Moving Along

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: