let’s just focus on running off that hot pocket I had for lunch, ah, my thighs are as fat as hams. Mmm, ham.”

Or she could be perfectly happy and enjoying the nice day. The student could also be focusing on his assignment, narrowing on his gameplan to become a successful architect one day. We will never know.

A bus driver told me one day, “the only normal people are the ones you don’t know.”
On the surface, normal people seem to have their shit together: they look like understand the opportunities before them, understand the importance of drafting if you want to be an architect, recognizing how lucky they are to be able to run on a beautiful sunny day without a thing to worry about.

It ain’t easy to be normal. It ain’t easy to appreciate where you are at any given moment. Our mind wanders because we’re human, because we’re too lazy or too stressed to appreciate what it feels like to be alive.

The good thing is, is that the moment is always there. As long as we’re alive, we’ll have that chance to appreciate where we are. It’s as if our life is waiting for us to stop looking at our watch or fantasizing about what’s on the cover of our notebook and tune in to our own station.

If only it were that easy.

Eustace Conway - The Last American Man

2008-03-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

For half and hour I walked around the apartment in silence. I just finished reading the Last American Man. A beautiful portrait of a Eustace Conway, a man who spent his life trying to convince people to live outside, along with nature. In his youth, he hiked the Appaliachian Trail, climbed mountains in New Zealand, and set two equestrian world records on going across America, once by horseback, once by buggy. The man then went to buy land and started an apprenticeship system in the North Carolina mountains tryin to teach people how to live off the land, as people did for millions of years.

For years, the youth of America feeling stranded from the conformity of America sought his guidance. This took a toll on Eustace. He now gives horseback lessons topay for the care of his horses.

Eustace is an idealist. He figured out a way of life that was perfect for him, away from the errs of society. He felt indebted though to convince people a truer way of life.

The struggle of Eustace is the example of the main struggle we all face in our life. We must find our own place of freedom. The more we feel indebted to convince people how to find it. When you have millions of people trying to voncince people how to live, yyou find conflict. The only way, as Eurstace himself admitted near the end of the book, is through politics. Government can be good. It will depend on honest people staying honest as they find temptation to corrupt the system as they gain power. Men are not angels. And unless men like Eustace who are devout in their belief of our natural freedoms, can avoid the temptations of power and corruption, the system will continue to be flawed.

That’s the kind of man I’d like to be. Challenge me with temptation for what I feel I’m after, can only be found through influence. I will succeed only by a proven number of people moved by what I have to say.

I can’t avoid this balance. I’ve found my happy place. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to tell people about it. There’s power in politics. Along with all of the tests that challenge the righteous man.

Today is Sunday

2008-03-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

Alex spent the weekend in Praia so I was home alone for a few days. On Sunday, I didn’t have too much work to do, and I decided to stay inside for most of the day. I did a little art, did some stuff on the computer, cleaned a little… not too much. You know when you’re alone though and you start thinking about how you spend your time? Like, what would other people would be doing right then? What would someone you admire, or even someone you loathe, be doing right then?

When I’m alone, I sometimes think everyone else is either being super productive, having lots of fun, or both. Is this what makes people feel lonely - thinking everyone else is getting so much more out of their time? Is loneliness an inadequacy we create when we have nothing to do?

I was deep into debate with myself when Tony, a coworker, rang the bell. He came in and we talked about random things. He invited me over to his house. I complied.

We sat down in his one room place and he put in a DVD. We watched Rihanna music videos and he told me about how his old house had a bigger TV. Tony’s next purchase is a refrigerator - he already has a nice stereo, DVD player and two TV’s. Jay-Z came on the screen and I thought, “if Jay-Z thinks he’s so cool, he should be a politician.”

If Jay-Z knew I said that though, he’d probably say something hip and try to make me think life is really about hot bitches and money. By now though, I’m pretty sure he’s wrong - Jay-Z don’t know nothin’. If he did, he’d be making a statement everyone – including white people and actual African people – would righteously aspire to. Instead, he leaves us outside his box of beautiful famous people thinking the only way in is by owning expensive things and having women at your feet.

I wasn’t into hanging out today. Usually I’m nice enough to at least spend some time and chat with people, but today I didn’t really feel like talking. I was in the middle of a good conversation with Deus and wanted to get back to contemplating the complexities of loneliness.

The keys hit the top of the spare oven, their usual place, and I sat back down on the couch trying to find my mental groove again. The clock ticked, the wind blew against the window and my stomach growled. Crap, I forgot to eat again. I hadn’t eaten all day. I found half a can of peas and carrots in the fridge and toasted the last pieces of bread before they molded. Each bite tasted good. The nutrients in the canned vegetables overcame the taste of preservatives. The butter on the toast melted just enough on the hot toast to feel both the texture of the slightly moistened bread and smooth cold butter on my teeth. As I savored the meal, I sat on a plastic stool and stared at the wall. The wall was covered with dark linoleum tiles and a cardboard spice rack hanging from the window.

When food hit my belly, I put my plate in the sink. My eyes slowly gazed out the window across the room. A whistle blew. I heard people playing soccer outside. The bass beats of Funana music blasted through the wall from the house next door. Outside my apartment, doors opened and closed: my neighbors must’ve been doing something important.

Is this where I’m supposed to get lonely and want to do something? If I do something though, I think I’ll miss where I am now - like when I was at Tony’s place and wanted to be back on the couch. Will I miss this moment standing at the sink? Will I look back on this moment and not want to be where I am then because this moment here is better? Well, I won’t know until then. I can only know where I am now. Well, where is that?

I’m where I’ve always been and where everyone else is, all the time. I’m here, trying to get as many smiles out of the day as possible. If I get them on my couch or hanging out with Tony, it’s all the same. I shouldn’t project how people spend their time or how I could be spending mine. Chances are if I were to go out there and find something to do, I would miss where I am right now. So, I’m gonna stay on this couch and enjoy whatever I end up doing because today is Sunday.

How hard can it be?

2008-03-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

I don’t really like the idea of having to pay to go to school. With the number of things to learn about the world, it’s a shame it costs tens of thousands of dollars to pay to go to school, essentially proving to people that you are educated. Unfortunately, for many young people today, this is our only option.

Here’s how it could go. Every Peace Corps post has a number of skills they require – for instance engineering, English teachers, or technical experts.

Right now, Peace Corps volunteers are severely under-prepared when entering their post. They are essentially thrown into a completely different culture, given two months training in a language they’ve never spoken and often times have little to no previous experience in their sector.

Staging for our group was in Atlanta. They put us up in a nice hotel. And for three days, we played icebreakers and watched slideshows of the country we would spend the next two years in. Granted, often times there is no substitute to learning about places than just going there and winging it trying to figure it out. But if Peace Corps wanted to get serious about development work, they need to better prepare volunteers for the field.

If Obama is elected, he has mentioned how he wants to start a Green Jobs Corps. This Corps, would create, quoted from his website, “an energy-focused Green Jobs Corps to connect disconnected and disadvantaged youth with job skills for a high-growth industry.” I don’t know about other people, but I’ve felt pretty disconnected from Americana as of lately and disadvantaged? Well, that’s subjective no matter who you ask. And if you ask me, I’d say our disadvantages are only as difficult as we make them to be.

Bananadog book

2008-03-13T06:52:00.001-07:00

This is a link to a book I just finished about a bike trip around New Zealand.
It's only 80 pages or so, and it has pictures. I've done my best not to bore you.

Here's what's written on the back cover:

In the beginning months of 2006, I rode a $35 bicycle 3200km around New Zealand. I embarked on this adventure for several reasons: I couldn't find a full-time job in my field of education, I wanted to experience a place I'd never been and I wanted to see if I could actually do it.

The goal was simple: get from Christchurch to Auckland by bicycle. With that goal in mind for 97 days, the obstacles between A and B became less difficult to overcome.

It's easy to make things complicated in life. When I challenged myself to do something very simple, I found that sometimes things are not as complicated as they seem.

Or at least they don't have to be.

God is not a man

2008-03-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

If God is this all-knowing being, I feel for him. You always appreciate things most when you have a change in attitude. If you always knew what it felt like to be right, I don’t think everyday wouldn’t be as much fun.

I feel for him. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes you hate everything. He doesn’t know what it feels like to care about things that don’t work out or to be depressed or have his feelings hurt by other people. So when I pray, does he really understand me? Naw, he’s not a person, he’s not fighting like the rest of us are, everyday, trying to find our peace in a world where we have to fight everyone else trying to find their peace at the same time. Unless this is the reason he created the devil… ahh, the guy who represents everything that is false. Yeah, we need that guy.

The world isn’t big enough for all of us - that’s the problem. That’s also the beauty of it. That’s the growth, that’s what forces us to learn and never stop learning. The more we learn about this world and the more crap we go through, the more God laughs at us because maybe what he knows is that the hurdles won’t ever stop.

If it gives people some solace to think that there’s this being outside our physical realm that understands our pain, go ahead. I can’t justify that though. When I get stressed, I tell myself to just chill out, to not take things so seriously, to separate myself from what I’m working on, not to let my ego get in the way of advancing what I’m trying to do. I try to stay focused on the ultimate goal, and if doing my best isn’t good enough, I laugh. That’s when I laugh with God.

If God was a man, he would realize how tough life is for everyone and tell us he’s sorry, he can’t imagine what it is we’re going through. But since he’s some kind of all-knowing being, the only thing he’s sorry for is that some people never figure out he’s laughing with us, not at us.

If God was a man, he would probably try and convince us that it all has something to do with trying hard but not investing yourself in the outcome. If you don’t try hard, you really have nothing to bitch about. And if you invest yourself in the outcome, you’re only setting yourself up for failure. And failure is never fun.

What makes a teacher successful?

2008-03-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

The less the kids pay attention, the more angry I used to get. When I care, I get upset when it doesn’t sink in or they don’t even try. Instead, I try not to really care anymore. When the students don’t seem to be trying, I try to be real with them - “I’m not upset, I fear for you. What are you going to do when you finish school in four months, if you even do graduate? What are you going to do with your life? You’re 20 years old and your lying to your teacher about doing work you clearly have not done. If you don’t try now, you’re gonna have hell to pay my brotha.”

“Teacher, don’t get upset, I’ve done the work.”

“You’re missing the point. First, you’re lying to me. You haven’t done the work. I can see this. And second, I don’t care anymore, so stop trying to convince me bro. I’m trying to teach you to try. You’re the one who will suffer a few years from now, not me. Please try, out of respect of my time. If you choose not to, I ask at the very least for you to stop lying to me.”

“Teacher, calm down.”

I took a deep breath and smiled. Like I said, I didn’t really care anymore. I did my part. I’ve shown up, ready to answer questions and made a good lesson plan - applied theory to something practical, something that can affect their future. They can complain about being poor or not having a pencil, but they’re running out of excuses. Soon, for them to fail at all, will be clearly their own fault. I think they know this and are beginning to either feel the tremors or get excited.

It’s the lazy people who will fail when application meets the theory. They will defend themselves and tear apart the people who try. Because they’ve been living a façade of adequacy, not ever realizing what it feels like to challenge themselves and achieve, they’ll figure out they are the ones who have the longest road to travel. With all of the conveniences we’ve developed in life, it’s easy to forget what it is we’re supposed to do. I look forward to watching my students experience what it feels like to do something on their own.

A web of Government

2008-03-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

It breaks down all of the departments of government. Each name represents a different “office” of social organization. Right now, these offices are stricken with bureaucracy and paperwork and all of those things that people in my generation loathe. My thing, the thing I think about every day, is how to use the tools of the Internet to make these offices completely open and efficient. I don’t think political positions will ever be obsolete, but we can make the system so open and democratic, only the most honest, competent, hard-working people will be elected.

If Obama wins, he’ll probably accelerate the rate at which the government adapts to an Internet doctrine. If he doesn’t, any resistance to change from the other candidates will give people like me even more incentive to change the way the system works. Give us ten years and there won’t be such thing as a smear campaign.

random quotes and notes

2008-02-25T08:25:00.000-08:00

(Article taken from The Economist, sometime in Nov or Dec, 2007, dunno, I’ve since lost the article)
A prize for “ achievements in African leadership” worth $5M, plus $200,000 a year for life, to an African leader who “best provides security, health, education and economic development and who democratically transfers power to a successor.

“Two scholars… are helping Mr Ibrahim assess the nominees and measure countries’ performance – by such criteria as safety and security, rule of law and corruption, participation and human rights, economic opportunity and human development.”
--
The Index of Development, Poverty.
The world has many problems. Many of these problems could easily be solved with more effort from people from the developed world. However, people in the developed world don’t have incentives because they, like people anywhere, are selfish. They want something for their work. They want physical representation of their contribution to humanity - they want money.

What Mo Ibrahim has done, is put a price tag on successful development work.

A website needs to be developed to offer a system for people to earn rewards for their achievements in the development world. A financial incentive caters to the natural instinctive to be selfish and gets development done.

Ibrahim rates his African leaders “by such criteria as safety and security, rule of law and corruption, participation and human rights, economic opportunity and human development.”

Let’s break down his criterion for judgment –
Safety and security – sounds like the military to me
Rule of law and corruption – that’d be the judicial system, governed by the administration
Participation and human rights – umm, natural court system? Okay, weak.
Economic opportunity – sounds like the Peace Corps? And other grassroots biz dev organizations
Human development – I don’t even know what this is?

There should be nice-looking financial incentives set by do-gooders through donations, for tax-credit, that award people’s effort in development work.

Individual’s, involved or uninvolved and informed, are free to make a case and offer money, open an account and begin the reward.

Possible ideas,
Index of Corruption,

A reward system to give money to people who open up the communication of their government. Rated on a system of variables, governments are annually rewarded by the developed world.

If governments were smart, they would take the rewards and invest them in the people who gave them money.

Indexing is the reverse of taxation. Instead of building a system that requires people to give money to a certain institution, ie - a government in power, have a system that people give money to, out of both benign investment and greed. The more greedy you are, the more you believe that person will make you money. Sometimes, even if you’re bad, it might pay off.

Index of Poverty, Internet development, etc…

Experience vs Inspiration (email debate with Alex)

2008-02-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

Experience vs. Inspiration (Email with Alex, Feb 23)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roseanne-barr/experience-vs-inspiratio_b_87982.html
Posted February 22, 2008 | 11:52 AM (EST)

Read More: Barack Obama, Barack Obama 2008, Inspiration, Oprah Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Breaking Entertainment News
When I fly in an airplane I want the pilot with the most experience, not the one who can inspire hope in me that I get to where I am going. When I pay my taxes, I want the person filing them to be experienced, not the new person who inspires hope in me that he can do the job. When I hire someone to fix my washing machine, I want the tried and true experienced person, not the one who inspires me to hope that he can fix it. When I go to the doctor I do not want to get the one who inspires hope in me that s/he can cure what's wrong, but the one who knows what the hell to do the minute I call. It's not really the job of a public servant to inspire, but to get the job that the people demand done. The democrats think that if they have hope and are inspired things will get better, but they actually won't. When Oprah makes her employees sign her fifty page non-disclosure statement, she doesn't "hope" they can't break it, she pays teams of experienced lawyers to MAKE SURE they can't break it, or be sued in an experienced court by an experienced judge.

Response
May I...?

If it wasn't for inspiration, the pilot, the plumber, the doctor, and Oprah's people, wouldn't have had the guts to finish what they started. To get the degree, to accomplish the challenges they faced. To be good at things, you need people to push you along and help you finish when things are tough. You don't need some experienced asshole leaning over your back telling you how it’s done. No one needs that.

Does the president fly planes? Does he fix washing machines? Does he operate on people? Does he keep Oprah's nose clean? No, those are the jobs of specialists. Those are the tasks assigned by the president.

A president is supposed to figure out where the biggest problems are, and inspire the right people to get the job done. He tells you, you can trust the pilot, you need to call a plumber, you should see a doctor, and he tells Oprah to watch her ass. He doesn't have to know details, just how to direct the people who deal with the details. A president is supposed to understand the big picture and synthesize a solution down to assigning specialists.

I don't want a president who is experienced, I want a president who gets people to want to work. It's the president's job to figure out what people need to do and it’s the people's job to follow through.

What happens in an imperfect system though, is that his decisions on what to do aren't what people want. So he leans on a system with rules and regulations, rather than inspiration, to accomplish his agenda. Because the system has drowned inspiration into a debateable characteristic of a president, we don't even know what we want in a leader anymore.

An ideal president needs both: an agenda and inspiration, the fortitude to have people stick with his agenda when things are difficult. We’re not used to this because our current president has an agenda not many people agree with, so he executes his authority to make people comply. Without executing a heavy autocratic hand, an ideal president can do one of two things: give inspiring speeches that make people think he is the man or create an agenda that gets people excited.

Obama can talk, but I haven't changed my course of life because of his gameplan. America needs a person who can do both. Until that time comes, I'll take my chances with the guy who gives me half of what I want. Yeah, I'm an Obama man.

A prize for...

2008-02-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

Human Stock Exchange

2008-02-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

Man, in the world we live in today, anyone can argue anything. You take any situation, to a certain extent, and put a smart enough guy in there, he’ll figure out a way to make himself right. He’ll essentially beat the court of law, with persuasion. He’ll convince people that something immoral or unjust is okay, and still be able to righteously stand within a civil society.

Does that put the flaw on him or on society for having defined itself by a system that could be beaten by a man and made the man think he was still walking in the righteous path. Every society needs a court of law, something to base judgment on. And I think this law should stand as nothing more than a moral obligation to mankind defined by our basic human rights.

You say, this is what we have done. Yes it is. But because of the immoral acts people can get away with now, there is plenty of room for improvement.

The law of man should be to protect and prosper other men. Where are these lines drawn? I think all we should think about is to help the poor. That is all. Who are the poor people?

The economy should crash. There’s too much money in the world. Everything will get cheap again.

I want to make a lot off money because I want to prove that not going the traditional route is possible. Money is a huge recruiting incentive these days.

Buy stock, Prosper.com.
Sell yourself on the goodwill of others.
Have them share your winnings.
The best gambling is on people’s goodwill to succeed at what they say they will.
It’s good to gamble when you gamble on people’s success.

We gotta start a business where we improve people’s business’s by using the Internet. We’ll share profits and get paid upfront not by the company, by Prosper.com-like idea. We can charge whatever we want. Internet consultants.
By advertising on newsjog, you’ll be offering your ideas as to how to improve something, you can discuss it with people, then submit an entry to either prosper or kiva for funding.

old hotdogs

2008-02-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

Water is getting scarcer every week. We have had water two days out of the last two weeks. In an effort to conserve water, Alex and I ranked our water usage in order of what has naturally been cut first, from least important to most:

Laundry
Bathing
Flushing
Cleaning dishes
Cooking
Drinking

Luckily, I did laundry right before the drought hit, Alex can’t say the same.
However, we’ve both gone about four days without a bath, the bathroom smells like old hot dogs (it’s me, somehow the toilet smell like rose pedals after she goes, honestly, I don’t know how she does it), and our dishes are piled up in the sink (this is also out of laziness, have you ever tried to wash dishes with a two bowl system? It’s not fun)

We’ve got about seven 5L jugs of water left under a table in the kitchen we use for cooking and drinking. The 11,000L tank that serves our three-story apartment building could be filled tomorrow, could be a month. Until then, we’ll have to wear dirty clothes, eat off of sticky dishes and keep the bathroom door shut.

Guess it’s really all the more incentive to push the solar still project. Speaking of which, the project is securely integrated into our lesson plans: Students are coming up with their own designs to improve the output in my class and are designing a few ideas Nick put together on AutoCad in his class.

Outside the design plans, we’re spreading the project into construction technology, Portuguese and practical lab classes, all taught by Capeverdeans. In the other classes, students are learning how to write a proposal and do a takeoff (material assessment based on plans) and an estimate (figure the cost of a project).

We plan to use these proposals, designs and takeoffs to lobby for funding and build the three new designs in the final trimester.

Maybe it's my teaching

2008-02-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Every Tuesday, I have an 11th grade class from 9-11am. Today, I gave a test. It was an open note / group test. First, each group measured a different wall outside. Then every student, with help from their group and their notes, had to sketch the front, top and side views of the wall then calculate the reduction scale of the front view on a piece of A4 (8.5” x 11”) paper.

For two hours, the students repeatedly came to me for help, despite having clear directions, group for help and their notes. I got frustrated, then angry, then as my head usually does, tried to figure out what the real problem was that going on in my classroom.

Development work is only good for so long. I’ll be in Assomada for two years. Afterwards, I’m gone and will likely be replaced by another clueless American who will teach a class they may or may not even know themselves in a language they probably haven’t ever spoken.

The problem is that the sustainability of my job rests squarely on my shoulders. If I choose to just put in my time, maybe try out some ideas and then bounce, I can tell myself I’ve accomplished something, but there’s a good chance there will be little or no movement behind me.

I think to solve the problem of apathy of the underdeveloped world will involve an entire social movement. You have to make development cool to make people want to work. You have to offer incentives not only to the volunteers, but to the students your teaching.

My students see me as just another person they have to convince to get a good grade. They have no confidence in themselves to figure things out and always feel like they have to break the system or cheat or get the teacher to give them special advice to make them feel like they’re doing alright.

Maybe it’s their confidence, maybe it’s my teaching. But there needs to be a complete shift of influence, within their own culture, that convinces them that work is good, work is fun and you don’t need the approval of some headmaster to feel good about what you do.

Granted these kids are 18 and probably still need guidance, I just think that sending some honky over here to teach technical skills, while it will work for small projects, for two years, is only slightly effective.

I look to governments. Governments set the stage for what is acceptable around the rest of the country. The American Government is no example. It has no idea the amount of influence it sets for the rest of the world.

If governments allocating funds toward prosperity and innovation, it would give people the power to think creatively without having to report to someone with meaningless progress reports. Consequently, setting a moral standard as a government would resonate around the world. Thus, if the American government set a better example by funding programs like the Peace Corps, it would more likely resonate not only through inspired volunteers, but through local governments mimicking the behavior of the biggest, most powerful institution in the world.

Although, I could be wrong. Maybe it is my teaching style.

Micro-profits

2008-02-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

The backside of Peace Corps Partnerships (PCP) or other micro-lending agencies is micro-profits.
With PCP, you ask for something to do something, a project or something. Once you get what you need you take off and do it and try to frequently let them know what’s up.

What if things go well and you’re project either makes money or is self-sufficient because it’s supported by the local government. Don’t you think people would be interested in seeing good work? Show them, ask for something back. It’s like the 10% donation after a Kiva donation. An optional button at the bottom asking if they’re interested in giving money to support something that’s so visibly charitable. A reward for good work.

PCP 2.0. Backwards financing. Getting paid for what you do because you do it.

A quote from the lame Peace Corps blog PP presentation...

2008-02-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

DISCLAIMER
“Any website maintained by a Volunteer during his or her Peace Corps service must reflect that it is neither an official publication of the Peace Corps nor of the U.S. Government.“
DISCLAIMER EXAMPLE
‘The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.’

It’s like the government is a parent not wanting to take credit for his child’s work. They’re saying, whether it’s good or bad, we want no part of it, you did it, you take the credit.

It’s the maturing phase of our social life. We’re no longer children, we don’t need to grouch at our parents, become an adult yo’self. Wow, this is lame. My apologies.

Color to Life

2008-02-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

There is so much more color to life with intelligent people around.

All I think about is ideas. When I talk to people, I assume they’re not interested in them. When I bring them up and they’re interested and contribute something to progressing the ideas, it enriches the whole life experience. Yeah, 5 beers tonight.

If technology doubles every 18 months...

2008-02-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

If technology doubles every 18 months, I estimate Cape Verde will be where America is now, in terms of personal access to information, in about 5 ½ years. What that means for community growth will be interesting.

Justification:
Down the street from me, a new Internet café is about to open up. Another one across town just did. I already know of about five others at are in a town. A few of my students have personal laptops, just a few.

I think my family, in America, got their first personal computer around 1988. We were upper middle class, so maybe I would have been one of those kids bringing the laptop to school.

If Cape Verde is 20 years behind America in technological development, and it spreads as fast as the 2x/18mo ratio, it seems like trying to align community development with the growth of the Internet would be the fastest way to eliminating poverty and giving people jobs.

Jesus in the classroom

2008-02-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

“Jesus Christ!” I was upset. The students weren’t listening to me and then asking me the same question I just answered. It had nothing to do with culture, or language, or poverty or anything else. They were just being lazy.

When I cursed, I articulated every syllable of the two words. The students clearly understood what I said. A stone cold look came over their face. They didn’t know what to think. In this very catholic culture, people rarely use the Christian messiah’s name in vain. Once I calmed down, I’m not sure if they finally listened to me or were still scared because their teacher publicly took the lord’s name in vain.

The next day, I was sitting next to Ronaldo in the teacher’s lounge. He was making a test for his class. When he showed me the diagrams for his resistance of materials test, I noticed at the bottom of the test was the phrase, “Jesus Christo te ama.” Jesus Christ loves you.

I’m not sure the meaning of the juxtaposition between my classroom outburst and Ronaldo’s faithful spirit at testtime. All I can say is that my students seemed to fear something after what I said in the classroom and I noticed, when I read the text at the bottom of Ronaldo’s test, although I wasn’t really stressed at the time, I calmed down.

Peace Corps aims to...

2008-02-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

a) train men and women to fulfill community needs,
b) act as ambassadors and teach people about American culture,
c) learn about other cultures.

In other words, the Peace Corps is an opportunity learn to how to better balance how you share your way of life with other people. And as a result of this communication, the number of people you successfully train to fulfill the basic needs of their community. (Ironically, two things American politicians have failed at, as of lately.)

…

That is freedom. That is what rich people are scared of, the ability to think for themselves, and the poor people need, an opportunity to succeed.

What is happiness

2008-02-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, happiness. In one sentence, I think it is improving how you balance life and increasing the number of things you try to achieve.

I’m gonna draw some comparisons that you will disagree with, but this is nothing new. (Speaking of which, I’ve been talking with this guy with a fat website, www.solarfireproject.com, he and his friends are trying to start a thermal energy revolution. He’s got a friend writing a constitution... www.sun.solarfire.org, he sounds like a spacey philosopher, like I used to be… okay, okay, still am, anyway, it’s annoying to read because the words aren’t concrete enough, for example… these are exerpts from the SFP Constitution (at that website) this guy is writing right now…
“A Solar Fire Project cooperates with anyone trying to develop and diffuse ecological solar technology regardless of religion, creed, or economic ideology.”
“Reasoning for humanity in general is needed to solve our global problems, and so if we assume humanity in general is selfish, untrustable and destructive, our global problems are unsolvable. A try cannot be based on the assumption that it will fail.”

I better understand why you and barry get angry with me when I throw un-concrete things out there. I think this constitution idea is good, but it could be better. Although I almost cry at the effort of a few angry individuals throwing down to make a difference. Martyrs. That’s basically how the counterinsurgency thing theorizes Islamic extremists… people willing to die for something. How often have you heard that in America? Someone willing to die for something…

Okay, where was I, oh yeah, the comparisons –
So the final conclusion of Bananadog said something about trying to balance your future with your past while trying to achieve as many goals, or to try as many things, as possible.

The introduction to Counterinsurgency, Bush’s military doctrine, said something about how the essence of military strategy is to balance offense and defense while trying to accomplish their mission.

Peace Corps’ goals, oversimplified, are to balance sharing your culture with learning about other people’s culture while trying to train as many people as possible.

Balance two things and focus on pushing something forward. That’s everything. That’s life. If you get out of balance or lose sight of what you’re after, it’s easy to fall off track.

This is why I think Peace Corps is an excellent organization. Your job is to do what you want. As long as you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else, you’re cool. You don’t get paid shit, but I would assume there is a direct path up government developmental organization pay scale. It’s jus that no one talks about it. A secure job that grants you the freedom to think for yourself and learn to achieve balance. That is freedom to me.

I just posted two articles I’ve been working on. I’m interested to hear what you have to say about them. Basically I have a million points why Peace Corps is the best idea ever and how it needs a shitload of organization to drop the hammer on some bitches and be phenomenal.

I like discussion.
Tell me what’s running through your head.

Justifying the Recession

2008-02-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

Why is the American economy sliding?
The rest of the world has figured out the supply chain and oil is not the best thing. This is why retail companies are justifying sending the work overseas and why Detroit is upset.

Prosper and Kiva and other entrepreneurial institutions are exploding.
America is out of ideas and we’re finding out we don’t have as much money to go “shopping.” If anyone has a decent business plan, judging from the success of these lending companies, they’ll probably find the money.

It’s not that there aren’t any jobs, it’s just that right now America is out of ideas. Lucky for us, people in the year 2008, the drawing board is being redefined, so coming up with ideas isn’t what it used to be.

Ethical Capitalism

2008-02-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

The Economist, 19 Jan 2008, p12

How wonderful to think that you can make money and save the planet at the same time. “Doing well by doing good” has become a popular business mantra… the idea that firms can be successful by acting in the broader interest of society as a whole even while they satisfy the narrow interests of shareholders.

For these are high times for what is clunkingly called corporate social responsibility (CSR)… One huge push for CSR has come from climate change: ‘sustainability’ is its most dynamic branch. Another has been the internet, which helps activists scrutinize corporate behavior around the globe. But the biggest force is the presumption that a modern business needs to be or at least appear to be good to hang on to customers and recruit clever young people.

Thus for most managers the only real question about CSR is how to do it.

The main contribution of companies to society comes precisely from profits (and the products, services, salaries and ideas that competitive capitalism creates). If the business of business stops being business, we all lose.

Most recent disasters have come from politicians seeking to offload public problems onto business: American healthcare is one sad example.

Be wary: businesses do not always adhere to voluntary rules; they naturally want ones that help them make money. Above all, it is governments, not firms, that should arbitrate between interest groups for the public interest.

So the apparent triumph of CSR should prompt humility, not hubris. There is money to be made in doing good. But firms are not there to solve the world’s political problems. It is the job of governments to govern; don’t let them wiggle out of it.

Too Many Innocents Ignored

2008-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

On January 9, 2008, Robert Strauss, former Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director wrote an op-ed article for the NY Times. His article, “Too Many Innocents Abroad,” went into detail about how “young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.” He emphasized the need to shrink the size of the Peace Corps and recruit top-students and older, more experienced volunteers.

The article received responses from hundreds of former and current volunteers, Peace Corps President Ron Tschetter (sp?), National Peace Corps Association President Kevin Quigley, and Chris Dodd, former volunteer and current senator of Connecticut who is working to help Peace Corps receive more attention from the government and the media.

Through the sheer number of responses to this article, Peace Corps Volunteers have, at the very least, exemplified the profound impact the organization has had on their own lives and how it could be improved:

“They are the new ambassadors for peace and ethnic diversity.” -: Allegra K. Troiano

“Peace Corps volunteers generate positive change not because they are more skilled than their local counterparts, but because they … inspire and challenge villagers to solve their critical problems themselves.”

“Sacrifice and friendship are what drive change” - Rajeev Goyal
“We should take a more constructive look at what skill levels can realistically be recruited, and be honest with host countries and with ourselves.” - Carol Benson

This effort, 600 million dollars shy of government propaganda, is coming from a voice that shouldn’t be ignored.

When my roommate read the article aloud in our apartment in Assomada, Cape Verde, we both grabbed our notepads and outlined a response:

This is my response, posted Jan 15 on www.peacecorpsconnect.com:
I’m not sure I understand who Mr Strauss considers to be an “effective development volunteer.” To me, an effective development volunteer is, most importantly, someone who grew up in a developed environment. They understand why roads are important, when you plant seeds you need to water them everyday, not spend more than you make in a business… these are skills Americans grow up with and should not be neglected as the fundamental concept of development work.

To turn Peace Corps into an effective developmental organization, several strategies could dramatically improve productivity:

1. Actively recruit young professionals. Recruit graduates from business, technical and journalism schools to start. Grades don’t matter, only interest. Spending enough time to finish college in a certain subject is enough interest. For example:
a. Businesspeople could train entrepreneurs through micro-finance institutions,
b. Engineers could teach technical skills and help develop energy, water, sanitation, etc, projects,
c. Journalists could promote the efforts of everyone else and document the culture for people at home and the host country.

Take all of their skills and add them together: you end up with a marketing department (journalists), an administration department (businesspeople), an engineering/research department (engineers). You could ad on more departments: IT, Youth, communications, etc. Every school of professions can be applied to a general realm of development work. Apply American business development to underdeveloped economies, financed by the goodwill of government taxes and… well, you’re in business.

2. Connect with other Governmental Development Agencies like USAID and MCC – The fact that there are several development agencies working in the same place, toward the same cause and don’t share information, is dumb.

Peace Corps Volunteers are directly involved with communities and can provide the local knowledge and essential contacts that different programs simply don’t know about. Volunteers should be, from the start of training, aware of local projects going on by other organizations and understand the procedure of project approval.

3. Hype these as job opportunities after Peace Corps – What’s the point of recruiting top-tier graduates and older volunteers if you’re not going to offer them opportunities to advance after their service? Companies offer job security. Right now, (I understand) Peace Corps gives you $6,000 and a thank you letter. If Peace Corps clearly advertises a career path, your number of applicants would increase tenfold.

4. Organization – Washington is developing Wiki’s for every post to use for local information, project ideas and lesson plans. Being able to trade information with other development workers around the world would help people come up with project ideas and understand how to follow through on all elements of a project.

5. Supportive, competent administration – With supportive, competent country directors and administration, volunteers would be prepared and feel inspired to work. This will take time and rely on the patience of young people to change an inept bureaucracy into a respected administration.

6. Publicity – Make volunteers famous for their success. YouTube and bloggers will probably figure this out sometime soon.

a. Reality TV – With scripted TV becoming outdated and reality TV getting boring, what about actual reality TV? Show the need for improvement in a community and the development of projects to show what works, what fails and how volunteers and their community respond. (New media journalists)

b. You can make anything sexy. Make short films with entrepreneurs pitching their idea on Kiva.org (Small Enterprise Development volunteers) for loans and/or post Peace Corps Partnership projects looking for donations during commercial breaks. Do this, and you’ve given people a new reason to sit in front of television.

c. Peace Corps should be open to connect with every revolutionary website on the Internet:
i. Current.tv and Flipvideospotlight - to document projects, culture,
ii. CouchSurfing - to arrange a network of where Peace Corps Vol’s live to locate one another,
iii. One Laptop per Child (IT), get computers in the hands of every person. It is the best teaching tool ever invented,
iv. Amiestreet.com - promote host country musicians and see if people can make a living selling their music online,
v. Google Earth - post everything here for ease of navigation, this is the basis of the physical organization,
vi. Google Sketchup Community, Patents – to share and improve project designs and proposals

Development work is not easy. It involves spending time with people and learning about their way of life. This goes both ways. It not only serves to fulfill the host country’s needs, it strengthens Americans as they learn about culture different from their own.

Peace Corps offers intellectual freedom, impact, fame, pride. It gives you the opportunity to find out what you want to do with your life if you haven’t already lived it.

Armed Social Work

2008-02-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

(Photo: thebudgetgraph.com)

In response to the lack of progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American Army has recently sketched out a new plan of “counter-insurgency”. They’re calling it “armed social work” - new specialist units sent to help organize civil reconstruction of communities among other traditional tactics such as training and improving the performance of local allies. (good article from The Economist and the 282-page most-recent American political treatise, Counterinsurgency)

It sounds like the 21st century soldier will consist of Marines who go through three months of language and development training and/or Peace Corps Volunteers who go through boot camp and are given a gun.

Why has the idea of development work not been at the top of the agenda since we pulled Saddam from that hole in the ground? Through the military’s attempting to decrease the threat of violence to the United States and help create sustenance in that country (which are kind of the same thing), the American government has sacrificed what every other battle has sought to defend – our freedom to live without fear.

Nonetheless, we have stayed and we have fought. Reports show the Government has spent X trillion dollars since the Iraq war began in 2003. Not to mention the body counts.

In 2008, the US Government spent another $600M+ (exact quote) to recruit and advertise for the Army (www.thebudgetgraph.com), an organization for average citizens that is evolving into armed development work, as mentioned.

In 2008, the US Government will also spend $331M to fund the Peace Corps, a development organization for average citizens.

To compare these two statistics, the government is spending about twice as much money convincing people to join an organization shifting towards development work, than an entire organization that already does.

Since 1961, the Peace Corps has focused on developing communities and establishing relationships with other countries. On a razor thin budget, it has not only strengthened communities in poor countries, it has exposed thousands of Americans to the world outside its borders.

With the Army now adapting the 47-year-old Peace Corps strategy and at a time when it is imperative Americans strengthen their reputation abroad the government needs to seriously rethink the budget distribution.

Fuel Economy

2008-02-03T04:37:00.000-08:00

Why are gas prices so high? Because oil is the blood of industries. We have many other liquid fuels. We just don’t depend on them enough. Give blood. Distill water. Live without expenditures.
Gas prices are so high because God is telling us we need to find another source of energy.
‘Nope guys, oil ain’t it. Look at what else you have to use. Sun, water, wind. You don’t even have to break the surface of the earth to figure it out. You just have to be a little creative.’

It’s a government’s responsibility to provide its citizens the opportunity to figure out how to live wisely, with less energy. And it has. Peace Corps, Americorps, Water Corps, Crisis Corps… Marine Corps… If these institutions were marketed and focused on the defense of moral reasoning, the world would slowly fix itself.

Be independent, use less energy.
Big business relies on lots of planes moving around for travel and expanding the business, shipping manufactured goods and so on. It takes up a lot of energy. If a new market emerged that encouraged people to live a low energy lifestyle, business wouldn’t need to spend as much money. Undo the top button - limit your expenses, cut the stress.

When you are struggling to find a job you're passionate about, it is your responsibility to make yourself useful. When a society is struggling to invite passion, you are the one who suffers. There’s no way out except to fight the current. If you don’t, the next guy is gonna be just as miserable as you are.

If you disagree with how things are run, it’s your responsibility to comb through the bullshit and make things right. If you don’t, someone else will have to.

If you think you have no idea what you’re doing with your life, you should work for the government.
If you think you’re too old to work for the government, you probably are.
If you think the government is not right for you, you’re probably right.
Whatever you do, don’t fuck with the people who do.

Energy, water, jobs. You got them, you get paid.

Granddaddy

2008-02-01T04:36:00.000-08:00

Has anyone ever compared the role of a government to the role of a parent or grandparent? A government makes laws and regulations (or rules) that limit what its citizens (or children) are permitted to do. A government can choose to draw as many or as few boundaries as it chooses. There is no right way to run a government, criticizing the way other countries government’s is always very sensitive.

When your child play with the neighbors children, some parents think it’s important to meet the neighbors – it’s important to know who you’re children are hanging out with. A responsible parent might want to meet them anyway, to know who lives around him. Some parents aren’t as honest and could either neglect their children altogether thus undermining the their integrity. Some parents arrange associations in the community to talk about certain things pertaining to the living conditions of the community. Sometimes the associations aren’t always honest or don’t even really care, as long as the associations have that check rollin in every month to “keep things tidy”.

The Declaration of Independence is split into three parts, as some teachers say. The first part is basically saying how all men are created equal and a good government should govern people to allow them the most freedom possible. When the government isn’t performing as it should, it’s the responsibility of those people to make things better.

The second part states the ways King George’s government wasn’t playing by the rules. How he stationed soldiers in people’s houses when the country wasn’t at war and how he made up taxes to charge people.

The third part says, “We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America… do, in the Name, and by Authority of the Good People of these colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these Unities Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.”

There is no place to run to anymore. We can’t sail across an ocean and tear apart another group of people to set up shop. If we could, no one in their right mind would. What we have to do is focus on how the (here, American) government can positively affect you, the citizen:
Ameri corps, Water corps, Crisis Corps, Peace Corps, Marine Corps, Service Corps, Veteran’s Corps, Retired Corps

And right now, from what I’m hearing from my friends in the 9-5er world, there’s not much pride in the workplace. That sucks.

Many people think, the weakness of the public sector is that there is no incentive. The harder you work, the more you make the same wage.
Whereas the main drive of the public sector is money. That will probably never change. It’s what makes up the private sector.

Progression of an economy-
AID – Grants – Loans … Purchases?

Water, food, shelter, jobs. In that order
Something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

You need an ego like you need a woman. You don’t want to have one all the time, but sometimes when things are tough, it feels good to unload on someone.

On a dime

2008-01-31T04:35:00.000-08:00

A government will mimmick the character of it’s leader.
Look at how concerned the government is with image, how much precaution it takes to not look bad in the media. It has learned how to preserve and reflect the character of it’s leader. Ambassador’s change their policy on a dime to mirror his platform. Rules, regulations, even tightened security is arranged to follow the directions of the guy in charge. It sucks now because our leader thinks he needs to sacrifice our freedoms to maintain our security.

There is no place to run to anymore. We can’t sail across an ocean and tear apart another culture to set up shop. If we could, no one in their right mind would. What we have to do is focus on how the (American) government can positively affect you, the citizen.

“In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith” – William Fulbright

“All religions were created by men who had not yet attained the full development of their intellectual faculties” – Kropotkin, Russian anarchist

Something to brag about

2008-01-31T04:34:00.000-08:00

“But when a long train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their Right, it is their duty, to throw off such a Government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

The Declaration of Independence was founded on a belief that people have the “unalienable” right to demand change from a system that imposes on their rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

People can’t experience freedom until they have no one telling them what to do. The government has already set up institutions that provide you a decent salary and healthcare and those other things young people don’t think about when they’re still idealists: Americorps, Peace Corps, Marine Corps, Water corps, Crisis Corps, Service Corps, Veteran’s Corps, Retired Corps are just some of the opportunities people have to serve their country.

Right now this whole organization is arguably more of a face of American diplomacy, something that looks good on paper. I truly believe though, with improved communication with things like Wiki’s and Peace Corps Partnerships, Volunteers are gaining the resources to do some real freakin development work.

My bad, I’m just ranting cuz I think Peace Corps is a very good diplomatic organization and want more people to apply. There should be every effort short of a draft to get people serving a few years in Americorps and/or Peace Corps. The fact that these things aren’t recognized as reputable as a graduate degree is a shame. Financially it’s a better bet – you won’t get in further debt and you get more life experience here than you will in a schoolroom. It just a matter of marketing. How do you market something that is so essential personally, and socially? Internet seems like a good idea. I’ll probably try that someday.

One person won’t change the reputation of a country. It’s the responsibility of every citizen to give their country something to brag about.

What’s fucked up about the world is when people act like nothing is fucked.

Think about it, consistent salary, good benefits, solid healthcare plan. It’s like a giant union that you are already paying for. Now, just incentive. These programs need to be marketed, funded, and expanded… wisely. People haven’t been informed or coached to take responsibility for their country’s reputation, to take pride in something and to recognize that freedom lies in spending your time doing what you want to be doing, without pressure that you won’t make enough money for the company or need to look like you are. Think if there was a leader up there who encouraged people to produce by going at things their own way. A leader who motivated you to produce but didn’t actually make you do anything but show up. The government is the man, because he let’s you do what you want. All you have to do is show up sober and don’t harass your coworkers.

Media for Taxes

2008-01-30T04:32:00.000-08:00

the government is a business. they sell media in exchange for taxes.

they employee people who take care of elements of society to keep people happy, like your customers. you have different departments, sales, those are your politicians, bankers, those handle the treasury, the governments bank account. Then you have research and development, engineers, marketing, information technology, education/internships, etc. Every element of a business, for example in a large corporation, are the same as all of the businesses in a society

Communist Manifesto

2008-01-22T04:32:00.000-08:00

Is this the jist Communist Manifesto?

The premise presents an idea how to oppose communism?
The rich and the poor, the “oppressor and oppressed” are always in constant opposition to one another. (“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted fight.”) Recent (and probably historical) American political stances mostly involve descrepancies between the two classes: abortion, welfare, taxation, etc.
“This struggle is between those who own the means of production and those who labor for a wage.”
This means that the means to succeed contradict the forces and relations of production.

You have to sacrifice yourself in order to connect with other people… a “cash payment” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions.

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from earlier ones

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Political power is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the working man organizes itself as a class and it makes itself the ruling class, it would flatten the social infrastrucutre.

They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains or dignity. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
A set of short-term demands, the abolition of both land ownership and of the right to inheritance, a progressive income tax, universal education, centralization of the means of communication and transport under state management, and the expansion of the means of production owned by the state. The implementation of these policies, would, the authors believed, be a precursor to the stateless and classless society.

Wedding?

2008-01-22T04:31:00.000-08:00

All a wedding is, is some dude who asked a chick if he could bone her the rest of their life and she agreed. They tell their friends and everyone goes to a church dressed up where they walk down the aisle. A wise man says some deep shit and they make out. Once it’s over and they need a bedroom, people throw food at them while they run away to go fuck for the first time not being single.

The only bond of a marriage is a child.

That’s a job that both people should be committed to until the child is ready to go on his own. The problem is, is people regard the paper more than the kid.

There are two types of people

2008-01-20T04:30:00.000-08:00

Those who have smart things to say and don’t say them.
And those people who don’t say smart things when they talk. Everyone falls into some range of these two personas. I think I lean more on the side of talking.
I talk more than other people. I haven’t found a way to explain what I’m saying, but I’m talking.

Many smart people don’t talk enough.

It’s smart people’s jobs to get the people who talk to say the right things and it’s the job of the talkers to get it out of them.

Solar Stills and Dollar Bills

2008-01-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

I have many things to say and chose to put them in an email.
Bare with me:

1. My friend Nick and I finished building a solar still with our students at school. The first day in operation it distilled 1,75L! This film tells the whole story.

Now, we are integrating the project into our lesson plans and working with the students to try and increase the output.

Science is awesome.

2. Over the past few months, I befriended the women who work at a local microfinance organization, OMCV (the Women’s Organization of Cape Verde) in Assomada. They have 100 (now, see film) qualified applicants waiting for funding but they don’t have sufficient resources. I made another film about their story and applied to be a Kiva Fellow, someone who acts as a liaison between the lending website and the microfinance institutions. These ladies need some press and their entrepreneurs need some cash. I guess I’m trying to be their point man.

3. I’ve gotten mixed reviews on the deep thoughts. You could argue I contradicted myself in last post: criticizing theory in school then making you slog through theory of my own.

Here’s what I’m gonna do. The globetrottr google groups forum allows you to store documents on there. I want to document this theory for my own sake in case something happens to my computer. And I guess I’ll go ahead and make them public, in case anyone is curious. I’ll pass the links on when I post something new, and you can check it out if you like. Otherwise, you can stick with the practical-ness of this blog. I’ve posted two already.

Like most blogs, more of this is to make me feel important thinking people actually care what I have to say. If you do, thank you. And as always, I welcome rebuttals. Reflecting on recent email debates with friends, I’ve found it actually kind of turns me on.

4. Screen writers guild are not the bad guys. It sounds like the corporate man is trying to keep the writers out of the new media paycheck. Here’s the scoop: www.unitedhollywood.com. I guess I’m taking up the slack of the fake news since The Daily Show is off the air. Of course The Daily Show was actually real news with jokes and I just wrote something that sounded good from my point of view.

5. Alex, my roommate, has lots of things to look at on her blog: alexalper.blogspot.com. She’s made two videos and written a number of articles about Cape Verde. One in particular is about our friend Mike (Fish for Christmas in Rincao), who is, well… he’s the man.

6. Finally, my brother Barry got engaged to his girlfriend Tara over the holidays. He’s moving to Islamabad, Pakistan in February as the Regional Bureau Chief for the Voice of America. He’ll return for their wedding next summer. Tara just finished her nursing degree and will move to Pakistan with him after the wedding.

Barry spent a good part of last fall in Islamabad being groomed for the job. If you logged onto Google News anytime during the month of October when the standoff with Musharaff was going on, there was a good chance his article was on the front page. Yeah, he’s kind of a big deal.

---------

It costs 4500 ECV (US$56) a month for a 256MB speed Internet line in Cape Verde. I may be wrong but a 256mb speed connection is just slower than DSL. I think the rate at which people get connected to the Internet, for a country or certain demographic for instance, should be a major statistic of development. I can’t find it anywhere though. Any help?

Gas prices are so high because God is telling us we need to find another source of energy. He’s saying, ‘Nope guys, oil ain’t it. Look at what else you have: sun, water, wind. You don’t have to break the surface of the earth to figure it out. You just have to be creative. Nuclear? Eh, maybe, but you don’t need it. Who needs cities when you have the Internet?’

I went to Fogo, an island with a big volcano in the middle of it. Here are some pictures from my trip:

Into the Wild, email with Ben

2008-01-15T04:28:00.000-08:00

(Ben is my best friend, we grew up together. We always bounce ideas off each other, often times though, he keeps me grounded and challenges the things I say I can’t back up. This is a conversation we had about the movie Into the Wild)

On 1/15/08, Ben Bain wrote:

Brian,

First off, I read that article by Alex. Tell her I thought it was really well done.

I just saw Into the Wild tonight. Powerful. I'm trying to let it sink in right now. I've got to apologize for arguing with you so much. I knew that if I just dismissed the guy as an idiot, then I wouldn't feel bad about my decision not to pursue that same sense of freedom. Gotta hand it to him, he had some guts. Some great parts to that story. The movie really hit that feeling of wanting that something else, wanting to just be out there, away from it all.

When we going to Alaska?

Response:
I dig it. cant wait to see it.

supertramp questioned alot and he was on a quest. but he failed. im not sure how much the movie hits on it, but i remember the book didn't really to emphasize how he failed his mission. you can fight the norm, but unless you live to see the changes you foresee, what is it worth? this kid got lucky because krakaur happened to hear about his story and glorify his dream. this is good. this is what the world needs right now. its people willing to die for something. but the world needs these people alive. think what chris mccandless would be doing if he was alive right now and had lived through that experience. i can only imagine.

i was looking through kurt cobains journal the other day, they xeroxed his mead notebook, his personal journal, page for page. he had alot of the same thoughts it sounds like. he said stuff like, those corporate bastards think im nothing, they think im just some drug addict who hates everythign and im gonna kill myself. well, he did. he lost. as much as he thinks he was right, he played into the hands of the man. if it wasn't for the corporate man, he wouldn't have made it as far as he did.

you can fight the man, but im learning you have to play by some of the rules or else you won't live to see your dream come true. it aint easy, but you have to believe it will be worth it. thus you have balance. focus on your dream and tolerate the man.

its people like you who challenge me and make me explain the crazy thoughts that pass through my head. i feel like i have the determination of these cats, but because of friends like you, i can't win unless i convince you that im right. don't apologize for questioning what i say, because you just having the patience to listen to me is the type of support that i need.

People aren't dumb, they just don't know what to do

2008-01-12T04:27:00.000-08:00

The only thing you can gain in life is knowledge. You gain this through experience, education… everything you do.
Knowledge increases consistently with time. You can’t get to understanding rocket science until you learn the basics, just as you can’t land on the moon until you leave the surface of the earth.
Both are necessary steps you must take to get to B. Can’t get to B unless you pass through A.

Effort, on the other hand, is consistent – you either have it or you don’t. You can have more or less every minute of your life. It doesn’t build, it doesn’t store up. It only matters now.

Do you have it or not? If you do, just keep going until the knowledge soaks in, if you don’t, get the fuck out of the way from the people who do.

Smart Power

2007-12-30T04:26:00.000-08:00

Democracy in America
Islamic terrorism… all out global war practicing politics… wrong definition of terrorist challenge

Hard power/ soft power

Smart power
You have a toolbag, you have to look at your toolbag and ask yourself – what tools do I need to fix this problem?

Restore habeous corpus

How important is reputation?
Interest of other to couterbalance or resist us, heightens importance of everything… we need to invest issues

UN needs reform. Don’t walk away, just tweak it. Look to other institutions… league of democracies.
Destructive or useful?
Creating strong international institutions, only come after drastic take institutions – instead, refine, strengthen those smaller groups.

Diplomacy. Don’t talk until you have your shit together. You do need to talk though.

Energy independence. National energy strategy, best defense against crisis.

Embrace benign emperor? More selective in where and how we get engaged. Off shore balancer to negotiate problems, don’t become a key player.

Strengthen regional institutions. Mid-level organizations to take up slack.

Restoring trust, moral credibility is the preface to the book. That has to be done first. Promoting more than we are prepared to do, continued liberalization of global best at transforming societies… protectionism is rising, passes prologue.

Military should be repaired, not massive, but credible, flexible, useful to challenges. Tall order of developed world, address forcefully failing states, genocide, terrorism, starvation, there is less excuse not to address that particular problem.

Jose Luis, my landlord, Christmas Dinner

2007-12-28T04:30:00.000-08:00

I ate Christmas dinner with Jose Luis, my landlord. These are some thoughts that ran through my head when I got home:

His shirt had a picture of a king and queen sitting on the throne. When he danced, I wondered if the queen was smiling again. His son, Ken, stood up and started stamping his feet to the sound of a Capeverdean woman’s voice emerging from his brand new stereo system behind me. Ze Luis, my landlord, is a nurse at the hospital across town. While I mimmicked his smooth cavalier dance, I thought to myself:

If a Doctrine is a body of organized thoughts that follow to some degree a religious, legal, and military indoctrination, because of the recent shift in communication, could we rewrite a doctrine of foreign policy that incorporates the Internet? Is it possible this doctrine could apply to all the essential elements of foreign policy?

There is hard power which is violent, there is soft power which is subtle and then there is smart power which is intelligent. Smart power executes the many tools of diplomacy and community development, wisely.

The reason the government runs such a tight ship is because they can. Traditional business methods enable certain acts of immorality to take place because of an imperfect system of communication. With the Internet slowly becoming organized, a smart government should be leaping over itself to innovate. Writing a doctrine, collectively, might be the first step to figuring out how it could work.

We should collaborate our knowledge on what a government should stand for on something like Wikipedia then expand it to an appropriate level of public involvement. How could this work? Google Earth? Probably, linked in with tons of other tools. The reason this hasn’t happened yet is because ‘men are not angels’ (Federalist Papers #51) and because the Internet is still a baby. The imperfect system of communication, has allowed people to play favorites behind the scenes. Once the Internet turns into a cranky toddler, people will learn how to bitch and moan.

Before we danced at the dinner table, we watched the first part of Goldeneye and had a grogue. It was tasty although my forehead tightened in the middle where you get that crease when you get old. ‘Bu gosta di televisor?’ Ze fiddled with the controllers while he flipped between the movie, a commercial for a music store in Praia and a music dvd. I enjoyed the show, but in the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake this connection, or disconnection, running through my head:

The battle of the sexes is something that has forever baffled the greatest men and women. It’s the ultimate balance of two worlds. Does every species, in order to successfully procreate, have an equal and opposite chromosome that attracts and repels the other? Always in constant balance, never being able to fully enjoy the end but only being able to relish the means, the present. Finishing an idea only provides temporary excitement. The thrill is in the nudging and growing and teaching and admiring the work. Enter babies, it’s something you start through love and continue to enjoy it while it grows, never knowing what will come next or what it will do, knowing you have a to put in what you can, while at the same time learning to let go.

“Boas festas, feliz natal, and happy christmas,” Ze toasted. We ate baked duck, sausage and rice. It was sabe. I had three servings and still feel full.

The Revolutionary Update, Mark

2007-12-28T04:28:00.000-08:00

(This is an email conversation between my cousin Mark Hocamp and I about the Revolutionary Presidential Candidate, Ron Paul)
12/28/07

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Newhouse.

I hope that all is well on the Dark Continent this time of year. I went to Chucktown for Christmas and had a splendid time indeed! I guess thouse of us here on the stateside need to start planning for your welcome home party. Hey by the way, what's up with Tyler? We were going to have a little get together a couple of weeks ago and I went ahead and called him to see if he was doing anything but his voice mail said he no longer operates that phone- I hope he is surviving.

Anyhow, RP doesn't necessarily want to advance an isolationist policy, he wants us to be more non-interventionist. I disgaree with you that the U.S. needs to be more focused outward these days. I think we need to be more focused on ourselves. Why are we spending tax dollars on feeding the starving kids in Africa when we neglect our own? And the money we send to Africa almost never gets to the people who need it. It ends up in the hands of war lords who are exploiting their own people for profit. The only way to cure worldwide problems is through the intervention of programs such as the one you work for. Foreign intervention fails, has always failed, and will continue to fail. The private sector can do more for those in need than bureaucrats ever could. The reason why Paul wants to pull out of the U.N. is because he feels that the U.N. has lost sight of its original purpose. The UN is meant to be an organized body present merely to stymie the possibility of WW3. The UN, as of late, has become a corrupt body that gets involved in many satellite conflicts that somehow end up profiting those who desire to get involved. Kofi Annan's sons are millionaires because they have had business interests in conflicts that the UN has indulged in. He also feels that the US has become a subservient body to the UN. If the UN feels that they need to enter a conflict, guess whose troops they send under foreign command? You got it- U.S troops. Why should we be spending money and losing our own to conflicts which will only result in some profiteer's deeper pockets?

Paul sees the inherent corruptness behind those who want to make war and he wants to stop it. He wants to make our economy stronger, not line the pockets of foreign war lords. if the UN was used for its original purpose, he may or may not have a problem with it. But for now, with the fact that we have a thousands of troops in dozens of countries, we cannot refute the fact that we are spread too thin and have made ourselves very vulnerable to attacks from the outside. Not to mention that because we have chosen to intervene in everyone else's affairs, we have essentially pissed off even moderate countries (read Turkey).

We are setting ourselves up for a fall and if we do not get our priorities straight, we will end up as the powers did during the colonial, imperialistic era - Spain, Britain, Portugal, France. These nations are still recovering from their flawed foreign policies from two centuries ago. They have a shaken national identity, mediocre economies, and militaries that have no prowess to avert full-fledged attacks.

I hope that this explanation finds you in good spirits. And hey, the offer still stands. If you need me to fedex some condoms or any other essentials to your hole in the ground, I can. Let me know.

MH

What up Mark,

Check it out, so Barry got engaged! He's gettin married next summer, so Ill be comin home for a few weeks before the second year. mark it dude.
tyler quit his job. pretty awesome. he sounds pretty stoked about the whole thing, trying to change from a 55hr/wk horse of a job to something he likes to do for a cut in pay. i guess he had to turn his phone over when he turned in the reigns.

I agree we need to stop sticking our nose in other people's problems, but how else could we institute an 'intervention of programs' without going abroad. Sure, programs like Americorps give citizens an opportunity to help the country domestically, but I feel like America needs to adopt a more diplomatic policy of foreign affairs by marketing community development programs like Peace Corps to young people.

foreign intervention has failed because there wasn't a way to channel funds to the people who could use it. with things like microcredit the barriers are removed. with programs like the peace corps and USAID, people are getting trained and learning how to run a business. if you put those together, its only a matter of time until poverty goes away.

why should people join the peace corps? same reason tyler quit his job and you're thinking about it. work sucks. work is stress, and i feel like so many people would rather be somewhere else. im not trying to gloat, only to prove a point by saying that i love my job. why? because there's no stress. i go my own pace. the peace corps is designed so that you can come out here for two years and smoke weed or you can treat it as a job and work your ass off doing what you want.

Many international programs are failing because of corruption and a slew of many other things that go wrong with big organizations. The question is, do we reinvent the wheel by reestablishing those connections between countries, or do we encourage americans to work for the government, comb through the bullshit then lead a more honest program when they get through the ranks.

the us has stayed on top in the past by constantly reinventing itself. i think the future of america won't be to focus more on ourselves, it will require us to change the way we think about business, how we spend our time. there needs to be a major focus on reducing energy expenditure and assisting developing countries. i think these are rising industries that people haven't yet wrapped their head around. imagine, my friend nick and i sell solar stills to the local government here while we train capeverdeans how to do it, we broadcast the progress of the program on youtube. thats actual reality tv. people will cream their pants to give money to this knowing their contributing to something good. i think these types of innovative green industries will reshape television and i believe americans will be the catalyst to putting a new face on diplomacy.

what about war? the soldiers of tomorrow will be equipped with language and an engineering degree. it's not about winning the war, it's about putting a roof over people's heads.

i like ron paul. I don't think he stands a chance because of the closed-mindedness of most of the country. I think this will change though, not through politics, but through the slow process of angry citizens like you and i, bringing morality to the american government and using the internet to facilitate communication between the rich and the poor.

~i love debate,
peace my brotha

What it is

2007-12-28T04:26:00.000-08:00

When it’s good, it’s better,
When it’s bad, it’s worse,
Is it worth it?
That depends on what it is,
When it’s not there.

Leadership Speech

2007-12-25T04:25:00.000-08:00

(from a podcast titled Leadership, found on economist.com)
Can’t shift with public opinion
Stand up guy, demonstrates courage
Combination of courage and competence
Not afraid to disagree/ stand up against people
So he can say later, this is why… ex. “laws against torture”
Leadership in the military - learn to follow people who aren’t good leaders, surrendering of your own freedoms to be able to do all you’re supposed to do, think of the nation – orient to something larger, as a result you see heroism. These are the guys who don’t get awards, can’t trust the medal winners.

Military, also understand what it’s like to follow a poor leader, learn what you should do instead, more sympathetic. Learn to follow orders rather than give them.

Do have to manage though. Appoint really competent people. Not a business, a democracy. 535 people are your board of directors, not selected by you.

Benevolent dictator.

A leader should know what it’s like to fail. Make terrible mistakes.

Executive experience comes in several different ways. American people are hiring a leader, hiring someone who understands them, thinks like them. Vast majority of people think managers get paid too much… less sympathy for the high-paid executive.

America wants leadership, not a CEO.

“Never negotiate out of fear and never fear to negotiate” – JFK

Use life as a vehicle of service, community organizer more than a governor

Fight big healthcare companies, if not willing to take them on, game over

Young people, don’t pay attention till older, when you have to shell out taxes, not politically engaged, start off global, green, tolerant of sexual orientation, tech savvy

Important for political leadership,
Easily bored by boring jargon… only focusing on graduating and getting out of debt

The Corps

2007-12-22T04:25:00.000-08:00

think tank connect Washington via wiki with universities to come up with ideas for development workers, like PCV’z. Include app’s for all kind of development work, short desciptions of each kind and links to. Make it simpler to understand what each does, benefits, downsides… ameri corps, water corps, crisis corps, even marine corps… it’ll be a list of opportunities to work for the state, have them broken down... this won’t be the official website for government work, it’ll just be the cleanest, the most effective. Clean as kiva, innovative as ebay. Except I’ll be selling jobs. This is a new organization of the web. Organizing development work, which is the essence of a government, and the point of the internet. Development in this sense being the development of individuals/communities.

This will be a source for an army of development workers.

Government is only a channel of employment.

Some foreign policy

2007-12-22T04:24:00.000-08:00

China exports goods
US exports knowledge

Open border, encourage immigration offer incentives like a job without a boss – self-employment for people to leave country and spread knowledge.

Rebuilding iraq – some cross between Peace Corps and Armed Forces. Smart, development worker incentive? A shitload of money. The uber Peace Corps volunteers. Bit of military experience, language, development work experience

Invest in preventive healthcare

Preventive healthcare - mandatory (via tax breaks) health checks at local

Incentive = tax breaks if you give to development work

Development work, take all info from Peace Corps/ developmental organizations, put on html database network that can be accessed from any computer with Internet, downloadable to be viewed without a connection.

Social profiling, google, babajob…

Elements of a Country (The New Yorker)
The Constitution
Courts
Civil Service
Environment
Science
Economy
Marketplace of Ideas
Intelligence
Military
Diplomacy
National Character

Every person is a commodity. Our resume is our sales pitch. We write down what we’ve done, which is what we are capable of, thus our history. Employers, people who run companies that collaborate both people and resources to make products through which everything started as an idea, look at a resume and decide if they would like this person to work for them. Just as they would pick up a catalogue and decide if they want to order one product instead of another.

The Colonial system of education is impractical. A teacher stands in front of a group of students and tells them things they should know. This knowledge, years down the road, will be applicable in “the real world”, so they say. What happens, is that instead of absorbing the information, students figure out that all they really need to do is follow what the teacher says so they will get a good grade. Good grades permit you to graduate. Good grades look impressive on a resume. The problem is that good grades don’t give you money and don’t give you a job. The biggest struggle I found when I left college was finding a job I really wanted, who conversely wanted me.

What the Colonial system of education teaches is two things: concepts of general knowledge and how to follow directions. Ten years out of high school, the only thing I remember from Calculus is that my teacher made me laugh, she smelled like cigarettes, could tell jokes and oh yeah, something about derivates. Physics, Maley told us a story about his friends of his from college who treated school like a job. 8-5. When 5 came around, they pulled out, this I remember vividly, the six-packs of beer and partied their tail off.

It’s not the material that sticks with you, it’s the method. If schooling was applied more to a practical system of work and jobs, students would be more engaged, would retain more information and would find it easier to find work once they finished.

A community needs a few things to function well: water, food, shelter. Once they have these things, it’s nice to expand to more communal things like infrastructure, electricity, schools, etc. To execute these ideas, we’ve created jobs. We need two things to do a job: the knowledge and the resources.

So you’ve got two things in the education system: knowledge and people who follow directions. School: knowledge and students
Jobs: knowledge and resources

It is the employed sector’s interest to begin schooling within their industries. Instead of paying to go to school, pay someone an internship fee and teach them the basics of what you do.

That’s the struggle. Is making the connection between work and education. How can they fit together?

no sleep

2007-12-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

My roommate Alex and I interviewed a local farmer named Domingos. He uses some very innovative approaches to making water and keeping his plants from getting thirsty in the Serra Malagueta National Park.

Just before 7. Morning run. The novelty has worn off and it’s more painful to get out of bed. Sometimes I still do - bones crackle, eyes still half closed. I slip on my shoes and descend a flight of stairs. By the time I get my feet moving on the cobblestone road, Assomada is in full swing: the two teams for the second game have already lined up on the basketball court and women are hawking fish from the early catch. The men mixing concrete at the new market see me run by. When they meet my eyes, I notice something oddly normal about their faces - crisp as cold water. It’s daybreak and Cape Verdeans have no sleep in their eyes. My hand instinctively flicks a piece of goo from my eye I hadn’t yet rubbed out. I wonder, how do they stay so fresh? My bet is on their tranquilo lifestyle rather than some product they apply before going to bed.

“Kal estado di undi”
“Georgia. Konch Georgia? ...Sta perto di Florida.”
“Ah, Florida, ami konch Florida. Ami oja na televisor txao Cubanos bai pa Florida.”
The only thing this guy knew about the State of Georgia was that it was near a state where he watched Cubans get arrested because they tried to sneak into the US by boat.

‘So, what else is going on at home?’ I ask, flipping the conversation back to my parents.
‘Not much, House is about to start a season of reruns. The Screen Writers Guild is on strike. I’m pretty sure it’s because of the YouTubers,’ dad says.
My mom adds, ‘hey, there is a new season of Dancing with the Stars. That should be good.’
The evolution of Americana at its finest - in my generation, we’ve gone from the Huxtables and the Tanners to Real World and Dancing with the Stars and now finally to whatever you can think of minus boobs and profanity.
Hey, Screen Writers Guild - you better stay at the picket line. The only hope TV has of survival is by showcasing the gems of the Internet through some kind of voting system like this.

Some stats (socio-economic indicators for Cape Verde (UNDP 2002)):
Cape Verde Sub-Saharan Africa Developing Countries
GDP per capita (PPP US$) 5000 1790 4054
Life expectancy 70 46 66
Infant Mortality Rate (per 1000) 29 108 61

Here’s another one: 52% of Capeverdean income comes from external sources. 48% of those sources are from family members abroad.

Up until a few weeks ago, I tried to be the cool teacher - talking about stuff like sex and hip hop as long as we got through the lesson plan, focusing on teaching just what they need to know, not being too strict on discipline. Because class was lax, I figured they would do the little things I asked them to do. I was wrong.

Seven weeks in, I gave my first homework assignment. Six out of eighty nine students transposed two polygons the four ways we discussed in class. I hounded them and gave out minus’s. They were devastated. The rest of the day they did everything I said because they feared receiving another minus for the day.

Of course, I dwelled on this and thought about how the whole education system needs to be reshaped. Here’s what I propose:

Colonial education emphasizes two things: the absorption knowledge and how to follow directions. These two concepts are important, but they are only a means to accomplishing something.

To accomplish something, two other things are far more important: self-motivation and productivity. If you’re not self-motivated, you don’t care about what you’re doing and if you don’t produce, you’re not doing your job.

For example, everything you do, in terms of a job, starts with an idea.
Once you have an idea, you jump on a track that is eerily similar among any job:

Development of an idea
Motivation – follow directions – acquire knowledge – produce

You need to be motivated to act on this idea and picture what you want it to look like when you finish. When you focus on the end product, you come up with a set of directions you need to follow to make your idea come to fruition. As you follow your proposed directions, you acquire the knowledge necessary to carry out your idea. Eventually, with patience, you produce.

The first step is motivation. As a teacher, you can motivate one of two ways: through fear or through inspiration. Fear is easy - use authority to make your students fear you will give them a mark that will somehow damage their future. That’s old school. Inspiration is what is new. Inspiration is what will change with the world. Make ideas hip. Make them sexy. Use inspiration to teach students about ideas that relate to their life and their community. Do this, and they will want to come to school.

So, I propose schools teach kids two things: the importance of following through with something you said you would do and an understanding that you have to do something.

To do this, schools should lead projects for students to do that applies chalkboard theory on a project that leaves them with something they can be proud of. If they focus on producing, the theory will sink in and the students will feel a sense of achievement having finished something they started.

I won’t be assigning any more homework from now on. I figure it’s my job to put a sexy face on drafting so these kids will think about ideas in their sleep.

Speaking of which, Nick and I finished the solar still. Everyone is really excited: the Ministry of Agriculture has given the idea a nod, a number of farmers already stoked to try it out and we’re planting seeds in our seniors ears to turn this into a business when they graduate. We got the hype - I just hope the damn thing makes water. We will see, we put water in it tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.

A neighbor of mine helped Nick and I move gravel to school the other day. It was the last step we needed to do before we could pour the concrete basin for the solar still. Once we dropped off the stone, Nick offered to buy him a round of grog. Instead, Lixi invited us into his home for a whiskey. First, he showed us his house. Lixi just finished building a dojo where he has already begun giving karate lessons. He then showed us his homemade workout equipment - metal rods coming out of the wall used for dips and pull-ups, pulley’s with a block of concrete for arm curls and a metal rod with the concrete balls on either end for benching.

We sat down and had a grog. Then another grog. Then some fries, then a whiskey, then some fried eggs and sausage. Over the course of two and a half hours, we talked about everything we possibly could think of. After the first hour had passed, I found myself looking at the clock – we were talking about the festa in Assomada, for the third time. Lixi suggested we get a coffee in town. Nick sucked it up and went out with him. I walked home and thought if I should feel guilty for trying to leave the marathon chega (chega – to arrive somewhere, or hang out with someone).

So much of everything is balance. You can get better at it, but the scale is always in motion, so it’s something you can never perfect. How much do you give, how much do you take? Do you do what you want to do or do you do what other people want you to do? How do you know if you’re right? No matter how well you think you can read a situation, there are always other factors, other temptations to swing your decision. In my case, I’m always a sucker when there’s a small glass of whiskey sitting squarely under my nose.

I ask Alex one night, “What’s the definition of intelligence?”
“Thinking quickly and deeply, well,” she responded at a pace that left no question she had this conversation before.
What about modesty? Is that part of intelligence? If you’re modest, it might allow you to think quickly and deeply, better, because you’re thinking only for the sake of thinking and not for the sake of appearing intelligent.

The one natural resource the world has left is the infinite quantity of human ingenuity.
-The Economist

Have you ever said to yourself, when I’m an old man I’d like to be able to say…?
Let me share with you a letter I’m writing to myself I plan to read when I’m 100:

Hey you wrinkled faced bastard. It’s you 76 years ago. I have no children yet (that I know of) and don’t really plan on getting married. The whole idea doesn’t make sense to me, putting a paper contract on a personal relationship. Babies? Yeah, probably, mainly though to satisfy mom, I know she wants grandkids really bad. It might be cool though to leave something behind once your body gives out. I’m sure by the time you read this, people will have figured out that we won’t be here forever, humans that is... I’m sure we will have identified our minds and the physical world as two parallel realms… both coexisting through time, each dependent on the other and indefinitely transcending solely into the realm of our mind through immaculate communication…

It’s weird, the more mobile people become through technology, the less we have to move. When people started out, they had to move around to get food and stuff, then they started farming and domesticating animals… it escalated from there. Now I can find work, give some dude in Africa money to start a business, chat with friends, watch porn and read the news all at the same time. We’re mobilizing our minds and stabilizing our bodies, at the same time. Wait, why am I telling you this, you’re probably reading this linked into some network of life hovering in a pod over the ocean.

Anyway, so what’s it like? Oh wait, I can’t ask you questions cuz you can’t go back in time... unless…? Hmm, I bet by the time your lady friend’s boobs sag as low as yours do someone might have figured out how to travel through time. If you can, will you please send me some kind of a message? Like show me what kind of tattoo you wish you had gotten, if any. You know, the biggest deterrent I have in getting a tattoo is that whatever I put on there now, I might regret later on. Let me know what kind of tattoo you wish you had gotten. I guess it’ll have to be something that blows my mind, leaving no question it was you.

What’d people do about oil? Did we go nuclear? Anyone drop a bomb? Or did we take it all the way back to solar and wind energy type stuff? Are we really approaching the end of nationalism?

Enough about you, I’m young and selfish and needy and want to talk more about myself. Work is okay. Sometimes it sucks though, my boss is an asshole. He gives me no respect despite me giving everything I got. Guess that’s it though, that’s the motivation. The more people give me shit, the more I can’t get lazy and relax. Well, I sure hope you’re enjoyin the hell out of it now. You’re laughing aren’t you, oh yeah, the joke’s on me because I’m young and naïve and think I know everything. Okay, I guess it all starts with laughing. Here’s what I’m gonna do: everytime I feel angry or anything other than laughter, I’m gonna picture you sitting in that fat leather chair wearing a robe some foxy lady bought you for an anniversary you forgot about, taking some kind of medicine for something dumb I’m gonna do between now and… now your time... when I get angry, I’m gonna step back and see if there’s something I can do to fix it. If I can, I’ll do it, if I can’t, then it’s someone else’s fault. That’s when I’ll laugh with you at how dumb people are. People, they’re the worst aren’t they?

Okay, well, I probably made you’re day cuz you’re old and bored and don’t have anything else to do with yourself… or is it that what you figure out as you get older: that the most important thing there is, is to be able to watch your children live and prosper and be able to see a reflection of yourself in what you left behind. Nothing really matters as much does it?

Well, old man, I’m here. I’m you, I’m tryin to do those things you wish you did but never got around to. Course, I hope by the time I get to be your age, I won’t have missed that much.