Rants and rambles

Pause.

2011-10-01T13:02:00.001+04:00

I have graduated from the Masdar Institute. I'm living in Ghana right now, one day I'll start posting updates again...

Masdar's first community event

2011-04-13T13:20:00.000+04:00

Masdar has recently announced the inauguration of a reoccurring public community event "The Market@Masdar City." The first one will be on Friday 29 April, from 10 am - 5pm. A recent email I received promised the event will "bring together artists, organic producers, food stalls, spas and entertainment." Spas. Not exactly what I think of when I think of markets or community events, but the rest sounds exciting.

The event is completely open to the public, everyone is welcome.

More info about the event here.

Location map here.

It's been very interesting to see Masdar open itself up to the public. When my brother visited in January, he asked if he could blog about how other people could find their way to Masdar to explore it. At the time, I told him no because it wasn't really clear whether Masdar was open to the public or not. I suspected that security would likely turn away random people showing up to just look around. However, shortly after that, at the end of January, random families started appearing on campus all the time. I'd walk out of the library and dodge around toddlers playing around the fountain, or see couples lugging grocery bags from the Organic food store, families relaxing at Caribou Coffee or enjoying dinner at Sumo Sushi.

By the time my brother came back through the UAE in March after some epic traveling, I told him it was fine to blog about directions to Masdar as random families were showing up all the time, which seemed to be encouraged as they bring a lot of support for the businesses here which would otherwise have to rely on less than 300 students/faculty/admin who work and reside on campus.

I'm glad the campus feels more open now. It's nice to have signs of life other than grad students toiling away in labs.

Best class ever

2011-04-03T17:44:00.000+04:00

Last week, I went to a giant extravaganza educational student conference dinner at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, and there of all places, I met someone from Southern Utah University. She described to me basically what sounds like the most awesome class ever.

It's called PAM for "Passion Action Media", it's meant to be the little sister of TED

Lectures involve watching a TED talk, with some additional input added by a visiting speaker in the classroom who can comment on the subject from their own expertise.

For homework, students choose any topic they want related to the topic and then research it on their own.
They turn in a 2-page paper that is graded pass/fail.

Then everyone discusses what they found in class. If you did not turn in your paper, you are not allowed to participate in the discussion.

At the end of the semester, everyone presents their own PAM talk.

Another one of my favorite parts is that students are required to make a "concept map" that draws links they've found between all the TED talks, presentations, and discussions.

I would love to see this class model be copied in other places.

TED provides some excellent learning material that is incredibly engaging
The course enables students to pursue what they want to learn.
Furthermore, students have excellent opportunities to learn from each other. All too often, this aspect is quite limited in classes.
I think this is the type of course that maximizes the learning, inspiration, and understanding that students can get out of a course while requiring minimal input from the instructors. (It's been my experience that many times awesome courses require an unsustainable amount of work from instructors.)

Here's a link to the syllabus for PAM.
And PAM's course website.

One more to go

2011-01-05T17:03:00.000+04:00

I didn't intend to imply in my last post that sustainable energy should be for the elite only. Far from it, just the way that Coca-cola is an aspirational product and everyone can take part, it's a very accessible product.

I'm a bit sad that the fall semester is over. It was my favorite semester at Masdar thus far, mainly because I loved my classes. One was Distributed Generation, which teaches some of the basic electric power engineering principles behind adding renewable technologies to a grid in a decentralized way. I've wanted to learn this stuff for so long, I'm really happy that I finally had a chance.

The other is Technology Strategy, where we studied a series of case studies about companies on the cutting edge of technology, particularly their successes and lessons learned. For example, we looked at E-Ink (technology behind Kindle e-readers) and Apple. During one of our assignments, I found this awesome paper by a couple of business professors at NYU that predict that wind and geothermal energy are on track to become less expensive than energy from fossil fuels within the near future. They make a strong case that wind and geothermal are now a better R&D investment than fossil fuel technologies.

There's a magazine article about this paper here. The original paper is here.

The reading assignments for class were fantastic, and really changed the way I think about start up companies. In particular, I found "Crossing the Chasm" to be super useful. The main premise is that there's a large gap between your first wave of customers and tapping into mainstream buyers. This transition is not smooth and companies need to fundamentally rework the way they sell their product. Although the book is tailored for "high technology" industries, I thought its explanations were particularly fitting to Global Cycle Solutions and their bike powered corn sheller and cellphone chargers for Tanzanian farmers. I was really excited to tell Dan and Jodie about this book, but a mentor from Echoing Green beat me to it. =)

Inauguration

2010-11-24T23:30:00.003+04:00

Yesterday was the official Masdar inauguration.

Lab building by night. I recently learned that the long bubbles on the outside walls are filled with argon, a non-toxic, odorless, clear gas that makes a good insulator to keep outside heat from entering the building.

My favorite part is that the organic foods store just opened on campus! I've had various adventures trying to find organic food around Abu Dhabi, and now it's ridiculously easy, 1 minute of walking from my door. Other new additions include a sushi restaurant and a coffee shop.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot recently:

Renewable energy/sustainability has a major marketing problem.

Melinda Gates (yes, Bill Gates' wife) gave an excellent TEDtalk where she decribes lessons nonprofits should learn from the way Coca-Cola does business.

One of the main lessons - aspiration sells. Gloom and doom doesn't.

For example, many organizations try to help developing communities prevent water-borne disease with improved drinking water sources and hygiene programs (washing hands, better latrines.) These type of programs are dependent on changing behavior, which can be tricky.

Telling people that they'll get diarrhea and die if they don't wash their hands or chlorinate their water is not very effective or appealing. That would be like Coke trying to sell by saying "drink sugar water, and maybe you won't feel sad."

Just like the sustainability movement is saying "reduce fossil fuel use or the whole world is going to burn and die."

Recently, researchers at the UC Berkeley found that such doom and gloom climate messages can backfire. Instead of pushing people into taking action, negative messages can push people toward not believing the evidence for climate change is real.

On the other hand, Coca-cola uses an aspirational approach - they associate their drinks with the kind of life that people want to live. They know that happiness means something different in every country, so they tailor their marketing messages to those aspirations in each location. Coke ads are full of dancing, singing people, happy families, beautiful women, dashing young men, etc.

People complain that renewable energy is still too expensive, but I don't think that's the heart of the problem.

Does a Rolex provide anymore functionality than a cheap, plastic $1 wristwatch? Why do people buy Rolexes?

What if, instead, renewable energy and sustainability were associated with the highest quality of life?

I've worked on a few projects in Zambia and many of my friends there live on a few dollars a day, they face many challenges. If you ask them what their dreams are, they talk about lots of cars and large houses, hoping for the environmentally disastrous lifestyle that Americans live.

Imagine if part of the viral American dream was low-impact living, and the whole world was instead straining to achieve the social status of a carbon-neutral life.

Likewise, the United Arab Emirates also has one of the highest per person carbon footprints in the world. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions Masdar can give is to change the marketing message here. Make sustainability synonymous with a better life.

I live in a spaceship in the middle of the desert

2010-09-25T22:14:00.003+04:00

Students have been living in Masdar City for about a week, so I've had the chance to settle and form some impressions.

The first day felt like culture shock. The buildings are beautiful here, and they look so different from anything I've ever seen, anywhere. My brain really struggled to believe what it was seeing. Is this real? What reality am I in?

Masdar student apartments. See the solar panels peeking out over the roof?

A computer generated graphic of the original vision for a part of the city.

My friend Ilham moving in.

Students walking toward the library

The first night of living in a Masdar apartment was hilarious. I didn't understand how anything worked: the stove, the lights, the bathroom faucet, the cabinets, and I couldn't figure out how to turn off the AC. Most of the cabinets and closets everywhere here don't have handles on them, so they look like flat plain wall panels. The secret way to open these secret doors is to press into them, which releases a catch and the door swings out. I also thought I would do some laundry the first night, but in the laundry room I couldn't figure out how to turn on the machines. And of course, the user manuals in the laundry room were written in Russian and Polish.*

[*Apparently, the power had not been connected to the laundry room for the first few nights. After the power was connected, turning them on became obvious, but I still was relieved to receive an English user's manual to wade through all the settings on the laundry machines.]

I keep telling people that it feels like I'm living in a psychology experiment. Every time I flip a light switch in the living room and the faucet in the bathroom starts running, or I desperately push all buttons on the stove to try to turn on a burner, I can't help looking over my shoulder and wondering if there's a scientist observing my behavior and reactions in this strange environment. Especially when I go around pressing all the walls to see if there are more secret doors, or I stare up in bewilderment at the kitchen cabinet shelves that are so tall and far off the ground that I doubt the tallest human on earth could use them effectively. Or the time I was working in the lab, a short alarm went off on the loudspeakers, and a male voice said something official-sounding in Arabic with a French accent.

The Masdar Institute is the first part of the city to be completed, it includes the library, laboratory buildings, and the student residences. And all these buildings fit together in a cube. And this cube is located in the middle of what is still a giant, flat, dusty, deserty construction site as progress on other phases of the city continues. It's quite a mind flip to be in such a strangely beautiful environment, then look a window and see flat dusty landscape stretching out to the horizon. It really feels like I'm living in a spaceship in the middle of the desert.

Masdar from the outside.

The library is on the right, student residences on the left.

The bedroom in my apartment. See? It looks like a spaceship. Actually, this is quite a lot of space for a bedroom on a spaceship.

So we are finally taking our classes in Masdar city, and the faculty and students are working to get the labs set up and running. But it definitely feels like the students, faculty, and staff are far outnumbered by the security guards and construction crew on the site. This place is a non-stop hive of activity, construction workers are everywhere in neon yellow and orange vests, fixing wiring, testing systems, installing fixtures. On my way to class or the labs, I dodge neon-vested work crews carrying tables and climbing ladders to tinker with pipes and wires in the ceiling.

Workers outside at night. I swear I can wake up at any time and look outside and see someone working on something.

In fact, the barrenness of the landscape contrasted with the lush architecture inside, plus the whole vision of building a completely renewable energy city makes me feel like I'm living in a science fiction novel.


The library by moonlight. I swear I took this picture myself.


The view from my apartment window. On the right is the 10 MW solar photovoltaic array. On the left is the site where all the construction waste is carefully sorted into piles for reuse and recycle.

Sometimes this place just doesn't seem real.

View from the library window. Construction materials and wasteland.

On the second day I was sitting in my apartment when I heard a noise. "I swear that sounds like a landspeeder," I thought. Turning and looking out the window, I laughed out loud. There was some sort of elongated construction vehicle cruising down the road. Not quite a landspeeder, but the sound is really similar.

Here's the construction vehicle:

Compare to the following. (At least the lab environment here is a bit more civil than Mos Eisley.)

India: Sukna stole my heart

2010-09-14T20:03:00.003+04:00

I finally know what I want to be when I grow up: an old, wrinkled Kumaoni woman!!! Let me tell you why...

One week into my research trip to India, I followed Chanchal and Harish hiking up the muddy mountain path for about an hour. Occasionally, a man with a line of donkeys and pack horses ringing bells around their necks would pass us going down.

We sat down to rest near the top. Cows and goats grazed on the slope above us, tended by a band of children and a delicate wrinkled grandmother who crouched in the grass, looking off into the sky. Someone had a radio (I thought) because there was music trickling down the slope. The kids were laughing, twirling their umbrellas, and dancing in a carefree, energetic, Bollywood kind of way.

Wow. Welcome to Sukna.

(I later figured out the radio was a mobile phone. Wow, Nokia knows their users pretty well.)

A glimpse of Sukna on the path up. You can barely see the white houses in the middle.

Another 10 minutes down the path, and we arrived at the Sukna branch of Avani, a mini-building where women from the village weave and spin.

An Avani mini-campus branch (just one building) only reachable by foot and donkey. Of course, this one is solar-powered, too.

Kumaoni women are beautiful beyond belief. Bold, humorous, strong, absolutely amazing. I don't speak Kumaoni, and they barely knew more Hindi than I did. But as I sat and watched them work, they would talk to me, teasing me, asking me questions. Sometimes it was obvious what we were discussing, like they would point to their eyebrow and make a pained look. I would shake my head, shrug, say "No pain," point to my earlobe, my nose, "Same. Same." Most women here have their ears and nose pierced, I'm surprised that so many of them asked if my eyebrow piercing hurt.

Other times the conversation was not so obvious. They would chatter and laugh and talk at me as if I understood. Sometimes I made up my own conversation in English to talk back at them, because it was just too strange not to reply.

An Avani employee carrying dyed hand-spun silk yarn.


The woman on the right is taking a break from twisting the tassles on stoles. Mina, the little girl, just sat and watched or would run outside to play with the other kids.


It's really quite amazing that Avani opened a branch out here in this remote village so that these women can continue to live with their families while they earn an income.

Chanchal is basically the most amazing person ever. He's one of Avani's lead technicians, and he is really sharp, humble, and gentle. I really appreciated his Kumaoni translating skills. I originally met him at IDDS in Ghana in 2009.

I watched women weave and finish the scarves, again little kids running around everywhere. Outside, a troupe of women passed by periodically, carrying rocks. They were working on a government program to improve the path to the village. The men dug up and broke the rocks apart, the women carried them up and down the path, and more men on the other side put the stones in place.


The hardcore rock-carriers. The woman on the far left had such a strong personality, I was blown away by her presence.

Sukna women sure know how to do hard labor in style.

I was a little shy, but finally I worked up the courage to ask for a head cloth from Chanchal and I tried carrying rocks with them. It was hard, but it was fun. The women were laughing, chatting, the sun was shining, we jumped from stone to stone on the path to avoid the mud.

They wouldn't let me carry stones that were too big. Once, when a man was loading the stones on my head, I convinced him to let me carry three, almost the same load as the other women. Then, of course, I ruined all chances of that ever happening again when I slipped in the mud and fell over. The rocks slid off my head and cut my hand. Laughing with embarrassment, I told them,"No problem. No problem," put the rocks back on my head and finished the route with them. On the way back I stopped back at the Avani branch to clean up the blood on my hand - it wasn't bad at all, just some larger than usual paper cuts on some of my fingers.

Then I tried to go back and carry more rocks, but the women refused to let me carry much at all. And teased me endlessly about falling down. It was really hilarious.

At night, Chanchal and Harish took me around to some of the houses to watch people cook. An important part of my Master's thesis concerns the indoor air pollution caused by traditional biomass fires used by literally billions of people to cook. The smoke from these fires is really dirty, and it gets into women and children's lungs, making them very vulnerable to respiratory diseases. The UN estimates that 1.6 million people die every year from chronically inhaling cooking smoke.


A lightbulb hangs in the doorway of a smoky kitchen. This house has an electrical connection, but electricity is far too expensive and unreliable to use for cooking. Most of the houses in Sukna have some electricity, either through Avani's solar program, or the grid connection that the government installed later.

As we walked around, the people were absolutely lovely, inviting us into their homes, showing their kitchens, chatting as they stirred, rolled, boiled and chopped. The kitchens were super smoky, my eyes teared up and I kept coughing. Although now I understand a little better why most cooking happens on the ground, and not on a counter or table - there's much more smoke the higher you stand, the lower to the ground you are, the less smoke there is.

Chanchal asked if I could take pictures of the kitchen, and the father agreed, so I started snapping shots. Then the mother came. I showed them some of the pictures, and then the kids started jumping in the shots, too. I'm going to print out a lot of these photos and send them with the D-Lab India trip that's going back in January so that people that are in them can have them, too.


This woman brought a solar light into the kitchen when we came as guests. Here, she's in the middle of making some chapati.

Mmmmm...whole wheat chapati, my favorite.


I love this photo. There's a type of wood with more sap that people use for lighting. This woman posed with the light and asked me to take her picture.

And this guy *really* wanted me to take a picture of him smoking. I think there's enough smoke in this kitchen already, buddy...

The next morning, we went out again to the houses.

Here's what one row of houses looks like. They are traditionally constructed with stone and slate, but Chanchal says that these days people usually pay for concrete to be carried up the mountain on the donkey trains.

We spent maybe an hour at this row of houses. It started pretty empty, with a person appearing every now and then out of a window or walking through the year. We sat at the side, chatted, and drank chai with a grandmother.

After some time, women came out of the houses and started bringing out livestock. Notice in the first picture, the very lowest doors closest to the ground? This is where the animals are kept. Little did I know that each practically harbors a whole zoo. This is what the yard looked like after some time, filled with goats, cows, and buffalo.

I *love* the buffalo the villagers keep for milk. Chanchal explained to me that people take very good care of these buffalo, treating them "like their own children." A woman must hike up and down the mountain to cut grass to feed the buffalo, which she carries back in giant bundles on her head. I also watched as women carefully washed their buffaloes, which were munching on the cut grass in the morning sun.

Buffalo!

Rajnish later explained to me that Avani is also working on a biogas cooking program in these villages, but it's very slow going. With a good biogas system, families with livestock take the manure and put it into a biogas digester, as the manure anerobically decomposes, it produces methane (natural gas), which the digester collects and the family can use for clean, odorless, smoke free cooking. One of the problems is that during the winter, it becomes cold and the reaction slows down, so there may not be enough gas during those months to cook with.

A grandfather pauses to relax with a hookah in the kitchen.

Sukna feels like a very vibrant community. Chanchal helped me translate a little with some of the women, I asked them to elaborate on what the best parts of Sukna are and what they wish were different. The women themselves began talking about how strong the community is. They all help each other out, when someone needs to build a house, everyone else pitches in. They mentioned that they felt other villages further on down the road were in a worse state because they didn't have the same strong community. I don't know if it was lost in translation, but the women couldn't think of anything they wanted to be different about Sukna.

Finally, meet my hero, Rubesi Devi, 80 years old.

I met her walking back, she was sitting outside, spinning yarn by hand for Avani's textiles. I fell in love. She is so bubbly, every other sentence is a laugh. Very sharp, she kept teasing me, and then she firmly insisted I come to her house for lunch, and grabbed my hand to take me there. Here's a short shaky clip of Rubesi laughing and spinning yarn:

I've spent a lot of time thinking where I want to end up. What is the end goal, where is it that I'm headed anyway? And now I can't think of anything better than a wrinkly smiling 80-year-young woman, sitting in the hills, spinning yarns, and laughing at visitors.

Uttarakhand, India: Avani

2010-09-04T08:42:00.005+04:00

I leave at night in a autorickshaw, careening through puddly narrow roads. There are stages with lights, music, and performers everywhere along the dark streets, I wonder which festival it is and what people are celebrating.

Old Delhi train station. Deep dirty puddles on the smooth floor. I stride quickly past crowds and long lines of tired men waiting, moving, sitting.

Push my way up the stairs, through flows and walls of mothers, men, children, porters, teenagers, vendors, grandfathers, down to the platform.

One overnight train ride north from Delhi, Ranikhet Express 5013, in sleeper class. God bless ladies quota, I sit in a cell with all women, one middle aged mother, one grandmother, and four teenagers on a trip to visit friends.

I climb up into my bare upper berth, curl around my backpack and sleep in starts and stops. The conductor never wakes me to take my ticket.

Arrive in Kathgodam at 6 am, only the grandmother is left, sleepily fixing her hair. Step off the train in the pale light, whisked away in a car further north on a road where the steep curves come in endless waves. I am so very very lucky not to be prone to car sickness. The road is wet and muddy.

It's customary for drivers to honk at every curve, at every oncoming car, passed car, at goats, donkeys, cows, monkeys, and people in the road, and at any other time when it feels right.

Hooooonk, turn, honk honk, swish, hooooooooonk, turn, honk, honk, honk, hoooooooooooonk.
I doze off in fits and starts.

Four hours later arrive at Almora, welcomed by Rajnish and Rashmi, and their precocious toddler Tanwii in their cosy mountain forest home.

Rajnish explains that the monsoon rains are much heavier than usual this year. Many of the mountain roads are blocked from landslides, so I had been taken on an alternative route longer than usual.

The food is absolutely delicious. Whole wheat chapati, daal, and curried green beans.

It begins to rain hard again, and I worry that I'll never make it. One hour later, it lightens, and Rajnish shoos me out of the house, also afraid it will rain too hard if I don't leave soon.

The direct road to Tripuradevi is blocked by landslides. Fortunately there is one much longer alternate route still open.

Five more hours of steep curves, fog, and car horns. But we do stop at a roadside stand where thin brawny Uttarakhand mountain men laugh and eat from shiny steel trays. White chapati this time, beans, curry.

I see the landslides now. Piles of rubble running into the steep road. I am suprised and impressed they have been cleared to the side so quickly, that giant pines fallen across the road have been cut through already. The closed roads must be in absolutely terrible shape if takes so much more time to clear them.

Dodging around large trucks, weaving on narrow streets past jeeps, bikes, and motorcycles. The air is chilly and wet. We fly by towns and houses with banana trees, gutters overflow with trash, pigs wander in the alleyways, smiling people talk at fruit stands, sit drinking chai.

Trilling truck horns, curves, fog, rain, goats, deep green valleys spotted with light stone houses, steep hills lined with towering pines with fire scarred trunks. More car horns, we lurch up and through the forest.

At last Tripuradevi! I recognize the gate to Avani, my heart fills my whole chest.

There is so much good here, it is contagious.

Avani headquarters, perched on a mountainside, looks out over a valley and across to the Himalayas. This is the beating heart of one of the most beautiful industries I've ever seen.

A toddler running through Avani's campus.

The Avani campus above looks out on the view below

There is a solar workshop where local women and youth build solar lanterns to sell to village homes, a place where locals are trained to become solar technicians.

Troubleshooting and repairing a circuit for a faulty solar lantern.

Avani sells and services a range of solar products from lanterns to larger home systems

Sudna is a new trainee learning the skills she needs to be a solar technician.

Avani has also built a thriving industry of local craftspeople who create hand spun, dyed, woven textiles sold to boutiques worldwide. Avani has built this network and brings thousands and thousands of dollars of income to an area where employment is very scarce for villagers.

Avani uses natural dyes to add color to wool and silk yarn.

One of the weavers takes a break to chat.

Twisting the tassles on a scarf by hand.

Avani headquarters is full of beautiful people, laughing, working at their job. Electricity comes from solar, water is harvested from the rain. There are children running everywhere.

Perhaps one of the most impressive signs of health is that everything is running without Rajnish and Rashmi being there. They are the founders, they built this place from scratch, and now they can work at their other home hours away as Avani continues to pulse.

And the food, of course, is exquisite. Whole wheat chapati, vegetables, daal, cold clean water. We all sit together and eat at wooden benches, smiling faces pile more food on my steel plate, even as I refuse, laughing.

Delhi rocks

2010-08-29T20:00:00.007+04:00

I love the crazy parts of Delhi.

I love the chaos in the winding, falling, jam packed streets.

Autorickshaws pushing through rivers of people dodging motorbikes and cars. Dogs, trash, flowers, bananas, dirt, hardware.

Photo from: Wikimedia Commons

Old Delhi is a man kneeling on the cracked, dusty pavement with an air compressor, filling air into the tires of a cart harnessed to a hulking white placid bull.

And the food, of course, is amazing. My stomach is smiling non-stop.

I find myself wanting to live or work here for a little while.

Quite a turn-around from, oh, 5 years ago when I went to study in Bangkok and completely hated it for the first two weeks.

Now I drop into a gritty, chaotic city and want to stay longer? Not sure if I'm improving or deteriorating.

I'm here for thesis research. First stop, TERI, then Avani and finally Husk Power. But TERI doesn't open until tomorrow, so I went to visit the Red Fort, but really, it looks much more impressive from the outside than the inside. The best part was the ride there and back in autorickshaws. If you go to Delhi, definitely see Humayun's tomb and Qutab Minar, but you can just drive past the Red Fort and you'll see the best parts.

Here you can see this from the outside:

And I'll save you the trouble of going inside. It's a mostly open area and hordes of people with different buildings erected by different kings.

I think photo below is where the king would meet privately with people. Can't remember if this is the building that had a man-made stream running through the middle.

And some cool-looking windows that I liked, but that was about it.

Someone who knows Delhi monuments pretty well mentioned that while the Red Fort may not be as visually awesome as Humayun's Tomb or Qutab Minar, if you get a tour guide the stories behind the building are fascinating. Oh well.

What every family of 9/11 should know

2010-08-23T09:53:00.001+04:00

Dear families of 9/11, I wish you could see the caring and the pain that Muslim families around the world felt with you on that day.

Three Cups of Tea is a book that tells the true story of an American mountain climber named Greg Mortenson who nearly dies but his life is saved by a poor Muslim village near Mount Everest. He promises to come back and build a school for them. Thus begins his epic quest to build schools for needy Muslim communities all over Pakistan and Afghanistan.

On 9/11, he is traveling to the opening of another remote school in the mountains. There is an opening ceremony, with the keynote speaker Syed Abbas, a "supreme religious leader" of Shiite Muslims in Baltistan of Northern Pakistan. Abbas says,

"We share in the sorrow as people weep and suffer in America today... Those who have committed this evil act against the innocent, the women and children, to create thousands of widows and orphans do not do so in the name if Islam. By the grace of Allah the Almighty, may justice be served upon them."

"I request America to look into our hearts," Abbas continued, his voice straining with emotion," and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education..."

Mortenson says, "By the time Syed Abbas had finished he had the entire crowd in tears. I wish all the Americans who think 'Muslim' is just another way of saying 'terrorist' could have been there that day. The true core tenants of Islam are justice, tolerance, and charity, and Syed Abbas represented the moderate center of Muslim faith eloquently."

After the ceremony, women from the village lined up to offer condolences to the Americans, pressing gifts and eggs into their hands "begging them to carry these tokens of grief to the faraway sisters they longed to comfort themselves, the widows of the New York village."

The true tragedy is that all but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders last month.

WAKE UP AMERICA! Don't allow politicians to cloud your knowledge with slimy arguments against the mosque two blocks away from ground zero. The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, and these hateful arguments only spread ignorance. The politicians speak out against the mosque are only strengthening Osama bin Laden's power, a power that thrives on ignorance and fear. The more America screams hate, the easier it is to recruit terrorists. As Americans, we must fight back against this ignorance.

Forbidding this mosque is like forbidding the construction of a community church near a site where the Ku Klux Klan held a massive hanging and murdered lots of people. The Ku Klux Klan consider themselves Christian. Do they represent Christianity? Not by a long shot. Would the average Christian even consider the Ku Klux Klan to be a part of Christianity as well?

It's the same type of fear that made Americans think it was okay to send Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II and the fear that fueled the Communist witch hunts during the Cold War.

Know your enemy. The enemy is not peaceful Muslims. The Qur'an promotes peace, education, and women's rights. The enemy is the terrorists, an entirely different breed. As Obama said, "The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics--a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam."

Oh, wait.

George W. Bush said that, not Obama.
See his full speech here.

But I disagree with Bush's words. Terrorists are not following an Islamic extremism, because they are not following Islam at all. Just as the Ku Klux Klan is not following an extremism of Christianity, their horrible acts against humanity make it impossible for them to be truly Christian.

The mosque, called Park51, is a community center with a basketball court and cooking classes. It embodies peace, it embodies religious harmony as its board of directors is full of Christians and Jews as well. The founder, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a peaceful man who has been sent on numerous speaking tours by both Bush and Obama to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations.
"Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron," Iman Feisal says. "It is a fundamental contradiction in terms."

The outrageous arguments against Park51 are just a smokescreen. Politicians are manipulating our emotions to buy votes for this fall. Don't be fooled.

And don't sit quietly, either. Stand up, speak out, talk to your friends, family, and neighbors. Don't let manipulative politicians drive America toward a hateocracy.

Required reading:

There is No "Ground Zero Mosque"
How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
Taking Bin Laden’s Side

Quotes from 9/11 families who support Park51
Build That Mosque
Three Cups of Tea (on Google Books)

Masdar: building progress

2010-05-19T23:17:00.001+04:00

Here's a few photos of what the new Masdar campus looks like: http://jennyperkinsblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/masdar-institute-green-university-is.html

Masdar students finally had the opportunity to tour inside Masdar in April. Before, I had a picture in my mind of a big empty construction site waiting to be lived in. But when we were tromping around in boots and construction helmets on site, I felt like I had wandered into the Emerald City in Oz as we navigated through streams of people. Masdar already is a living, breathing, city as there are construction workers moving everywhere, working on everything. I've heard that it's 24 hours of non-stop activity as different shifts cycle through. I wish a proper historian could document this building process, because it's incredible. I know everyone's excited about the buildings, but in 50 years time it will be a shame if they don't have photos like this one of an awesome old timer bolting a skyscraper together:

(photo by Lewis Hine)

Or these cool dudes on lunch break:

(photo by Charles C. Ebbets)

Borneo: no leeches

2010-04-18T20:51:00.000+04:00

I posted a brief update on Masdar's D-Lab Energy trip to Borneo on the D-Lab blog: here.

We had initially been warned about all the leeches we would face (I didn't know they could follow you!), but it was so dry that we didn't see a single one.

I'm pretty sad about how Kaiduan dam is threatening to displace our new friends in Terian and Buayan. It's frustrating to feel so powerless.

Steven Chu is the man

2010-02-25T15:22:00.002+04:00

Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy (and Nobel Laureate), came yesterday to visit Abu Dhabi and Masdar yesterday. He gave a speech at the Emirates Palace at a Masdar-sponsered event.

Although I knew that he has an extensive science background, I automatically expected a politician's speech. Instead, he gave this really delightful slide show and I learned a lot. (Found a similar slide show that he gave in China last year. All of the following figures are stolen from that slide show.)

He presented a riddle: How is a Boeing 777 like a bar-tailed godwit? The bar-tailed godwit happens to be a bird that looks like this:

The answer is that they can both fly 11,000 miles non-stop without stopping to refuel. (Bar-tailed godwits migrate from Alaska to New Zealand every year.) Similarly, when they begin their journey, roughly 50% of their mass is fuel. Which leads me to this neat graphic that compares body fat to fossil fuels and batteries:

I've heard so much about how batteries are pretty terrible at storing energy, but this is the first time I've seen them directly compared with body fat. That's pretty incredible how energy-dense nature is.

Someone better figure out a battery break through fast, because so much renewable energy depends on storage. The wind isn't always blowing, the sun only shines half the day, if that, and those pesky humans like to use energy all the time. Maybe those Matrix robots were onto something with using humans as a power source... although why you would feed nutrients into humans instead of just using the nutrients directly for energy is beyond me.

Other interesting things:
The last ice age was only 6 degrees colder on a global average. Most of the US was covered in an ice sheet. Under a "business as usual" scenario, the earth will become 6 degrees warmer in the next century. 6 degrees is a huge deal.

He also said, "It is our [the US and other developed countries] responsibility to reduce carbon emissions to allow developing countries the headway to grow." Wow.

Refrigeration efficiency is a nice little success story from the US. In the following graphic, the red line is the average refrigerator volume. The blue line is the average energy use per refrigerator. And the green line is the price of a refrigerator, adjusted for inflation.

Basically, following California's lead, the US adopted standards for refrigerator efficiency. Manufacturers grumbled at first and said it was possible, but the refrigerators would be more expensive. Nope. Refrigerators have become more efficient and less expensive while expanding in size.

The amount of energy saved from refrigerators from this policy is greater than ALL the renewable energy generated in the US. That is both sad that we have so little renewable energy and impressive that efficiency improvements can do so much.

He also mentioned pumping water up to a reservoir as a way of storing energy. (When you need the energy again, you run it through a hydro plant) I've heard some vague stuff about this before, but generally that it isn't very efficient. Steven Chu said it's 70-85% efficient, which surprised me. Anyone know anything else about this?

Also, he mentioned another reoccurring theme I've been hearing a lot over the past year concerning agriculture.

The Haber-Bosch process is arguably the most important technological advance of the 20th century. The world population could not have quadrupled from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000 if not for the Haber-Bosch process, which produces ammonia for fertilizer, which won a Nobel prize in 1931. Without this process almost two fifths of the world's population would not be here.

According to Saul Griffith, 21% of the world's energy consumption is for agriculture, and I bet that ammonia production plays a large role in this.

Also Norman Borlaug, aka the father of the Green Revolution, is believed to have saved more than a billion lives by developing a strain of wheat that produces more food per acre and is drought-resistant.

In 1968, a famous book called the "The Population Bomb" argued that global starvation was unavoidable because food production was not keeping up with population increase in developing countries. Borlaug and his colleagues turned that around. For example, they worked in the middle of a war to spread the high-yield grain and took Pakistan from famine to self-sufficient in wheat production 3 years, and India from famine to self-sufficient in all cereals in 6 years.

Towards the end of his talk, Steven Chu also briefly mentioned a carbon nanotube technology that will take 30-50% less energy to desalinate water. That would be a huge deal for places like the UAE, but also a huge deal for the world in general, as water scarcity is probably going to be a major challenge in the upcoming century.

He also mentioned a liquid battery being developed at MIT that uses molten metals that dissolve into an electrolyte as they release energy, and then reseparate when the battery is charged again. This is an exciting technology because the batteries can absorb very high electrical currents and you could potentially make them the size of swimming pools (according to Chu.)

At the end, during the super brief question/answer period, Josh asked the following: The Obama administration is putting $80 billion towards the renewable energy industry. Obama has also stated that "I do not accept second place for the United States of America." However, China is putting $440 billion towards renewable energy. How can the US hope to compete when China is going to vastly outspend us?

Mr. Chu's response was along the lines of $80 billion is a start, and once the innovation economy gets going there will be more force behind it.

Hmph. Not the most reassuring answer ever. But I'm glad it's $80 billion and not zero, which is where it would probably be if Bush was still president.

Mzuka

2010-02-12T08:42:00.001+04:00

Another installment from my winter trip...

The last few days of my trip I spent exploring Nairobi. Bernard and Woon also were flying out of Nairobi around the same time, so we all took the bus up together from Arusha to Kenya.

In Nairobi, Bernard took us to Kibera, Nairobi's most notorious slum. He worked there before with a World Bike project, so he had friends that he wanted to visit. I'll admit I was nervous about going to Kibera, despite hearing repeatedly that it's one of the neatest (but perhaps also dangerous) parts of Nairobi. Anything with "slum" in the name just sounded like a scary place that I probably shouldn't be going. But it was absolutely amazing.

Daniel M^2 was right - Kibera slum is full of smart, enterprising people. The type of people that would leave their village and migrate to the city looking for work, only to find that there aren't enough jobs to go around.

Before I went, the picture I had in my head for a slum included lots of sketchy, scary men slouching on street corners, smoking and drinking, waiting for their next chance to mug someone. (Funny how my mind reflexively makes these half-formed pictures of places I've never been before.) Of course, the picture I found was much different.

Here's some first impressions:

Life. Everywhere. People moving, breathing, talking laughing. Kids. Everywhere. Women selling vegetables, shoes, shampoo, everything you can imagine. Houses. Everywhere. Patchwork of woven corrugated tin sea of roofs, mud walls, some concrete. Narrow little turning twisting muddy fractal alleyways. Doorways. So many doorways. The dirt road and branching alleyways are practically carpeted with plastic bags and trash stamped into the mud. So many home made TV antennas leaping up into the brilliant blue sky.

Hygenic nightmare. Murky muddy channels running everywhere with waste water. Many alleyways are filled with nasty-looking water, we need to tip toe at the edges and scrape by the walls. Maze. The first time Bernard's friend came here, he rented a room, left to get his stuff, and when he returned, he couldn't find his alleyway or room. He searched for hours before he went to find the landlord to show him where it was again.

Here's some Kibera photos I stole from this blog.

Actually what's interesting about the above photo is that it was taken about 5 years ago. When I went in January 2010, it seemed like every house had a homemade TV antenna shooting out the roof made from a pole, a frying pan, and old fluorescent lightbulbs. I have no idea why that particular combination works, but they were everywhere.

Tons of enterprise. This guy may not have a roof for his shop, but a sewing machine is enough to start a business. Check out the blog these photos came from for more examples of all the businesses to be found in Kibera.

Kids everywhere. Plastic everywhere.

The day I flew out of Nairobi, I took a matatu downtown in the morning, spent the whole day walking around town. Nairobi feels very modern. It's worlds away from Lusaka in Zambia, and even feels more polished than Accra, Ghana. I saw only a handful of other muzungus the whole day in the crowds. And you know what? Practically no one hassled me. I walked past thousands of people, I think only two asked me if I wanted a safari, only one said something like "Hey white boy!" (My hair is still short.) Whereas, if I walk in downtown Lusaka, Arusha, or Accra, it feels like a nearly constant hassle, everyone's got something to offer or yell at me.

In the early afternoon, I decided to head back, and grab my bags for the airport. All I had to do was find the place where the matatu dropped me off in the morning.

No problem, I know right where it is, right? Eh, rather, my brain decided it would be hilarious to remember the matatu stop as being in a place where it wasn't. It was a strange kind of being lost. I knew exactly where I was, but where I wanted to be wasn't there.

I had probably been circling around the same streets for about an hour, looking for my phantom matatu stop when I received a phone call from World Bike Dan.

"Which part of town are you in?"
"The east side. Kind of towards your house."
"Oh. Good. There's a riot on this side of town. You probably want to stay over there. In fact, you should probably get out and go home. I think they're moving in your direction."
Blink.
"Oh. Great. Thanks."

The day still seemed normal. Everyone around me in the street still seemed normal: happy, bored, walking, talking, sitting.

It felt like my nightmares. There's something looming, something coming. I can't see it, don't know where it is, but I've got to get out. Keep moving, keep moving. Same street. I've been here before. It's not here. Not here. This is so weird.

Finally, I mustered the courage to ask a shopkeeper where I could find the matatu stop. (I'm really really bad at asking for directions, especially in Africa. Admitting I'm lost kind of feels like painting a target sign on my back.)

He looked worried. "Well, it's a bit far from here. And you can't go around asking everyone for directions..." But he pointed me to a street and told me to walk straight.

After about 15 minutes of walking, I suddenly recognized a building, and took a few turns and found a familiar line of matatus! Jumped on, made it back in time to catch my flight, no problem. Yipes. Never saw the riot. Read an article about it later. It's hard to fathom that was happening and the other side of town seemed normal. I mean, it logically makes sense, but I suppose whenever I read about "hundreds of stone throwing protestors" I automatically imagine the whole place being shaken up.

Wuthering

2010-01-30T22:14:00.000+04:00

I did it! I took two steps in a handstand on Friday at parkour practice. Wahoo! New Year's resolution #1 mission complete. Still working on New Year's resolution #2: more awkward.

In other news, Abu Dhabi is expanding its public transportation offerings.

This is great. I came back from winter break to find two new bus routes that could get me all the way down town without taking a taxi. Awesome. I had silently, fervently hoped in my wildest dreams that this might happen sometime during my stay here, but never did I imagine it would happen so quickly.

Abu Dhabi is also installing a ton of air-conditioned bus stop booths. Okay, fine, it jumps up to 50 C (122 F) in the summer here, air-conditioned bus stops are probably necessary.

BUT.

The weather here is lovely right now, 23 C (73 F). I sat in one of those bus stops recently (the air conditioning was off) and it was SUPER HOT inside. You know why? The bus stops are big glass boxes, i.e. small green houses. ARGH. Perfect. Trap heat inside a glass box and then air condition it cool again. I bet any carbon saved by people riding the bus will be quickly gobbled up by the air-condition greenhouses scheme. Did no one think of insulative glass? Did no one test them out before they starting installing them everywhere?

There is no spoon.

2010-01-23T06:04:00.000+04:00

Jodie Wu and her team at Global Cycle Solutions are doing some pretty neat things in Arusha. Jodie is a D-Lab alum who spearheaded the development of a mobile bicycle cornsheller for Tanzania, building from the work of Maya Pedal in Guatemala.

A couple of summers ago as a student volunteer in Tanzania, Jodie built a pedal-powered cornsheller, then made back the money spent on building materials in a week by renting out to people who biked it to farms to shell corn. If you know D-lab, you've probably heard this story a thousand times, my apologies, skip the next paragraph. If you don't know D-lab, you may be asking "What's corn shelling?"

Millions of people across the world eat maize as their primary staple food. Usually, this maize is dried out in the sun, and then all the kernels are removed from the cob by hand. ("Shelling" is the process of removing corn from the cob.) It's a time-consuming, tough process. Another common method is to put the corn in sacks on the ground and beat them with sticks until all the corn comes off. Not very efficient.

Turns out there's an antiquated and neat farm tool that uses rotational motion to shell maize pretty quickly. It's super neat, I wish I had a video to show you. At any rate, GCS is making it easy to power these shellers to normal bikes. It looks something like this:

Based on how popular the first one was, Jodie decided to move to Tanzania and start a business after she graduated from MIT.

Another super awesome product GCS is developing is a cell phone charger, which Arusha resident inventor Bernard Kiwia designed completely from bike and radio parts. (Well, in some models, he also uses part of a clothes hanger.) It's a wicked elegant design, and it's meant to passively charge a cellphone while the rider is biking around. Villagers are REALLY excited about this one. (Mobile phones are a HUGE deal in emerging economies.)

Bernard shows off the charger he designed.

New Year's in Tanzania was fun. Jodie made a New Year's resolution to learn to drive the GCS pickup truck, A very stubborn, finicky manual truck with no power steering. In the words of Woon, "That truck handles like a corpse." And Arusha roads/traffic aren't exactly the friendliest of places to learn.

So we all jumped in the truck, Jodie took the wheel, and Woon coached her driving all the way to Shaibu's house for his New Year's party. Jodie had completed her first resolution within a few hours of the New Year. Jodie is basically a rock star.

Whereas the Christmas party at Jodie's place had been full of kids, cooking women, Maasai grandmothers, and a few local police, the New Year's day party at Shaibu's place was basically just young Tanzanian males feasting on goat, beer, and dancing the day away to loud music. I figure Tanzania's got to be the most awesome place for being a bachelor.

Shaibu's hardcore Tanzanian bachelor stove. Food, soda, matchbox, side of goat.

Dancing the day away.

Shaibu really knows how to throw a party. And you know what? He's a rockstar, too. He knew that Woon and I don't eat meat, and he made a veggie dish just for us. I was so impressed. What a bro.

Shaibu grilling goat.

Shaibu's also a manager at Tumaini Cycles. That kid is going places, he's amazing.

We also attended the Mama Afrika circus in Arusha, it was outstanding. Acrobats, contortionists, a polished female magician, it was all pretty nifty. The highlight was the last act: three young jugglers who did this mind-bending hip hop hat juggling routine. I'm sure they broke several fundamental laws of physics.

New Year's resolutions: 1) Be able take two steps in a handstand without falling down. 2) More awkward.

Resolution #1 is fairly self-explanatory.
Resolution #2 I've been thinking a lot about.

I ask a lot of people different types of questions. One of my favorite is: "Would you rather know many languages or how to play many instruments?"

Originally, my own answer was many languages. It just seemed so useful, I could travel more places, be eligible for more jobs, understand more people. But then I thought about it some more, and realized that even in English-speaking places, I'm a pretty awkward person. Knowing more languages would just enable me to be multi-culturally awkward in different dialects. When I framed the options that way, it suddenly became much more appealing to know many instruments.

Several hundred turns of thought later, I believe that being comfortable with awkward is loads more useful than being multi-lingual. In a way, being "awkwardable" can be substituted for language fluency.

And the more I travel, the more I realize that it's often not about language fluency, it's about being comfortable in awkward situations. If I'm comfortable in awkward situations, then it doesn't matter if I need to make funny hand gestures to communicate what kind of food I want. It doesn't matter if I don't immediately understand what's going on, as long as I can go with the flow.

Yes, learning other languages is still very useful. But actually, being awkwardable is a prerequisite to achieving language fluency. It's fairly straightforward to learn a language in a classroom or from language tapes, but fluency doesn't come unless the learner practices a lot with native speakers. This involves making all sorts of embarrassing mistakes over and over again. The more open a person is to awkward situations, the easier it will be for her to practice, and thus the faster she'll learn a language. (This is why it's easier for kids to pick up languages - the have a social pass to make mistakes, while making the same mistakes is much more embarrassing for adults.)

Easier said than done. But at any rate, I think it's worth working on...

Beware the tangawizis

2010-01-16T11:12:00.000+04:00

So much stuff on my mind, I'll try to spit it out a little at a time.

A few days ago I was in Arusha, Tanzania for winter break, visiting and trying to be helpful to Jodie Wu, co-founder extraordinaire of Global Cycle Solutions.

Here's a a few highlights:

Christmas - Jodie threw a proper Tanzanian feast, goat and all. I tried to make it through watching Joseph Kisoky and a few other locals perform the goat slaughter...I nearly passed out instead. Wrapped up a long day by dancing the night away with some tipsy Maasai grandmothers.

Jodie's neighbors - Jodie lives in a small house off a dirt path from a dirt road that is not exactly the pinacle of modernization or security. When she said she had a couple young Tanzanian males as neighbors I'll admit I was a bit wary.

But hey, it turns out her neighbors, Mic and Mas, are really great guys. And break dancing semi-celebrities. They're members of Contagious, the Arusha bboy crew. Went to one of their shows, very impressive. When they're not performing or practicing, they get together and...roller blade around town. Oh, and they're completely sober. What upstanding young role models. Jodie basically has the best neighbors ever.

Woon opened the new year with a new haircut. We waited patiently for 5 Tanzanian grade school boys ahead of us to get their heads shaved. Then, after some confusion and mangled Kiswahili, he paid the full haircut price of $.75 to the barber, put the clippers in my hand, and I shaved a mohawk. "No, it's really a very old haircut," he explained to Matayo. "Hundreds of years ago in America, there was this tribe..." Walking down the street, he got tons of smiles, laughs, and various call-outs, including "Hey Mr. T!" But the most common definitely was "Jogoo!" aka rooster in Swahili.

The Christmas goat slaughter was a religious experience. Intellectually, it was something I really wanted to do. Humans kill animals all the time for eating. It's a process I should know something about. I tried to watch, to be logical, I really did, but my body had other plans. My mind started swimming, my stomach fell into a black hole, I almost passed out, so I sat down instead. Logically tried to reason myself through why I shouldn't be on the verge of fainting, stood up after 5 minutes and nearly passed out again. Continued the process throughout the morning -- went to watch the preparations for as long as I could until I got too dizzy to stand. Turned away and sat down until I could stand up again, went back to watch.

I was really quite surprised my body had such a strong reaction. One of those interesting paradoxes where one part of my mind very clearly wants to do something, but another part clearly does not.

If my genes had made me a carnivore, there would not have been a problem. It's pretty funny that I'm a creature who clearly has some difficulties watching another creature die, but acknowledges that other dead creatures are tasty. (Just because I'm vegan doesn't mean that I deny meat tastes good...and oh, wow, there's a whole other can of worms to discuss there about botched vegan attempts in Tanzania, but maybe for later.)

Anyway, the whole experience put me in another plane of existence for a day, pretty hard to describe.

Mic and Mas took us to the church (aka club) to listen to the pastor (aka DJ) preach. Three of the crew and three of us jammed into a taxi for a few minutes on the rutted dirt road. Masaai camp. Saturday night, where everyone in Arusha goes. Good mix of wazungu and Tanzanians. And so much dancing. I felt like I could go on forever...but oddly only when I was surrounded by dancing strangers...then just felt limitless, like I had escaped myself, very trippy. I swear I was stone cold sober. Yay mob psychology?

Oh, also, Mas has a new name. Bboy Babu. Babu = grandfather. According to Mas, when he was in middle school in Dar Es Salaam, he was among the first 3 people to break dance in Tanzania. You should see his crazy freezes.

National Day

2009-12-06T19:37:00.000+04:00

On Tuesday 2 Dec, the United Arab Emirates turned 38 years old. Celebrations are still going on. Local custom: decorate cars like crazy, drive down to the Corniche and honk jubilantly. Makes sense that cars would play such a big part in the celebration of a country that has made such huge progress because of oil.

Car decorations get pretty creative. Below are some illustrative random samples.

Can you see the passenger? He's wearing a red-checkered ghutra (traditional head wear), as many of the local males normally do here. Car says: "EMARATY" "UAE." I have no idea where all these huge decals come from. The UAE flag is red, white, green, and black.

Hearts! Red, white, and green hearts. A very common theme. I'm not accustomed to seeing young Emirati men driving around with their cars plastered in hearts, but apparently love for the UAE runs very deep here. I also saw flower shapes.

Lots of cars went all out. I wish I had photos of them for you here. Huge pictures of the Sheikh everywhere. This one has the Sheikh, the UAE colored lik the flag, and some nice sand dunes. Other common themes included giant teddy bears tied to car roofs, and people leaning out of car windows spraying silly string everywhere.

Of course, if everyone jumps in their car and drives to the same place, it creates a jovial traffic jam. As Brian later remarked when we tried to find a cab home, "What is this? National traffic day?"

In other news, Sherry and I grew a TON of basil. Here's Sherry hiding in our basil patch before we harvested it to make pesto for Thanksgiving:

Concrete

2009-11-23T09:32:00.000+04:00

I've been training with a group of people who do parkour in downtown Abu Dhabi. I'm probably the worst jumper they've ever seen, but it's still the highlight of my week to show up and sweat through their grueling conditioning routines.

I'm astounded how great I feel during and after exercise. It was a tough week. My time log says that I spent an average of 12 hours working every day. On Friday, I drag myself to parkour, and after a few sets of push ups, suddenly the whole world is beautiful. I notice the sky. For the first time I see the birds soaring around the skyscrapers. All my insides are smiling. Yay, endorphins.

After parkour, we walked to the skate park (I knew there was a skate park somewhere Abu Dhabi, I just didn't know that it was that close.) There was a competition going on -- skate boarding, roller blades, and bmx bikes. Two things happened that were very interesting.

1) There was only one girl in the competition. She was on roller blades and she was AWESOME. She would fly up these high ramps, flip through the air and land on the other side, or she would float, dive into a hand stand, pose, then continue skating. As a girl who is frustrated by her lack of innate ability to jump, it was really inspiring.

2) The skate park was full of teenagers, and fights kept breaking out in the audience. Whoa. It was really out-of-place. Never seen anything like it in Abu Dhabi. They keep stopping the competition to break up the fights. They called in the police, who arrived right when I was leaving. Somehow the fights made Abu Dhabi seem more real. It's not just a giant bubble of sterile skyscrapers and malls. It has angsty teenage kids who get into fights. One of the many parts of Abu Dhabi I know nothing about.

Certified Abu Dhabi Ramble

2009-10-14T06:31:00.050+04:00

After residing here for about 7 months, I present you with a compilation ofAbu Dhabi random facts.

Abu Dhabi literally translates to "Father of the Gazelle." It is the name of both an Emirate and a City.

United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a country. An emirate is kind of like a state. So, it's like the United States of America, just substitute "Emirates" for "States" and "Arab" for "America."

The Emirate of Abu Dhabi takes up something like 80% of the landmass of the UAE. It's a big emirate. Dubai is the next door emirate. Dubai is the place with the tallest building in the world, the man-made islands in the shape of palm trees and countries, the indoor ski resort. All the stuff you've probably heard of.

Thus, Dubai is at the edge of everyone's tongue. "How's Dubai?" They ask. I say, "Abu Dhabi's great." I don't think most people notice. Dubai's the one that gets all the world press. They have better PR.

[Abu Dhabi/Dubai confusions don't bother me. Just don't conflate them if you're arranging airplane transit...]

Besides having all the land, Abu Dhabi also has the large majority of the oil money. About 95% of the oil in all the UAE, which is about 9% of the world's oil reserves. Crazy.

Abu Dhabi's economy is built on oil. Dubai's economy is built on tourism, finance, and real estate. Thus, Dubai screams louder for world attention, because the success of its economy depends on the world noticing it. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi relaxes in its pool of oil and money.

To be fair, Abu Dhabi realizes that its pool of oil and money will not always be there. They are working towards muscling up their tourist attractions and also building a "knowledge economy" instead, like Boston (biotech central) or Silicon Valley. Masdar (where I am) is a large part of this master plan.

Abu Dhabi has the highest per capita energy use in the world. And the highest per capita carbon footprint. (Yes, they even beat the good ol' USA.) Not to mention the highest per capita water consumption. (It's all linked, really. All the water here needs to be desalinated, which requires lots of energy.)

I wonder if I get points for being a fuel locavore here--all the petro-fuel in the buses I ride around in was produced only a few miles away. Local consumption, right? Hahahaha...I'm just kidding...

You'll also be happy to know that the city of Abu Dhabi has over 2,000 mosques. I swear there's one every block, which makes sense because the majority of the population prays 5 times a day. (I really like hearing the call to prayer ring through the streets...)

Less than 20% of the population are local. More than 80% are expatriates. From the Filipino cashier to the Pakistani taxi driver, and the Ugandan security guard, it's quite apparent this is a major destination for people who want to make money to send back to their families.

But perhaps the most fascinating facet of Abu Dhabi is that it didn't exist 40 years ago. Rather, there was a village of grass huts and about 1,500 residents. It became a ghost town during the oppressive summer heat - residents would ride for days by camel to Al Ain, a nearby town with cooler temperature and more shade. (It takes an hour to drive to Al Ain today.)

Today, Abu Dhabi is a gleaming city of skyscrapers thick with six-lane rivers of traffic.

The fascinating part is that so much of the oil wealth was distributed throughout the local population During the early oil wealth years under Sheikh Zayed, bundles of money (literally) were given to locals to help infuse the local economy with the wealth rolling in. Apparently, "it was not uncommon to see local people walking out of the banks carrying cardboard boxes full of cash on their heads," according to Mohammed Al-Fahim, who wrote an autobiography about growing up in pre-oil Abu Dhabi and the changes that came afterward.

Actually, the giving away bundles of money thing happened more than once.

Al-Fahim notes that each time it led to a "frenzied buying spree fueled by the oil wealth." Some people invested wisely - built a nice house -- others blew it all on few flashy cars that became worthless in a few years. Some people were really smart and opened car dealerships. In fact, Al-Fahim's dad was in the car business.

To give you an idea of the kind of explosive growth Abu Dhabi has experienced, imagine this: in 1966 his father sold about 200 tires. The next year he sold 10,000 tires. A 5000% increase. Al-Fahim himself took on the family business and described what it was like to import cars and have them snatched off his hands when they rolled off of barges onto the still undeveloped sandy coastline. If a buyer wanted a vehicle, "they would stuff bundles of cash into my hands, slip into the driver's sear and drive away in their new car."

Between describing the hardships of living in the desert and how the locals worked hard to scratch out a living, Al-Fahim off-handedly mentions, "Naturally, there was no domestic help as there is today."

In what other country has the local population gone from walking miles for brackish water to hired help as the norm? I would bet that in the overwhelming majority of countries that discover oil, the wealth only reaches the wealthiest, most powerful top sliver of the population. In this case, it reached everyone, who then turned into the wealthiest, most powerful sliver as the population boomed when more people arrived.

The government of Abu Dhabi certainly looks after its locals. Sheikh Zayed was known for his generosity and compassion, and I think he's left an admirable legacy. If you're local, and you get married, the government gives you a house. If you want to study abroad, the government will pay for your tuition. (And it's common to hear people say, "There's no such thing as a poor Emirati.")

When I first arrived here, I resented a lot of the laws that favor the local Emiratis - double/triple salaries for locals over foreigners doing the same job, only locals can own land here, if you want to open a business, you need a local partner. Not that I want to buy land or start a business here, -it just seemed like an uber elite high society making rules to maintain its own eliteness.

But now I'm impressed by how Sheikh Zayed set up regulations like these to ensure that the wealth benefited the locals, that the money from oil circulated in the local economy and didn't go straight to the pockets of foreign businessmen.

It was really smart at the beginning, but these days, if Abu Dhabi really wants to become a "knowledge economy" they'd be wise to be more supportive of immigrants. In my personal opinion, immigration is a huge plus for innovation. The US is arguably the most innovative country in the world (the oil industry, electricity, the internet all have their roots in the US) and I think that a significant reason is because the US is a nation of immigrants.

When different cultures mix, it becomes a more fertile ground for innovative ideas to break forth. (For more details, read The Medici Effect. Also, here's a Harvard paper that explores the links between immigrants to how innovative cities are--hat tip BoPreneur. "Immigrants are very important for US invention, representing 24% and 47% of the US scientist and engineer workforce," while the rest of the US workforce is only 12% immigrants...)

Finally, this ramble post wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention that robots are an important part of camel races in the UAE. Once, camel jockeys were lightweight, starved children, but the UAE outlawed this practice and the children have been since replaced with robots that are essentially a remote-controlled hand drills attached to a riding crop. Technology to the rescue.

Tick tick tick

2009-10-13T10:37:00.006+04:00

Huh. There go my empty zen days. Guess I'm a student again, grinding out problem sets. I feel like a lower life form.

I have no time for thesis research. GROWL.

Alternative Energy Myths

2009-10-01T18:14:00.000+04:00

Tim recently sent me an awesome article from Foreign Policy: Seven Myths About Alternative Energy

Several points stood out for me...

Nuclear is super expensive and take a long time to implement. Amory Lovins estimates that nuclear costs 3 times what wind power does.

There's a lot of people running after developing sexy new technologies (sigh...biofuel...), while focusing on unglamorous efficiency has the potential to cut 20% to 30% of the world's energy consumption by using technology that's already widely available.

Efficiency also does not ask people to change their lifestyles -- it finds ways to do the same activities with less energy, as opposed to conservation, which asks people to cut back on activities to preserve energy.

For example, power companies make more money when consumers use more electricity and they need to build more power plants. However, California has implemented measures to decouple consumer electricity use from the energy company profits. Thus, companies have been enabled to work with consumers to reduce energy consumption.

As a result, electricity use per capita in California has remained flat over the past 3 decades, while in the rest of the US, it has jumped 50%.

Here at Masdar, there's lots of plans afoot to experiment with different techniques of enabling people in the city to use less energy. I think an important part is giving a clear signal to individuals about how much energy they are using. For example, imagine a small number display next to each appliance that displays the energy use/cost.

I think that most people want to use less energy, but there's a wide range of how far out of their way people are willing to go to use less energy. If the default option is "use less energy", if it's the easiest path, then the majority of people will take it.

The sustainability movement needs more persuasive technology, or rather, persuasive applications of the technology we already have.

Imli!

2009-09-28T19:57:00.000+04:00

DOUBLE BACKFLIP AWESOME TRIP. We managed to check off quite a number of typical India experiences:

Filled out lots of paperwork. India sure likes paperwork for every occasion. And tea. Chai and paperwork at every turn.
Traveled by rickshaw, taxi, train, car, foot...dodged cows, goats, dogs, and monkeys
Leafed through dusty books at the IIT Delhi campus library
Visited Humayon's tomb (wow...), Qutb Minar [jaw hits floor] and the iron pillar (modern day mystery, it's been standing 1600 years and hasn't rusted...supposedly scientists have been unsuccessful in duplicating the alloy)

Humayun's Tomb - didn't have camera, image stolen from here

Qutb Minar, I took 7,000 photos, it's absolutely stunning. And apparently attracts more visitors than the Taj Mahal

Talked shop with some incredible social entrepreneurs
Met a Bollywood Star (Shilpa Shukla from Chak De! India)
Ate lots of home-cooked Indian food
Ate lots of Indian food in roadside stalls (Chantar Mantar Dosa Wala in Delhi is fantastic)
Ate in an American Diner
Visited urban tuberculosis treatment micro centers in Muradabad
Journeyed north to visit villages in the Kumaon region - foothills of the Himalayas
Yoga (of course)
Saw grassroots silk worm farming in action
Received surprise aura healing by an Indian gentleman who earlier took two seconds to go from talking about uber-accounting to the importance of opening one's self like a flower to other people
Followed our Sikh rickshaw driver on a tour through a Sikh temple
Quested out to buy some tabla
Dropped in on a surprise birthday party
Swung through a night Bengali festival
Decided that airports are always the worst part of the trip

Our trip originally had three main purposes:

1) Meet up with Avani. Avani does great work. For my Master's thesis, I'm working to help them with their plans to use pine needles to create electricity and high quality cooking fuel to mountain villages.

2) Meet up with Envergent. Honeywell is developing a flash pyrolysis process to convert biomass to electricity. They're interested in rural applications.

3) Meet up with Operation Asha. My advisor, Scott, volunteers with a foundation that works on fighting tuberculosis and they recently partnered with Operation Asha, a fiesty, innovative new tuberculosis organization.

wow. wow. wow.

Avani is incredible. They do so many things right. Imagine a Barefoot College Campus in the foothills of the Himalayas, 100% powered by renewable energy. Water is collected from rain and stored in multi-thousand gallon tanks. Local women dye silk and wool with natural colors and weave them into breathtaking patterns that are marketed and sold to wealthy consumers. Avani workers "leave their caste at the gate" and live, work, eat together. Extraordinarily delicious local ingredient food for every meal. It has all my favorite elements:

1) AWESOME people

2) Cash flow from outside into a rural community (usually money only trickles out as the poor by products, it's hard to find good examples of good cash flow coming in)

3) Renewable energy, eco-conscious (goes straight to my eco-puritan heart)

4) Heart-stopping scenery

5) Great food

I'm way too excited about the pine needle gasification project to stop and type about it now. It has so much potential I think about it non-stop these days.

I feel so blissfully lucky -- I met Rajnish (co-founder) and Chanchal (lead technician) at IDDS this summer. Then everything fell into place, almost of its own accord. It felt like one day I was bubbling to Scott about how great it would be to work with Avani on their gasification project, I blinked and we were riding up the twisty roads into the mountains of Uttarankhand.

Beautiful lady - all the women I saw in the mountains were stunning, especially the old ladies

Rice paddies on steep slopes

Avani silk worm farmer. All the leaves inside are crawling with silk worms.

Operation Asha is also beyond words. We met Sandeep and Shelly, the founders, and friends of SK. Incredible, wonderful, determined people. Thought it was about time to take a common sense approach to tuberculosis (TB) and they're producing impressive results after only a few years. They build up a network of treatment micro-centers that are accessible and open for long hours so that it's easier for TB patients to come by and take their medicine every day. It could be in a shop, or someone's home. It makes it much easier to reach patients in a cost effective way -- other tuberculosis programs typically spend $300/patient while Asha does a better job for $15/patient. I'll describe the Operation Asha strategy more in depth in a future blog entry, it's quite fantastic. (Their website is a bit clunky at the moment, but trust me, they're phenomenal.)

Yes, I liked India a lot.

Deviations on a theme

2009-09-19T05:36:00.000+04:00

Today I woke, sat up, and found myself staring at ancient stone tombs, a wide lake and [gasp] greenry everywhere. I probably should not have accepted that drink from that weird guy by the boat docks last night...

Errrr, rather, Ramadan is ending soon, which means that there's a school break for Eid, the end of Ramadan. Scott Kennedy, a Masdar professor who's my thesis advisor, and I thought it would be a good time to travel out to India to set up some projects. Visas, tickets, paperwork all came together at the last moment and much earlier this morning we arrived in New Delhi (only a 3 hr flight from Abu Dhabi) jumped in a taxi, then managed to scramble on foot through some twisting alleyways to find the apartment of one of Scott's old friends. It was still dark, so we all fell asleep again, and woke up to one of the best apartment views I've ever seen.

Delhi has a talent for whirring modern traffic life around solemn ancient monuments. I suppose I expect ruins to be out in the jungle somewhere, not cosying up to apartment complexes.

I chew fufu

2009-09-02T09:02:00.000+04:00

IDDS 2009 is over. I can't believe we pulled that off. Definitely the craziest venture I've ever been a part of. More participants this year, more organizers, less funding, we moved to a foreign country for the first time, added in 3 sets ofvisits to 10 different villages, my hat is off to the people who were muscling the logistics this year.

This year's list of projects include:

Batteries made from aluminum cans, salt water, charcoal, and copper wire (they powered a 12 LED lantern or a radio from a six pack of batteries!)
A device for producing chlorine from table salt and water with pedal power (for clean drinking water)
Various tools for making it easier for rural women peanut farmers to remove peanuts from the roots of the plant
A rice threshing wheel of doom
A novel way to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by absorbing their rotting gases with corn cobs

I'm in charge of posting all the project reports on Appropedia. I'll post here when that's done if you feel like browsing.

Now I'm back again in Abu Dhabi, where it's quite clear Masdar and IDDS are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Abu Dhabi is empty. In Boston, every night there were at least 7 different tempting options to choose between - talks, dances, bike rides, late night meetings, music, theatre, capoeira, drumming. In contrast, there is little to do in here Abu Dhabi, I spend a lot of time alone in my room...which can be very pleasant, in a Zen way. Limited choices = happiness.

In Abu Dhabi there is more time for reflection, for thinking about where I've been and where I want to go. I'm better at keeping in touch with my parents, and I'm working more on my music-reading skills and learning bits of new languages like Arabic and French. At the Masdar Institute, I spend all day doing self-directed research on renewable energy in developing regions. I love it. My advisor is amazing, and I have a ton of control over which direction I go, which means I have tons of room to learn things I've always wanted to know. I also exercise nearly every day, which balances the zombied feeling caused by spending all my working hours staring at a laptop. I sleep well, I eat well, I breathe a lot. I suppose I have more time and space to balance myself overall.

IDDS is fullfullfull. Chaos, merriment, frustration, triumph, mad wild excitement, exhaustion. When I'm at IDDS, I don't have a self anymore, there is only IDDS.

No time to talk to parents, my eating habits are horrible, exercise is infrequent, and sleep comes in snatches where I can grab it. I also have very little control over what I do or where I go -- it's all determined by IDDS or what needs to be done to help IDDS happen. It's hard to take care of myself, but the tradeoff is working intensively with so many awesome people on amazing projects. IDDS people are incredible.

A random sampling: Patricia Tarwali started a school in Sierra Leone, and now she also teaches welding to girls. Bernard Kiwia is a bike mechanic-turned-inventor from Tanzania. Gago Cadan is a yak herder from Tibet, who has also started his own school for nomadic kids (and likes to sing Tibetan songs while wandering through the hall.) Benjamin Dankwa is a farmer from central Ghana. Carla Tennenbaum is an internationally recognized artist from Brazil who makes art with EVA waste. And of course, Suprio Das, an inventor from India who was my co-conspirator on our IDDS team this year, it was awesome to be able to work alongside him. (These photos taken by Nathan Cooke.)

Bernard, IDDS veteran

Suprio, as himself.

It is essential that I take a moment to share a few of my favorite Suprio quotes:

"Hello, my name is Suprio. I like animals. Humans, too."

"I look like a bacteria."

Even though this is the third year I've gone through IDDS, I'm still surprised by how much I've learned. Every year it becomes richer. After the first year, I was ecstatic. After the second year I was depressed and burnt out. (More responsibilities, more stress.) After this year, I feel burnt out, but content, and excited about the future of IDDS. In summer 2010, IDDS will be in Colorado, collaborating with Paul Hudnut and Brian Wilson at the Global Social & Sustainable Enterprise program at Colorado State University. The focus will be to take technologies developed over the past 3 IDDS's and build business plans and strategies for dissemination to take them forward. In 2011, IDDS will likely return to Ghana.

Finally, a few more random stories about Ghana:

On the first village visit, the Offuman group arrived late at night, crawled out of the vans after a tightly-packed, bumpy, 4-hour ride, and was immediately attacked by army ants. Army ants like to run up your legs as high as they can before they bite you. Which is both hilarious and tragic. It's happened to me once before...when I was in the middle of presenting to Peace Corps Zambia volunteers about drip irrigation and standing in the wrong patch of grass.

The chief of Asampu said our IDDS group was "bringing fun to the village!" That is so cool. We spent a lot of time running around, trying to learn as much as we could by helping women pound fufu, or shell corn, or carry firewood. And playing with kids. Hopscotch, itsy bitsy spider, and learning neat things like this game that all the kids all over Ghana know that involves jumping, kicking, and clapping. I had a lot of practice carrying things on my head, but I'll never be as graceful as a Ghanaian woman.

Amy Smith named me as a co-founder of IDDS during the opening ceremony. That's very generous of her. I was mostly in the right place at the right time to help out when IDDS started forming in her mind. The incredible vision and talent to find the resources to make it happen were 100% Amy Smith. This summer I realized that Amy is an entrepreneur right down to her bones-- she builds these grand visions of what she wants to do, and then she has an incredible talent for exciting people to be passionate about building those visions with her. Amy also has a knack for convincing anyone to cheerfully do anything. "Hey guys, I know you want an opportunity to practice your hands-on skills, there's going to be a great easel-making party in the parking lot in 15 minutes!"

Ghana has a high degree of entrepreneurship. Seems like everyone and their grandma is selling something by the road or in the markets. There's also a high number of packaged products made in Ghana -- tomato paste, peanut butter, yogurt, water sachets, etc. I was also delighted to find that it's a Ghanaian practice to "dash" - add in something extra. For example, if you agree to buy a bag of tomatoes for 1 cedi, it's very likely that the vendor will also throw in a few extra free tomatoes after you close the deal.

Lady selling 7 different kinds of cooking oil made from palm nuts, ground nuts, coconuts, vegetable oil...

Everything is late in Ghana -- it's common for hired buses or catered meals to be 1-2 hours late. All the time "wasted" while waiting for things that should have happened hours ago has the unexpected benefit of tons of casual conversations with other IDDS folk. I feel like I met more people and know them a little better than I have in past years.

In the villages, I was quite surprised to see a high number of LED flashlights, powered by cheap Chinese batteries. I've always heard "The poor use a lot of kerosene. They should be using LED lighting, which is cheaper and has better quality light. But kerosene is more available and fits their cash flow better, so that's the most popular option." I actually saw very little kerosene use in villages, although it seemed to be a more common choice among street vendors in the city. Turns out 1 coke bottle worth of kerosene (300 mL) costs 1 cedi (about US $0.75) and lasts for about 3 days in a kerosene lantern. However, 4 cheap D-cell batteries cost 1.2 cedis and last for a month. Light for 3 days vs 30 days for roughly the same cost.

When visitors come to Ghanaian villages, it's customary to greet the chief, who will always ask "What is your mission?"

Medase - the Twi word for thank you - literally means, "I lay myself before you."

Crazy mind, able hands!

2009-07-11T02:27:00.000+04:00

Holy cats. Back organizing IDDS again, and this year has new levels of insanity -- IDDS is running for 5 weeks in Kumasi, Ghana, instead of MIT.

I like this article on IDDS 2009 a ton: Crazy mind, able hands.

All the organizers are pulling 18+ hour days again, but somehow it feels much more cheerful and thrilling to me this time around. Third time's a charm? I feel completely alive, vibrant. I've never felt this charged before ever in my life, I think. It's as if the energy of the summit completely replaces the sleep and food I'm missing. Flow. Maybe I'm finally getting a handle on this stress management thing?

I'm collecting expressions of agreement. For example, Americans say "uh huh" or "yeah" to indicate that they understand or agree with the person they are talking to. Ghanaians say "ah Haaa" rather enthusiastically. Zambians say "ey ey" (which means "yes" in Nyanja, a common language in Zambia). My favorite may be the Tibetans who make a short sharp inhaling gasp. To my American ears it sounds like the noise I would make if I stepped off a stair that I didn't expect to be there.

I love the IDDS participants this year. So many good conversations, and some of them in Spanish! I'm fantastically excited to see that I've learned a ton of Spanish since the first IDDS when I could barely talk to Carlos. Aw man, if only my French were anywhere as functional. I really desperately want to learn it so I can travel and work in the French-speaking African countries.

I love Kumasi. It's home of the Suame Magazine, a region where roughly 1.3 million people crowd in small workshops, hammering, welding, cutting, casting, lathing, milling the day away. I think it's the largest informal manufacturing area in the world. Other things make me smile, like the Twi word for thank you, "medase", literally means "I lay myself before you." Eggplants are called garden eggs here. And I'm stunned that I've seen both men and women carrying huge 100 lb loads on their heads.

It is the 3rd official day of IDDS and it feels as though it began eons ago. Or, as we say, IDDS--a month of Fridays...because every day feels like it's a week long.

Thus, I have several hundred untold stories...which I'll hopefully be able to post sometime in this lifetime...

For better coverage of IDDS, check out Nathan and Niall's blogs.

Looking glass

2009-06-23T06:36:00.000+04:00

Masdar city opened its first 10 MW solar photovolatic plant and conncected it to the grid on June 1st, apparently on budget and on schedule. It's currently the largest PV plant in the Middle East right now.

We're all still living/working in temporary spaces, though. I think they've been pretty clever about finding space...which is incredibly scarce and expensive in Abu Dhabi city. Currently, the Masdar Institute is housed at the Petroleum Institute (PI)...in an old warehouse Masdar recently retrofitted. You might never know just by looking, though. Here's what it looks like inside:

I witnessed how they turned this room from a dark dusty corner of warehouse to a slick office space in about one week. Here's what the same room looks like from the top, you can still see some of the old warehouseness:

The white pizza boxes are actually the tops of the fluorescent lights in the first picture. There's other signs of the old warehouse, like this side door:

At the top, you can see how it was once one of those rolling sliding warehouse doors, and then they stuck another panel underneath with a double door. And here, where the ceiling isn't quite completed yet, you can look up and see the warehouse:

Actually, we're only in half of the warehouse. Apparently, the other half was empty until ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, they run the PI) saw what Masdar had done with the space and was so inspired they decided to retrofit the other half for ADNOC offices. There's also a rumor that once we leave this space, they're just going to tear down all our retro-fitting, which is quite a pity. Here's what the building looks like from the front:

Green things! Which are wonderful...even though the PI likes to water them in the middle of the day with great giant puddles that leak out onto the street, which is awesome because the UAE has one of the highest water consumption rates per capita in the world, which is even more awesome because all the water here is more energy intense because it needs to be desalinated.

Meanwhile, back at the city construction site, they have mods! Two-story office mods. (For non-Oliners, mods were temporary housing units for students when Olin was in the middle of construction.) Here's the Masdar version, complete with circus tent:

Isn't the tent neat? It shades the building so it doesn't need as much cooling. Here's the solar PV test site, where they have all sorts and brands of PV to test it in real world conditions with incredible heat and dust.

You would think that the desert would be an ideal place to have a solar plant (I did) but it turns out that dust is a huge problem. There's trade-offs between energy production and how often the panels should be washed. This site is how they chose which brand/type of solar to use in their 10 MW PV plant. And here's a solar cooling experiment:

See how seriously that dust has caked onto the panels?! The dust settles on the panels and then becomes cemented on when the air passes through the dew point at dawn and dusk. I think this pilot has largely run its course, so it's no longer being maintained. You can also see in the background how deserty it is around these parts.

Why is it that "deserted" sounds like "desserted" and not "desert-ed"?

Here's what our school looks like now:

Apparently, we'll be moving in, oh, 2 months. Right.

Wha?

2009-06-04T09:10:00.000+04:00

Government-sponsored TED talks?! This is cool. What kind of alternate reality have I wandered into?

Addendum

2009-06-03T20:19:00.000+04:00

Also, the Coca-Cola distribution chain may soon be put to work for distributing medicines and supplies in Africa.

Band Aid Kool Aid Marmal Aid

2009-06-03T19:54:00.000+04:00

I just found Beyond Good Intentions, a series of short episodes about rethinking aid for the developing world. I think it's super well done, it looks at a lot of issues like religious-based aid, social entrepreneurship, using randomized experiments to measure the effectiveness of aid (yeah, J-PAL!), the Peace Corps, and there's even a critical look at micro-finance and Kiva.org.

I also enjoyed looking at the bonus material for the episodes, and there's a good road map of what each episode is about at the Beyond Good Intentions Blog, where there is also extra commentary.

Your mother should know

2009-05-31T04:11:00.000+04:00

I MADE SOY YOGURT FROM SCRATCH. and it worked. I took dried soybeans and turned them into yogurt. I feel so accomplished.

By far the best set of directions I found comes from the i eat food blog. Instead of using an incubator or leaving it in the oven, though, I read "110 degrees" and thought, "Perfect!" then left in in a cooking pot outside on the back porch for some hours. The world is my incubator.

There were a few mishaps. Soymilk likes to sneak up and overboil like mad when you're not looking. Virtually my entire 2 L pot of soymilk disappeared over a 5 min period when I stepped out of the kitchen...I was puzzled that it could evaporate so quickly...but I later found the soymilk lake in the grease trap beneath the burners. Good thing I made too much soybean mush to begin with, so it was easy to make another batch of soymilk, but I watched it like a hawk the second time around.

I'm really happy. It's one of those open-up-the-black-box moments where I take something mysterious (yogurt) and figure out how it works. Like opening up an old TV set.

Sprong

2009-05-23T19:41:00.000+04:00

In the Kalahari Desert, hunters still run antelopes to death. It's called "persistence hunting" and it works because they run in the middle of the day. Humans can sweat and cool down as they run, but the antelope needs to stop and pant. So they run after it, keep it on the move until it collapses. You must watch this video, it's incredible, probably the best youtube clip I've ever seen. I cried the first time I watched it, no kidding.

How the devil did they film that? (More info about persistance hunting here.)

Likewise, in sub-zero temperatures it's possible to run a half-marathon barefoot and shirtless.

Yes, I've been thinking quite a lot about temperature. I'm experimenting with adjusting to the heat here, it would just be so awesome to not be bothered by heat, since it promises to be a large part of life here. However, I could freeze ice cubes on my desk at work, because of the overly abundant AC, so becoming accustomed to the cold is still useful.

It can feel pretty awesome to exercise at high temps. Once upon a time, I tried out Bikram yoga, which is basically yoga in a super hot room, and I was suprised at how awesome I felt after sweating profusely and grunting in difficult stretches for an hour. I would walk out and feel like a million bucks. Yay, endorphins.

In Abu Dhabi, I've recreated that feeling a couple of times after exercising in the heat. Sometimes it's as though the heat gives me extra energy - I feel like I can run farther, and it certainly makes stretching easier. Thank goodness my ancestors ran antelope to death.

However, if I'm stressed out, I just can't deal with extreme temperatures. I get grumpy fast and switch on the AC or retreat indoors. If I'm happy (and hydrated) heat's not usually a big deal.

Even still, I have a hard time imagining back breaking labor in the sun all day, like the migrant construction workers here do.

Apparently it's common to see temps of 50 C (122 F) in the middle of the summer here.

Took a short trip to Oman recently. It definitely got up to at least 48 C (118 F). I was surprised to find that it was still possible to walk around outside and people weren't bursting into flames or gasping for breath (Honestly, it never occurred to me that humans could function at those temperatures...a 105 F fever is dangerous, right?) All the water that came out of faucets was pretty warm. Makes sense, just hadn't ever thought of it in Boston where tap water is freezing cold in winter. Upon investigating the much higher than predicted temperatures in Oman, I found this interesting article that suggests the Omani government isn't quite truthful about their published temperatures.

It's really quite impressive what a human body is capable of. I think most of us never have the chance to see this potential because we have grocery stores now instead of antelope, and they stay put. And it's not just those hardcore African bushmen who can do it - at least one white guy has kept up on runs too, Louis Liebenberg, an anthropologist. (Okay, on his first run he nearly died of dehydration, but even for this untrained runner, the antelope died first.) ...which makes me think that all humans have the hidden potential to run an antelope to death. Take Dean Karnazes, for example, who started as Joe Schmoe, but then metamorphosed into ultra super athlete man. Among other things, he's run 50 marathons in 50 days and then decided to run from New York to San Francisco.

Flutterby

2009-05-23T19:08:00.000+04:00

The best thing to ever happen in Abu Dhabi was the WOMAD festival. I keep thinking about it and wishing it were happening every weekend. Free entrance, three glorious nights of music from around the world, dancing away the night on the cool sandy beach. My personal favorites to watch were the Dhol Foundation (for their awesometastic beats and their ability to work a crowd) and Sa Dingding (for her theatricality.)

Robert Plant was there, too. At the end, he sang a song in Arabic and the crowd went wild.

Cabbages and kings

2009-04-21T07:44:00.000+04:00

I finally bought a bike and last night I BIKED TO THE GROCERY STORE and bought groceries ON MY OWN. This improved my general well-being by 10,000 points.

A momentous victory. We all live in villas which are pretty far from town, and we have drivers that will take us where we want to go, but the vehicle options are 1) mini bus and 2) large bus. Either bus is normally 90% vacant, which is great for needlessly wasting carbon. We must first arrange with the driver where we want to go and schedule the bus. If we want boys and girls on the same bus, must obtain prior permission or call the director of General Services. Public buses don't come out this far, and taxis can't find our villas (no road names, no address numbers...not that they would help that much...taxi drivers typically navigate by landmarks, not street names.)

Thus, it was AWESOME to just jump on my bike and go. I can't describe the sense of freedom that has returned. (Although I very much miss my fixed-gear beast in Boston.)

Life is filling up fast. I'm taking an hour or two of Arabic every day now (I can read like a kindergartener!), plus various other activities. I'm also sitting in on one of the coolest classes EVER: the History and Politics of Oil in the Middle East.

It began as something I thought I "should" do, a topic I "ought" to know more about, so I dragged myself into it. And it's orders of magnitude more fascinating than I ever imagined. The course text is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin and it's SUPER. The book does an awesome job weaving an off-the-wall story complete with outrageous characters and all their quirks.

For example, take Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the first monarch of Saudi Arabia. He was the Saudi king who united the warring tribes of Saudi Arabia- a desert adventurer, roaming the sand dunes with his camel caravan, conquering tribes, and wedding desert princesses to forge alliances. (He fathered 50 kids in his lifetime!) Before oil was discovered, he could carry all his wealth with him on a camel.

When the Middle Eastern oil craze was just beginning, he was initially not interested offers from companies that wanted to prospect for oil, he wanted to drill for water instead, which makes a ton of sense when you think about how much value water has in a desert.

From all accounts, Ibn Saud was incredible. Six foot four, charismatic, dashing, everything a king should be. Later in life (after oil discoveries) when he met Roosevelt on the USS Quincy, all the Westerners slept in the cabins at night, but Ibn Saud and his entourage insisted on sleeping in bedouin tents pitched on the deck. That is so cool.

Saud had an advisor/friend named Jack Philby, aka Sheikh Abdullah, a British expatriot who converted to Islam. He was fluent in Arabic, as well as Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi. It seems like any time anything important happened between the British and Saudi Arabia, Philby was there, swaying things one way or another. And when the American relations with Saudi Arabia started growing and Britain was fading away, Philby was there, facilitating that change too. (Britain thought there was no oil in Saudi Arabia. They advised Ibn Saud to take the Americans' money and sell them an oil concession the Brits thought was useless. Boy, they regretted that.)

Philby was an avid bird watcher, a desert explorer, and his son is famous in his own right for being a spy for the Soviet Union. His second wife was a Saudi slave girl. After Ibn Saud died, Philby began openly criticizing King Saud, the next ruler of Saudi Arabia for his wild spending, among other things. Philby was exiled. On his deathbed in Beirut, he spoke his last words: "God, I'm bored."

I've learned a ton about World War II, oil companies, OPEC, Iran, and some about the Palestine/Israeli conflict, Egypt, and the evil oil company stereotype (which is both true and false, quite a change from my previous stance of "oil companies are evil, die, die, die.")

I also learned more about the energy crisis in the 1970's when for the second time Americans had to wait for hours in long queues to buy gas. President Carter's approval rating dropped to 25%, comparable to Nixon's rating during the Watergate Scandal. For various reasons, Americans viciously blamed Carter for the frustration of waiting in gas lines. It made me think that when Bush invaded Iraq, it wasn't just for "those evil oil companies." He was also doing it because we Americans, as individuals, demand a reliable oil supply through our actions and habits, and if anything happens to the supply, there's hell to pay. Yes, I know, gross oversimplification, but the point is that my entire view of how oil works is now vastly altered, and I feel about 100 times more informed than before, which means I'm about a millionth as informed as I should be.

[I'M SO EXCITED AMERICA NOW HAS A PRESIDENT WHO CARES ABOUT RENEWABLE ENERGY. ]

The Prize was also turned into a PBS documentary series, and we watch some of these films in class, which are also super great. It's absolutely wild to see black and white footage of old classic cars driving up and down sand dunes. Which reminds me of a story...

There's a highway that runs north-south called the Desert Highway in Jordan, and according to Husam's dad, it was once literally just a swath of desert that people drove on. Thus, you'd be driving along on the sand/dirt and you might look to your right and see another car driving alongside you, but maybe 100 meters away. At any rate, back in the day, Husam's dad was driving from Maan to Aman in the north. He ate lunch, then jumped in his car and started driving on the Desert Highway. About midway there, he meets another car headed the opposite direction.

They stop and chat and his dad asks this other fellow where he's going. "Aman," he said. "No way," Husam's dad replies, "I'm going to Aman, you're clearly lost." They argued for a few minutes, but in the end, they both continue driving opposite ways. ...several hours later, Husam's dad ends up (you guessed it) back at the restaurant where he ate lunch earlier in Ma'an.

PSA

2009-04-18T15:30:00.000+04:00

Heard of Maker Faire? (Think catapults, flame throwers, knitting, circuits, DIY, artistic soda explosions, hackers, geeks...kind of like Burning Man, but less drugs and more building cool stuff?). It's growing an African branch! Maker Faire Africa, 13-15 August 2009 in Accra, Ghana (oh-so-conveniently scheduled to happen at the end of IDDS, also happening in Ghana this year, July-August.) I think this idea came from the founder of AfriGadget. This event has so much potential to be the coolest thing ever.

two more

2009-04-14T07:08:00.000+04:00

Boing Boing/Desert Blogger

BBC # 3

Time Machine

2009-04-13T20:33:00.001+04:00

I was pretty shaken by some articles published recently.

BBC article

BBC video

(The following article is particularly alarmist and depressing, brace yourself...and make sure to read the comments...)

And some responses:

Habibi!

2009-04-06T05:33:00.000+04:00

Dearly beloved, pay close attention, there's a magical land you should travel to, and it's called JORDAN. [insert adventure music: dun dunnnn dun dunnn dunndunn AAAAHHHH ahhhh AAAAAHhh ahhh]

Okay, here's a sneak peek through the seeq...and the same bloody picture that a billion other people have taken.

Petra! Remember it Indiana Jones? Well it's sooooooooooooo much cooler than I ever possibly imagined. First, take a long winding walk through the seeq (canyon) or hire a horse carriage if you're not feeling plucky.

Then, [dun dun DUUUUNNNN], the Treasury of Petra!

Congratulations, you've made it as far as 99.9% of the tourists. But don't stop now, it gets even MORE AWESOME.

There's tombs carved into rock (some of them are HUGE), Bedouin caves, a Roman ampitheater, ruins of a Roman town, it's such a completely awesome mix of cultures and it's all set in some of the best hiking scenery I've ever seen. Okay, 50% of tourists make it this far, but wait, IT GETS BETTER. Climb higher (or hire a donkey) until you find the [aahh ahhh AAAAHHHH] monastery!

Okay, it's tiny in this photo because we climbed above it, but it's huge and arguably cooler than the more famous rose red Treasury at the end of the siq. Look, here are our intrepid explorers!

Can you see vertical black line just below the dark doorway? That's a person standing up. The monastery is HUGE. Congrats, only 10% of the tourists make it up here.

Also, I would like to officially declare my deep love for camels.

Ahhh...what devastatingly gorgeous creatures. Awkward yet graceful, elegant yet beastly.

Ok, don't stop now, hop back on the road and venture farther south to Wadi Rum!

Hire a Bedouin guide, camp out overnight in the desert!

Red sand dunes, craggy canyons, rock arches, breathtaking landscapes, it's incredible.

And Husam finally had a chance to show off his raw brute strength:

Speaking of brute strength, did I mention how much I love camels?

Ah, Jordan, land of wonders...Where else can you visit places like Mt. Nebo, where Moses first viewed the promised land? (You mean all those places in the Bible actually exist? Galilee? River of Jordan? They didn't just make up all those names I learned in Sunday school?)

And you know what? We didn't even see half of what Jordan has to offer! There's some awesome Roman ruins in the north we didn't have time for, and I'd really like to spend some time living in the capital city of Amman - full of twisty hilly streets where everyone stops you just to say, "Welcome to Jordan!", and the most gorgeous otherworldly prayer chanting blasts/echoes through the streets at 5 am every morning.

If you're thinking about going, definitely take a look at this website: Ruth's Jordan Jubilee.

The other side of the story? A few weeks ago, I joined some friends and impulsively bought a plane ticket to visit Jordan. I had a lot of reservations about it. I've been growing away from one-night-stand tourism where I drop into a place, look at all the sights with the other hordes of one-night-stand tourists and then leave again. It's started feeling kind of hollow, especially after seeing what kind of changes rampant tourism can bring to a place. I mean, I suppose it's good for local economies, but at the cost of becoming trashier when they start catering to all those one-night-stands. I've also noticed that I have a ton more fun during travel like D-Lab Zambia, where we don't see any sights but just live and work in communities. It feels more connected. And full. And real.

I've been making quiet promises to give up my wasteful, carbon-spewing, one-night-stand tourist ways, so I nearly passed on this Jordan opportunity. ...but Husam is a native Jordanian, and he was coming too...and we were meeting up with Sheena's friend, S.J., who's been living in Jordan for a few years...and those pictures of Petra just looked so wicked cool...and I wasn't likely to make this trip on my own...

Ha. So, in short, I came up with a list of excuses and justified it to myself. And I'm glad I went. It was kind of like a scouting expedition--Jordan is definitely on my list of places I'd like to live.

Okay, so my no one-night-stand tourism goal isn't working out. But I have a new goal to work towards now: spend more on donations to my favorite groups than I spend on airplane flights in the same year. I'm pretty durned far from reaching this one right now, but it seems to be a better framed goal than STOP TRAVEL. I think it will serve the double purpose of making me think twice before jumping on a plane, and stretching me to give more freely of my money to groups who use it better than I will.

Aaron: "I think Laura and I have the same hair style."

"Yeah, we both go to the same salon."

Aaron: "That's right...the salon of riding on a camel in the desert."

Drift would

2009-03-15T20:02:00.000+04:00

Top 10 list of Things that are really great right now:

10. Air drying my clothes. No more excuses. I'm in the middle of the desert, there's no rain, it's not too cold outside, there's plenty of space, finally for the first time in my life I'm boycotting the clothes drier. Yeah, I know, it doesn't really make a dent in the fact that I'm living in Abu Dhabi, which I'm sure has the largest carbon footprint per capita in the world, but I'll take small victories where I can find them. And enjoy simple pleasures like the massive

9. Time shift. I'm constantly eight hours ahead of everyone else in Boston and since the work week starts on Sunday, I get an extra jumpstart on the week, and the weekend starts earlier on Friday. I never thought a time shift would make work flow better, but it sure does. It definitely gives the appealing illusion that I have extra time that other people don't, and that I should work a little harder to stay ahead because I have this advantage. Weird, huh? Also,

8. Music is great. I'd forgotten how AWESOME music is. I just read papers and listen to music all day, it's quite fantastic. I dance all the time in my office chair and grin as I comb through reports. And even more super because

7. Songbird version 1.1 is now out. Songbird is like the Mozilla Firefox of music players, which makes me happy because I just don't like using iTunes...it feels slimy. Speaking of spiffy computer apps, another program that is totally sweet is

6. Zotero. YESSSS!!! I love Zotero. It helps me keep organize all the papers I read, takes all the work out of creating citations, and keeps track of all the random tangents and themes and ideas I'm finding. If you are doing any sort of research at all, definitely definitely check out the powers of Zotero, because it's amazing and free. And you know what else is amazing and free?

5. Google. YEEEESSSSSS!!! I am a Google slave. My Gmail account is tricked out with 13 different Google labs features, I can keep track of email from 5 different accounts and a gazillion different email lists (spam free!), as well as appointments and task items on the same simple page. And organization effort for email is so minimal because labels and filters are great, and it's so frickin easy to find anything I need with a Gmail search. Not to mention my copious use of Google Docs, Google Scholar, Google Books, and, of course, plain old Google searching. Yes, it's pathetic and I love it. All of these tools, in fact items 9 through 5 plus the tabbed lightning speed internet browsing wonders of Mozilla Firefox have made my

4. Workflow AWESOME. I've never been this productive before. I'm so excited to arrive for work every morning, it's bizarre. I've had summer research jobs before, and this work is kind of like that - lots of self-pacing, which can be tough (and was much more tough before), but thanks to free software and the power of music and time shifts, it's incredibly enjoyable. I'm sailing through papers, learning faster than ever before. The only problem is that I spend a ton of time sitting and staring at my laptop, so it's great that I can

3. Work out. Never really had the time to do it regularly before. Weight training is a lot of fun. Better muscles, stronger bones, I think my body is going to be pretty happy here because I'm also

2. Eating great. Definitely the healthiest I've ever eaten in my life. I'm a full fledged vegan now (it's been about a year) and I'm eating tons of veggies and lentils (there's like 14 different kinds here!) and hummus and it's all fantastically scrumptious. I love buying tons of produce at the super market, my favorites of the moment are pomegranates and tomatoes. But really, the number one thing that is going really really great is

1. Years of brainwashing are going down the drain. I'm one of five non-Muslim Masdar students here now, all the other students are Muslim. I really really don't like admitting it, but when I lived in the US, the first word that came to mind when I heard "Muslim" was "terrorist." I knew better, but I found it devilishly difficult to erase that gut reaction when the media screamed it back into place every second. It is FANTASTIC to be here, finding so many other better words to associate, to learn first hand about so many different shades and hues of Islam. I feel like I'm healing a huge scar on my brain. I'm pretty sad that scar has been there so long, so it feels great to stitch it back to health, one piece at a time. And if you want to cry at what a horrible place America was under the Bush Administration, just listen to Habeas Schmabeas episode of This American Life. (It's really well done, won a Peabody award.) Guantanamo Bay is basically another form of the Japanese Internment camps from WWII. The USA gets scared and we torture very innocent people. Nothing has ever made me feel so ashamed to be American than Guantanamo Bay. And I think a large reason why the public put up with it is the utter complete brainwashing that Abu Dhabi is now SAND BLASTING out of my brain. It's a wonderful wonderful wonderful feeling.

Empty Full

2009-03-06T21:18:00.000+04:00

Abu Dhabi is very empty and very full.

Long empty 8-lane high ways lined meticulously with palm trees, filled with the shiniest fleet of cars you’ve ever seen. It’s like a car commercial.

Tall hotels and malls loom over wide empty streets teeming with traffic. People of every skin tone, face structure, height, width, wearing dishdashas, abayas, t-shirts, jeans bustle through the malls, but they seem scarce outside. Engulfed, dwarfed by the looming steel glass structures.

The street where we live is empty, sandy, flat flat flat. Lots of huge, expensive-looking, multi-story residences, lots of empty skeletal construction sites that will soon be huge, expensive-looking, multi-story residences. Dust. Walls. Pavement. Dirt lots. A colony of dry mini-mansions.

My life is the same every day. Wake up at 4 or 5 am. It’s still dark. I cook breakfast. There’s a Muslim prayer chanted over loudspeakers that echoes through the streets at 5:20 am. It’s beautiful. Eat, slowly. Feed my internet cravings. Leave the villa at 8:15, step into a private mini-bus hired for Masdar students. Mousa is the morning driver, he’s from Sudan. Twenty minutes of long straight highways, lots of roundabouts. We arrive at the offices, I walk past all the other cubicles to my cubicle in the cubicle farm. Open my laptop, start reading. I’m reading everything I can find about renewable energy projects in the developing world. It’s exhilarating. One paper leads to 5 more, I’ve never been so excited about reading papers before. I’m learning so much, I’m learning so fast, I can tell because my awareness of how much I don’t know is growing exponentially. 12:15 eat lunch with the same 8 or so people, we walk over to the cafeteria at the Petroleum Institute. I usually eat hummus and baba ganoush and tons of leafy green salad and vegetables. Lunch is always amazing. Maybe we talk for an hour. Walk back to cubicle land, open laptop, commence reading. At 5:20, walk over to the gym. The women’s gym is full of shiny new machines, and usually deserted. 6:30 bus back home. Bashir is the evening driver, he’s from Kerala, India. Dinner, I’m usually asleep by 9 pm.

Empty. Full.

Strangely, I feel intensely content at the moment. There’s so much time here. Quite a contrast to Boston where there were so many options, I filled my life full full full because I couldn’t bear not to. Here, I have time, I have space. I have time to write my mom decent replies to her emails. I have time to work on my handstands, to practice capoeira. If you asked me, I would say this is not my ideal living situation. In the land of sand, oil, and malls, another variation of the isolated bubble. …but…I feel so balanced.

I know I would not feel this way if I wasn’t excited about my research. I know I don’t want to live here forever. But at the moment, everything is grand.

Fade in

2009-02-26T21:08:00.000+04:00

Ok. I’m here. A 48-hour impression:

Haven’t seen a single bike, but the piles of shiny cars are nauseating.
Yes, a land of sky scrapers and shopping malls. And sand. It feels empty.

But Abu Dhabi is also surprisingly mixed. Ethiopians, Jordanians, Indians, Pakistanis, Philippinos, Palestines, Europeans, and all sorts mingle in every place. It’s quite extraordinary. I don’t stick out at all, which is wonderful, and there’s a quiet sense of wonder, sort of like I’ve wandered into a Star Wars world full of people and cultures I’ve never encountered up close before.

Clothing ranges from jeans and t-shirts to traditional dishdasha. I think the strangest combination I’ve seen is a dishdasha with a baseball cap, which is actually pretty common. Women range from tank tops to veils, scarves, and coverings of all sorts. I try not to stare at the women with complete face veils that only reveal their eyes. These women are so elegant, mysterious, and striking it makes me think that they seem like much more of a temptation than if they were wearing mini-skirts.

Women wearing niqabs in photographs can look stifled, but to me, they look powerful when they move, when they walk.

Last night, I was at the grocery store in the pads aisle (I accidentally left my cup in the states…grrr…) and one of those elegant women with a niqab rolled her shopping cart up, grabbed a package of pads and rolled away again. It was a very “I guess we’re all human” moment. I’m sorry, I know it’s not that extraordinary, but what do I know, I’m just a boorish American…

Random fact: The Arabic weekend is Friday-Saturday, so the workweek here is Sun-Thurs.

Right, so I’m here for Masdar, and while they build the university, we’re ironically housed at the Petroleum Institute. All the Masdar folk have their own corner in one of the buildings. But when we go to the cafeteria for lunch and walk through other Petroleum Institute buildings bustling with PI students and faculty, I really feel like we should start snapping and break into a West Side Story scuffle complete with singing and dancing.

Alien Orphan

2009-02-11T19:57:00.000+04:00

When I returned from Zambia--worn out, exhausted, but content--I crawled to my bike to ride home, and found that Woon had transformed it into a beastly fixed gear while I was away. I was so excited I got stuck somewhere between crying and laughing. Best gift I've ever received.

So...I had this master plan to quietly wrap up my business in Boston and then clandestinely steal away to the UAE. And, then, last week (oh man, I can't believe this) Amy Smith and Ben Linder (and other suspect folk) organized a suprise going away party. It was TRIPLE BACKFLIP FANTASTIC. Using all sorts of very clever deception, Amy managed to take me (completely unsuspecting) to the Museum of Bad Art where dozens of my favorite people lay stealthily in wait to shock the buhjeezus out of me. There were so many awesome people there, I nearly exploded and imploded at the same time (good thing F=0...you know, the forces balanced out?) A ton of good food, ten megatons of good company, it was glorious. When I set out to work for Amy Smith a couple years ago, I never in my wildest dreams imagined she'd eventually throw a surprise party for me. I'm still pretty stunned. And glowing. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who made it possible.

But the happiness in general isn't really the super sweet jagged roller coaster kind that pops up for a few moments. No, this happiness is the sustained, quiet kind that sloshes contentedly inside my ribcage. I don't recall ever being this content before. Life is very good.

bwanji

2009-01-30T17:44:00.000+04:00

On my last day in Zambia, I had the pure joy of riding an infamous double top tube black mamba bike on a red dirt rutted Zambia road one more time. As I passed a group of children walking, they gleefully shouted out, "How are you?!" and laughed when I shouted back "Fine!" Still laughing, they starting to run alongside my soaring bike, pounding the red earth with bare feet and flip flops. They ran with me for a long time, smiling and laughing between the deep blue sky, the rich green fields, and the muddy red road. I don't think I've ever seen anything so beautiful in my life.

I will also miss theway Zambian men (just friends, mind you) hold hands when they walk down the street, the way dragonflies float over the grass and through the razorwire into vast skies, and eating a mango under an umbrella watching thunderstorms.

Not to mention the AWESOME team I worked with in Zambia this year.

"Why are you smiting us?" -- Trys

Rolla

2009-01-24T17:23:00.000+04:00

My Zambian grandmother is sick.

Last year, I was adopted by Ambuya Theresa, a widow, one of the strongest women I've met, full of life, mischief, constantly caring for other people, one of the most devoted Light of Hope volunteers.

I went to her familiar two-room concrete shack to visit her, and found a frail-looking young woman lying on the couch. Must be one of her daughters, I started walking to the back room. But when she sat up and looked at me--a very sad, empty face--she spoke a few words and I instantly recognized her voice. It was like being hit with a sack of bricks.

TB. Tuberculosis. In the olden days, it was called "consumption" because victims wasted away--night sweats, fever, weight loss, coughing up blood. Her friends tell me Ambuya is recovering now with medication, she was much worse. She's lost so much body weight she's nearly unrecognizable, but worse her spirit is gone. Her face was so empty I had to fight hard not to burst into tears as we talked in broken English and Nyanja.

Last year, I loved living with her. In the doldrums of Boston (not that all of Boston is doldrums) I often thought back to the early mornings, washing dishes, sitting on her front step in the evening, watching all the children play in her front yard.

(From last year...not the best clip ever...I was shooting this from the hip, it was getting dark, but I think you get some sense of what watching these kids play is like. If you listen closely, you'll hear Ambuya say "imwe," which means "you" and in this case she's scolding one of the kids.)

It really made me think about what it feels like to lose someone. I've never lost anyone before. People wander in and out of my life, but there's always an assumption that they're carrying on wherever they are. Even when my grandfather died, I didn't go to the funeral, so I hadn't lost him. He's still carrying on somewhere. Ambuya, too, was carrying on somewhere, until I met her again and saw that she was gone, and it felt like someone had torn her out of my chest. When she summoned the strength to stand up and escort me down the road a few meters*, it was all I could do to hold back the tears until she turned around and shuffled back to her home. I've lost her.

I went back a second time, to face my fears. Her sister was there, helping to care for her, they were having dinner. They handed me a generous plate of nshima and chiwawa (pumpkin leaves), my favorite. I nearly choked with awkwardness. I should be the one cooking dinner for you, Ambuya! This makes no sense! I said nothing out loud--in Zambia, it's an honor to feed a guest, and it would have been incredibly rude to refuse the food. There were two framed photos in that room. One of them was a picture of us together from last year--an awkward white girl grinning next to a proud, laughing Zambian woman. She pulled it off the shelf to explain to her sister who I was.

The last time I went back, she seemed more herself. Still complaining of pain in her legs (a side effect of the medication) and other problems, but every now and then a glimmer of a smile would flicker on her face. She asked her sister to pull a duffle bag of papers out of her back room, then she determinedly dug through it, until she triumphantly pulled out a small notebook. A project she had volunteered to help me with last year, to keep daily records when the team had left. Each page was meticulously filled out. My jaw hit the ground and I thanked her profusely. When I left for the last time, she again summoned the strength to rise and escort me down the muddy dirt road a few paces. She stopped. "I'm tired," she said. "Go well. See you later," and she grinned.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
*In Zambia, when friends leave, the host often walks with them down the road a ways to see them off.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was cutting through hectic downtown Lusaka when someone behind me grabbed my wrist. I whirled around, half expecting to find someone I knew, but instead found a complete stranger, a tall African man. I ripped my wrist from his hand and gave my best "fuck off" scowl, be he grabbed my wrist again more tightly and started talking angrily in a tribal language I don't know. (There are 72 languages in Zambia, not to mention all the Zimbabweans who are now flooding Lusaka. This year, the streets are teeming with vendors who sit on the streets, everyone says they're all from Zimbabwe.) I scowled harder, ripped my wrist out again, and scrammed, my heart beating in my throat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another woman in Linda Compound who amazes me is a single mother, raising her children in a two room concrete shack. She earns $1.60/day working in the morning. In the afternoon, she farms her own maize, sweet potatoes, and beans in her front yard. Moreover, she's by far one of the most active people in her community. It seems like she spends half of her day volunteering, advising young mothers, counseling at-risk teenage female HIV orphans. And yet she still finds the time to wash all her family's laundry by hand and keep her house spotless. Not to mention that she's a phenomenally cheerful, friendly, optimistic, wonderful wonderful person.

And she's HIV positive. I had no idea until yesterday when we had an awesome conversation. She used to drink a lot and go out to bars with her friends, but then her husband died and everything changed. She wanted a new life, she wanted to be a good role model for her kids. She stopped drinking and got to work. She began to notice that she was getting very tired easily, so she went in for testing and the results were HIV positive. She started taking the free ARV medication offered by the Zambian government, and her health improved. Last year, she had another child. She quit her job, just so she could take care of her new child and make sure it stayed HIV free. For 6 months, she breastfed, then carefully weaned her child to orange juice and maheu before the baby started teething, which leaves open cracks in the gums where HIV from the breastmilk can infect the baby. Today, the child is HIV free and healthy, and the mother has started her job again added counseling other HIV positive mothers to her long list of accomplishments.

I also spent some time shadowing some of the caretakers at Light of Hope that visit patients in their homes. By and large, the free ARVs seem to be working wonders in Linda Compound. Every person we visited was HIV positive, but they all looked healthy and most said they were feeling fine. However, I'm a bit worried, because even through treatment seems to be working wonderfully here, prevention is lagging far behind. For example, Light of Hope peer educators only spread news of A and B (Abstinence and Be faithful) but leave out C (Condoms). As Elizabeth Pisani notes in The Wisdom of Whores: bureaucrats, brothels, and the business of AIDS:

People are more likely to transmit AIDS when their viral load is high.
It goes down while they're on medication, but they're still going to have spikes every now and then.
A person on medication is going to be healthy enough to continuing having sex.
A sexually active person with occasional spikes is going to spread more AIDS than a dead person.
ARVs must also be provided for a person for the rest of their life, which adds up fast as patients accumulate.
Thus, while effective prevention programs decrease needed treatment, just increasing treatment alone leads to a greater need for treatment and prevention in the future.

Also, "Treatment makes HIV much, much less scary, beacuse it makes it less fatal. Thee are fewer cadaverous people around, fewer funerals to go to. With treatment, people who were at death's door leap up and march back to the office and the nightclub...As people get less scared of AIDS, they get sloppier about prevention."

Wisdom of Whores was an excellent book to read on this trip. If you ever wanted to know anything about AIDS, read this book, it's fantastically lucid, irreverent, insightful, and doesn't beat around the bush. For example:

A schoolgirl in Suth Africa is ten times more likely to be infected with HIV than a prostitute in Beijing.
The most common risk for HIV among youth men in Southern Africa is getting married.
The US Congress earmarked $1.1 billion for overseas HIV prevention programs that have been proven not to work, even in the US.

Over and out.

Muli bwanji umoyo?

2009-01-13T07:46:00.000+04:00

We're in Mumbwa now, camped in the deputy's office of the Kabwanga Basic School. We were originally going to stay in a vacant teacher's house, but after a 3 hour cramped bus ride, another hour in a land cruiser beating its way over a narrow path and through African bush, we were told the house wasn't ready and in the meantime we could hang out in the deputy's office. Since then, we've slept here for two nights.

It's a nice place—bats fly around in the rafters (hopefully eating all the mosquitoes) and each night a toad hops under the door into the room before we can herd it out again. The walls are covered in meeting agendas, grade rosters, and posters advising us to avoid early pregnancy and HIV. This narrow space looks otherworldly at night when we fill it with 6 mosquito nets and the light from our head lamps flickers across the walls.

Yesterday, the torrential Zambian rain beating on the tin roof held us captive for the morning. Today, our jailors are school children. It's the first day of school (we thought for sure they'd want us out of the office by now) and there's a worker stationed outside the door, but we can't tell if he's there to keep other people from disturbing us or to discourage us from leaving and causing a wild ruckus of a distraction for the hordes of wide-eyed school children in faded navy uniforms who wait in the front yard for classes to begin.

Today we'll start working on the biodigester at Kine Community School across the way. Fingers crossed...

Mama Razor

2009-01-12T16:42:00.000+04:00

Zambia is a binary state—I'm either here or I'm not.

And once again I've completely forgotten Zambia while I was away, and the last traces of Boston are leaking from my mind now. It was another person who lived in Boston. I've only known Zambia, and I've borrowed someone else's makeshift memories of the States.

This time, I have a new experiment—I'm trying to pass as a male. My hair is short and I wear only men's clothing, but at best, I look like a 12 year old boy. Apparently, that's good enough. The "hey mama," "I love you white woman," and "baby baby" call outs that previously plagued me in the street have virtually disappeared. I think I just confuse people long enough for the 30 seconds it takes for me to walk past them. I've even received several "white boy," "white man," and even "hey boss," and "hey brother" shouts in the street, although people usually switch from addressing me as "sir" to "madam" the minute they hear me speak. The change in call outs is awesome. Instead feeling threatened, my ego inflates. Even a woman called me over, mistaking me for a man, I've never been called over by a woman like that before.

I also think a lot about making my stride more masculine—I stand taller, widen my stance, and walk with my shoulders, not my hips. Hahaha…but I'm pretty sure at best I still look like an effeminate 12 year old boy. Interestingly enough, I find it much easier to act masculine when I'm scowling, but if I flash a smile, I feel like my entire guise cracks and I'm feminine again.

Heretofore

2008-12-21T10:14:00.000+04:00

A purely hypothetical perfect day:

I wake up in Jungle Boy's arms and we're out the door by seven grinning foolishly and striding through the cobblestone streets of Antigua. We dash to catch a chicken bus trundling around the corner with SAN ANDRES ITZAPA emblazed on its side and bound up the steps to find a place among the crowded school bus seats. The bus rumbles off, bumping along narrow twisty roads, and we gape at the mountains and valleys as they unfold. I look past Jungle Boy to the fields roaring past us and I can't think of any other place on earth I would rather be.

In Itzapa, (where the streets are paved with concrete) we hike up the steep calles to reach Maya Pedal—home of bicibomba, bicimolina, and bicilicuadora—nestled on a hill between other narrow cinder block buildings. The gates are wide open and we take a whirlwind tour around through the workshop. On the top floor are piles of bikes from Bikes Not Bombs, and I reflexively scan them, on the chance I'll recognize a bike I loaded in a container or flattened at a bike drive. Nothing, nothing, nothi-woah! Turquoise handlebars! Nah, couldn't be…wait…a red frame…and…yes! It's missing its rear brake cable! It's the same bike Ste used for IDDS in Boston and then donated when he left. I took care of this bike for a few days before Gwyn came with his pick-up to take it to BNB. Great blazing whales, of all the places that bike could have ended up…

At 9 am, we scramble back down the hill to see my good friend Carlos, bicycle machine master extraordinaire. We jump in his pick up and he takes us further down the winding roads to Technologia Para Salud to meet Julio Cesar, another Guatemalan mastermind. He takes us on a tour, explaining their improved stoves, latrines, recycling program, dehydrating system, waste water treatment, and crazy enough I understand everything he's saying, or at least enough to ask him to clarify words I've never heard. My Spanish is finally becoming functional, a huge victory for my "things to do before I die" list.

Carlos drops us off at the side of the road and we flag down another chicken bus. We make it back to Antigua just in time to catch my brother leaving the house, eat lunch with my host family, say goodbye, and I race off to my last Spanish lesson. After, I meet my dad and my brother in the hall of the Spanish school (they've just finished up their last Spanish lessons, too) and we make our way to the other side of town to meet our guides.

A few hours later we're all hiking up Pacaya, an active volcano. The first part is easy and peaceful, and my dad tells stories about his life that I've never heard before. We set up camp and watch Fuego erupt in the distance and eat curry for dinner that we've carried up the mountain. Night falls and Pacaya begins to glow and stain the darkening sky red. A few steps from our campsite and we can see lava pouring down the mountain before it cools enough for great glowing boulders of molten rock to break off the flow and tumble down the slope. We leave our bags behind and begin the harder part of the hike, scrambling up a steep slope of sharp black volcanic rock that slides out from under our feet every step we take. Soon it's dark and the only light is the pale white of our head lamps on the dark rock and the glowing blood red clouds sweeping overhead, reflecting the light from the lava now hidden behind the dark razor silhouette of the ridge that looms above. The wind is blowing cold and it's more of a struggle than I want to admit to progress up the sliding slope. I marvel at how strong my dad must be to have made it this far—he's a polio survivor who was told he would never walk again. If only his childhood doctors could see him now, I'm overcome with respect and pride for everything he's done with his life.

It seems like the peak never comes closer, no matter how many sliding steps we carve up the mountain, but suddenly the air feels much warmer, I look up and see the top of the lava flow. The ground is now solid-old rolling lava flows that radiate heat as we walk over them. The new lava flow throws off enough light to paint the entire scene neon red. I begin to believe the stories of Prometheus when my brother braves the blistering heat to get close enough to shove his walking stick in the lava. It instantly catches on fire. It's easy to picture him smuggling the flame down the mountain to bequeath it to the poor shivering fireless mortals below, minus the liver-eating vultures part. Time is suspended. We relax, trade more stories, watch the blood red clouds race by, lose ourselves in the mesmerizing glow from the lava , roast marshmallows (of course) and throw in whatever we can find into the flow to watch it burst into flames. I can't imagine any other place I would rather be. Finally, when we descend, and it feels like we're skiing as the black volcanic rock continuously slides from under our feet. We arrive at our campsite, crawl into the tent, and call it a night.

I wish my mom could have come.

2008-11-05T17:21:00.000+04:00

Wow.

Rao gin tao rao

2008-10-09T23:18:00.000+04:00

Rough summer.

I think I'm more or less recuperated now. At least I find myself smiling pretty often again, instead of spontaneously combusting in tears when someone asks me if I'm okay. (Embarrassing, no?)

I think I spent a lot of the summer trying to convince myself that I was happy. I mean, I had every reason to be having a good time. For goodness sake, I was working on a dream project with one of my heroes, why shouldn't I be happy?

I really hate admitting it, but the part of summer after couch boat tore my soul out of my chest and staple gunned it to a bed of rusty nails. My jaded level has tripled.

Imagine a purely hypothetical situation: You have a friend from Zambia. A really good person whom you trust. You invite him to apply for IDDS and he's accepted, mostly because you championed him and his skills when the committee was going through applications. Needless to say, you feel pretty responsible for his well being.

Now you're standing in his room, half communicating because his English isn't that great and your Nyanja is worse. He tells you he needs help, that his job has stopped paying him back home because they've run out of money (you know it's true) that he can't support his family and he doesn't know what will happen when he goes back. "Maybe I die," he says, "Maybe I die." He asks you for money, and all you can do is stare at the shoddy laptop he bought at Swapfest. He's worrying about his family starving and he bought a laptop at Swapfest.

Do you give him money? Does he mean it? Is he using you? Do you give him money as a friend (you have before), or twist the system to extend the scholarship you gave him as an IDDS organizer? Then again, why did he spend his original scholarship money on a laptop? (It was for food expenses.) A frickin lousy laptop, does he even know how bad it is? Who in bloody hell sold him that festering pile of electronics, anyway? Who buys a laptop when he's worried about his family?

What a twisted system to be caught in, money for electronics instead of food, instead of family. Flaming cows.

Multiply that situation by 3 individuals, add 3 hospital visits, smear on some tough decisions, and lather with 18 hour working days.

Huh. I cracked.

I think there were only a few days where it was pretty obvious, but I've seriously felt very off-kilter for a few months now.

After a few very awkward conversations where my parents innocently asked how my summer had gone and heard only stony silence as I choked back tears on the other line, my mom half-jokingly sent me a book about depression. My immortal brother sent me a care package: a black wifebeater with a ghost ranch white cow skull silk screened on a triangle of recycling arrows: "RECICLE O MUERTE." I wore it for three days straight.

Haha, oh man, I never would have expected to be so scarred after this event.
Now I think I'm gently drifting back into status quo, instead of trying to shake free of the feeling that all my vitals were torn apart and only my skin was holding me together.

A lesson re-learned for the 567th time:
People are great -- Sean and Jona kept me in one piece.
As much as I want to picture myself as a loner, it's other people who pull me out of my darkest places.

A lesson I've always been learning for the first time:
It great to be in love. Even though my life is as up-and-down-and-struggle-against-apathy as it ever was, it's pure bliss to wake up and fall asleep with the same person. And hey, now I can do chin-ups, pull-ups, and write with my left hand.
As much as I want to picture myself as a loner, it's other people who push me to soaring heights.

Rapture

2008-07-09T00:46:00.001+04:00

I present you with one of the proudest moments of my life:

Yes, that is a couch floating royally on the Charles. What a magnificent way to watch the fireworks.

Jona, Sean, Becky, and I worked like dogs to pull it off. Completely worth it for the looks people gave us when we carried it to the water (think about 6 people trundling down the street with this beauty), and for all the cheeky comments from other people in canoes, rafts, rowboats, and kayaks.

I can die happy now, I captained a floating coach, I can't ask for much more than that.

Sunny Days

2008-07-03T03:46:00.000+04:00

There's a man in my life. Tall...dark...handsome...47...married...with kids...and did I mention he lives in the Republic of Guinea? I've never met him face to face, but I can spot his voice in a heartbeat because we yell at each other on the phone every day.

Cellphone rings at 6 am, there's a long string of numbers on the display
[groggy, wiping sleep from eyes]
"Hello?"
{crackle crackle hiss crackle}
"Hallo, Miss Lo-rah?"
{crackle}
"HI LAMINE. CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
"MISS LO-RAH? I NEED {crackle FIZZ FIZZcrackle crackle} EMBASSY {crackle} PAS{hiss} PLEASE, MISS LO-RAH."
"PLEASE. SAY. AGAIN. LINE. IS. BAD."
"IT IS VERY BAD HERE. I AM SUFFERING. THE EMBASSY {fizzyhisshiss} VISA WON'T{cracklefizz}...."
"THE LINE. IS. BAD. PLEASE. SEND. EMAIL."
"THERE IS NO ELECTRICITY, MISS LO-RAH...PLEASE {cracklepop} CALL EMBASSY".
"I. CAN'T. REACH. EMBASSY. MY CALLS. DO NOT. GO. THROUGH."
"PLEASE, MS. LO-RAH, {hissycracklefizz}..." and so forth.

Craziness. Pure madness.

I tried to mail him some important papers from MIT for his visa application through DHL. Then the troops in Guinea decided to riot because they weren't being paid, and DHL stopped delivering to Guinea. Lamine had to travel 800 km from his home to Conakry where violence was the worst, and he was stuck there in limbo, waiting for my stupid papers that DHL was holding.

Man, I nearly went to bits. I couldn't talk to him on the phone. I couldn't tell if he was reading my emails with all the power outages. None of my text messages were reaching him, although his flowed in every day--"ms laura the solders catch the son of the president", "laura i wait for you .lamine diakite".

And you know what? After 3 months of shuddering with frustration and guilt at the sound of my phone, LAMINE GOT HIS VISA!!!!!! The guy is clearly brilliant. I knew before that he speaks 22 languages, but anyone who can navigate the bureaucracy at an American Embassy and wrestle out a US visa in those conditions is a bloody magician.

It's true, I can finally say he's coming to IDDS now, I booked his ticket. I feel very strangely entangled for a person I've never met. It seems like I've thought about him constantly for weeks on end, even in my dreams I can't escape him. So I figure we're either going to be best friends or worst enemies. I can't help wondering if he's a complete charlatan who conned his way into a free ticket to the US.

Meanwhile, the first of the international organizers have arrived and IDDS kicks off full blast ummm...1.5 weeks from now!!!

***
And finally, a few more lingering thoughts on consumption. An MIT class calculated that even homeless people in US have carbon footprints that are twice the global average. (They divided the footprint of the infrastructure in the US --roads, schools, military, libraries--equally among everyone.) So, hey, even if you make no money and spend no money, you're still wrecking the environment.

Woon showed me the Happy Planet Index, which calculates the countries that have the happiest people with the lowest footprints. Apparently, island nations win this game, with Vanuatu at the top of the pile (7.4 happiness rating, 68.6 years life expectancy, and if everyone lived by their standards, we would need 1.1 Earths worth of resources. In comparison, the US and Germany have similar ratings but the US needs 9.5 friggin planets, while Germany needs 4.8 planets--half of the US impact.)

So maybe all the eco-puritans should flee to Vanuatu?

In the mean time, I still cling to my belief that individuals make a difference, whether it's through choosing to live lightly on no funds, fund your favorite world-changing charities, create/run your favorite world-changing business, or enjoy your own life heartily.

Light Killing Ducks

2008-06-07T10:30:00.000+04:00

Dear World,

You are a strange place.

Today, Muhammad Yunus shook my hand. And reached out and grabbed my shoulders in a friendly, chummy way. Twice.

I've now got a severe case of happiness-zinging-through-veins.

Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to make people happy just by touching them?

Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who founded Grameen Bank, which lends small amounts of money to impoverished people (mostly women) with no collateral. Microcredit. What a simple, revolutionary idea. Grameen has loaned over 6 billion dollars to over 7 million people since its inception and inspired numerous similar institutions such as Kiva.org.

In other words, he is a god. And he also happens to be friendly and charming and warm and...he shook my hand.

But really, he's just a person. And it's stunning to think that any hero is just a person who tried hard until they broke through.

Which brings us back to the impact that an individual can have.

Thanks a ton for the comments to my last post --I read them all immediately, and I've been rolling your thoughts around in my head for the past couple of months.

I wrestle a ton with the individual-vs-societal good and the impact-vs-pain questions. I have very scientifically concluded that INDIVIDUALS MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Change happens when individuals are audacious enough to think they can make a dent. Yunus started with the goal of trying to assist one poor person every day, and it was through talking to poor people that he came up with the idea for Grameen bank.

That being said, I also fervently believe in a high quality of life, and it's pretty hard to enjoy life when I'm fretting over every friggin detail. For example, it doesn't make sense to cry over every paper plate I throw away. Paper plates are not going to destroy the world. Their overall impact is rather low. Choose your battles, right? I'd much rather think of clever ways to cut out cars from my life than drag along my own dishware everywhere I go. Actually...umm...that doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...

....because the second part is to reframe what "high quality life" means. Okay, this will sound super dorky, but I've been reframing annoying painful things as challenges. For example, I'm now an avid trashcan fisher for recyclables. I'm shameless about reaching into trashcans to rescue aluminum cans. I used to be slightly uncomfortable about it (won't people think I'm weird?) but then somehow it became twisted into a little challenge to prove to myself how brave I am about bucking social norms. (Hahaha, oh man, I'm such a rebel...I warned you it was dorky!)

Is pulling cans from the trash going to save the world? Um, no. But maybe one or two other people will see me do it and be inspired pull a can out of the next trashcan they walk by...and then we'll all be beaten to shreds by the homeless people who make an income from collecting recyclables in shopping carts.

Ahem. In any case, my rules are 1) Choose your battles and 2) Make your battles fun, which brings us to: 3) Vote with your money.

Every cent I spend, I'm telling corporations, businesses, NGOs, non-profits, etc. how I think the world should be run. (**beep**beep** Warning: extreme eco-puritan chatter follows.) I refuse to eat chocolate that isn't fair trade because of the rampant child slave labor involved in harvesting chocolate. It's hard to turn down chocolate, I'll admit, and at first I wasn't enthused about spending an extra couple of bucks on fair trade chocolate bars. But now I think of it as voting. If I buy a cheap chocolate bar, it's like someone bribing me to agree that child slave labor is okay. If I buy a fair trade one, that's $2 of voting for chocolate companies that I think are doing the right thing. Not only does the extra $2 buy chocolate and a vote, it also buys an ego-trip and a sense of self-righteousness. That's $2 well spent.

Consequently, I've also started giving more of my money away. Little bits at a time, maybe $25 a go when I get pleas from Amnesty International, Avaaz.org, or the Obama campaign. I'm a penny-pinching curmudgeon, so this is a huge step for me. It makes me feel like an awesome person to reach for my debit card instead of the delete button. Maybe they'll spend my entire donation on sodas and paper plates for an office party where all the cans end up in the trash. Regardless, I really think these groups are working to make fundamental change in the world, and I like believing that I'm part of an expansive network of people who also chip in little bits to create a roaring vortex of cash.

Individuals make a difference. Sometimes making bold change is about one little change at a time. And being obscenely stubborn.

Cannon Fodder

2008-04-01T07:10:00.000+04:00

Okay. Fine. I'll admit it--I'm a friggin eco-puritan. The worst kind. The kind that snarls at Hummers while her fingers freeze off because she's biking. The kind that silently screams in frustration when her housemates take 25 minute hot showers, and the kind that's utterly disgusted by the sheer amount of mass-produced meat that Americans consume.

I typically squelch these outbursts and channel them towards pedaling faster, finding ways to shorten my own showers, or cooking another batch of lentils for lunch. I firmly believe people have a right to pursue enjoyment and more importantly, throwing a tantrum or stepping up on a eco-soapbox isn't going to convince other people that I'm right and they're wrong. No one likes being lectured (or screamed at). Besides, who am I to talk? I'm taking 2-3 international flights a year now, plenty enough to obliterate all my other minuscule attempts to cut waste out of my life.

I'm not an angry person. I rarely get into arguments, and I can't remember the last time I yelled at someone. Usually, things just slide off my back, so I'm fairly puzzled by this boiling eco-rage that's bursting out more and more frequently.

Why do these things bother me so much?

I attended the down:2:earth convention in Boston this weekend, where I was completely inundated by eco-propaganda. It was eco-puritan heaven--chatting with the folks at Equal Exchange (the fair trade coffee/chocolate/etc company), tasting water beetles and cicadas at a bug cooking demo, learning about Sol Solution and Mass Bike, watching an expert carve up a locally farm-raised pig carcass, and re-discovering The Food Project.

During a presentation on climate change by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the speaker was talking about floods and droughts and she said, "Basically we're going to have less water when we need it and more water when we don't." And I burst out laughing. When she started talking about the effects on fish populations and tree diversity, I rolled my eyes. I didn't care. I've been swimming in don'tpollutesavetheenvironment since first grade, and I'm glad it's receiving much more popular attention, but frankly by now I've grown dead sick of hearing "global warming" bleated everywhere.

So why the eco-rage?

Then I heard Bill McKibben speak, and it suddenly hit me that it's not the pollution or the carbon footprints that bother me, it's the blatant disregard for other people. That's right, drive that bloody Hummer while soldiers die in Iraq to satisfy our oil habit, go ahead, burn a few more gallons so the rising temperatures can encourage the spread of dengue fever and fill stretchedtothelimit crumbling clinics in Bangladesh. Don't worry, it won't harm you. Just turn the air conditioning up. Yeah, maybe Boston will flood, but hey, they'll build dams to keep the ocean at bay. You really shouldn't trouble yourself about all the farmers in Mali that will lose their crops to the flooding rainwaters and their children will die because they won't have the nutrition to fend off disease.

I do believe everyone has the right to pursue enjoyment. Life is short. We don't all have to shave our heads, wear burlap sacks, and retire to caves to meditate. Maybe Hummer drivers really enjoy their Hummers. But fuck it, couldn't you have chosen a slick little sports car instead?

America has 4% of the world's population. And we use 25% of the world's resources. That's disgusting.

Hahahaha...and here's the sick part, I'm willing to bet Hummers don't contribute much to the enjoyment of their owners. Despite tripling affluence in the developing world since the 1950s, overall happiness has declined. McKibben argues that as we grow richer, we become more isolated from one another in our nice suburban homes, and our communities are withering. Humans are social animals. They like interacting. Hummers are big metal boxes that separate you from the rest of the world. Go ahead, pop some more prozac.

Yes, I'm simplistic. It's part of being an eco-puritan. Disagree with me? Disagree with anything I've said? Please post a comment!!! I would really really like to hear another viewpoint on this that isn't the groupthink I've been wallowing in. Know someone who will violently disagree? Please send them here or have them drop me a line.

P.S. Dear housemates, even though your showers sometimes drive me crazy, I still love you. At least you don't take 2-3 international flights every year...

Of shoes and ships

2008-03-04T06:20:00.000+04:00

These rock my socks. Especially the old man with the bike/boat. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Pedal-Powered Washing Machine
Coconut Tree Climber
Modified Scooter
Amphibious Bike

Mud, it's what's for dinner.

2008-02-26T07:27:00.000+04:00

There's a fine line between rock star and monkey. Everywhere I walk in Linda Compound, kids call out, "Muzungu! Muzungu! Muzungu!" ("White person!") or "Bazungu! Bazungu!" when there's more than one of us. Of course, it's never shouted quite the same way...

There's the football chant: Mu-zun-gu! Mu-zun-gu!
Suprise/concern: Muzungu? Muzungu? MUZUNGU!
and I've even seen kids run around in panicked circles and yell it frantically like they were yelling "FIRE! HELP! FIRE!"
Kids have also been known to spontaneously start laughing or crying. (More than one mother has told me, "You're scaring my baby.")

I have instant celebrity here. Just add water. And lots of mud. If I'm walking with a Zambian friend, everyone stops us to greet me, ask who I am, shake my hand. Everyone wants to meet the muzungu. If I'm alone, I walk faster, trying to outrun the shouts of strangers. Everyone wants a muzungu to live at their house, it's unfair that some people are hosting two muzungus. Forget learning mad guitar skills and taking the nation by storm: all I need to become a full fledged rock star is move to a small African village.

[Enter monkey.]
Zambian stranger: Good afternoon!
Zambian friend: No, no. Greet her in Nyanja!
ZS: Oh? Mwachoma bwanji?
Monkey: Bwino. Bwanji?
ZS: [Laughs] You speak Nyanja?
Monkey: Nipunzira chinyanja. (I'm learning Nyanja)
ZS: [Laughs] That is good. It is good you learn the local language!
ZF: [in Nyanja] Wait, wait, it gets better. Ask her what she eats here.
ZS: What are you eating here?
Monkey: Nsima, of course.
ZS: [Laughs] Oh really?
ZF: [In Nyanja] Go on, ask her what she eats it with.
ZS: What do you eat with nsima?
Monkey: [suppresses eye roll at ZF] derare (okra), kapenta (small fish), kalembla (sweet potato leaves), vinkubala (caterpillars), chiwawa (pumpkin leaves)...
ZS: [Laughs] That is good. You are eating real Zambian food. I thought they were feeding you rice or bread. [Laughs] Where are you staying?
Monkey: In Linda Compound.
ZS: Here?! Are you serious? You are living like us?
Monkey: Ummm...yes.
ZS: [Laughs for a long time] You are crazy.

Walk 3 meters down street.
Repeat scene 70 times.
Good monkey.
Very good monkey.

All the food left on my plate actually does go to African children. My house grandmother gives it to the kids that hang out in her yard. I don't need to lose weight, but if I did, this is a damned effective way to do it...I may need some caloric therapy when I get back to the states.

Ambuya Theresa (Grandmother Theresa) is awesome. Last weekend she bought me a racy pair of underwear as a gift. She also took me to Catholic Mass. I have Catholicphobia and that was one of the top 3 religious experiences of my life. So much music. It felt like half the church was a choir and it shook me to my bones. I kept almost bursting into tears because it was twisting me in such a magnificently beautiful way and I had to fight to repress the tears so I didn't alarm Ambuya because I wouldn't have been able to explain. If you want cultural experience in Zambia, steer clear of tourist traps and go to church instead. Ha, and she even passed me 500 kwacha during for the offering, just like my mom used to do when I was young enough to be going to church with her.

Oh, and I also happen to be the world's biggest hypocrite. Yes, I love the dirt-bare simplicity of Linda Compound, and yes, I have the option of going back to my cushy life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have the choice. And I obviously don't choose to live in Linda. And yes, I still desperately want to explain to people in Linda all the intangible things they have that rich Americans don't, like the ability to laugh at anything, lush social face-to-face contact with so many friends and family members, fresh air, so much time spent outside...and I'm ashamed when they ask how many cars my family has or ask how much it costs to fly from the US to Zambia. But even if I had the power, I would never replant them in a suburban American setting. It would strip the richness from their [snicker] poor lives.

And yes, I hate the word "poor." The developing world isn't full of poor huddled masses. It's full of creative, innovative, hard working, laughing, singing people. And yes, they have problems. But it breaks my heart to see so many people want American lives, and I just wish I could show them that it's empty and show how rich they are already. See? Complete, utter hypocrite.

[Written Jan 27th, while I was still in Zambia Now I'm USAland where I stare at computer screens and get bone-soaked bike riding in the rain.]

Isn't it?

2008-01-16T11:11:00.000+04:00

I feel like I’ve been here my whole life. It’s so hard to remember what the states are like now. Maybe someone I know used to live there.

I have a cold. [snicker] My first thought when I woke up with a sore throat was, “Wait a minute…you can get normal diseases in Africa, too?” Hahahaha…

The whole group is now in Linda Compound, a community outside of Lusaka, the major city. It’s about an hour from Disacare on mini buses. We’re working with Light of Hope, a community center that acts as an ad hoc clinic. Kind of. At any rate, it’s the base of operations for a lot of people who are incredibly motivated and actively trying to improve their community.

…

Chitenge are the long cloths that Zambian women wrap around and use as skirts, or to carry babies on their backs. They usually have super cool designs, but they’re also used as billboards. I’ve seen plenty with campaign slogans and pictures of Mwanawasa, the current Zambian president, and churches often print and give away chitenges with religious messages.

Right. So, a few nights ago, I found myself wearing a “Jesus Saves” chitenge with pictures of the bleeding Christ, scrubbing at an nsima-encrusted pot with a piece of mealie meal bag and sand, surrounded by a dozen tiny curious children, who giggled/screamed and ran away when I looked up at them. It was the best dishwashing experience of my life.

Most of us are staying with local families in Linda. My “Zambian grandmother” is Theresa, a widow with six children who are grown and married. She lives in a two-room mud/concrete house with a tin roof. I’m super fond of her because she makes me cook and wash as though I was one of her children. We cook one pot at a time over a small charcoal fire, and eat by candlelight. Ha, but wait…the best part is that there’s only one bed in the house. The first night was a little awkward, but the bed is big enough for both of us, so it really doesn’t seem like a big deal now.

It’s incredible. I love her house. I love watching the children play outside at night. The wrestle, jump, cartwheel, circle, sing, joke, push, and even just roll through the grass, laughing and shrieking in delight. No TV, no toys, these children seem so alive. Joyful. Exuberant. Creative. Maybe I don’t spend enough time watching kids, but I’ve never seen anything like it.

But what really scares me is how content I am there. Nothing. There’s nothing but shelter, dishes, food, a bed, and a constant stream of neighbors and friends who drop by to talk. (I still don’t understand most of the conversation, but my Nyanja’s improving.) So much time is spent just sitting in silence. And I think a lot about how easy it would be to move here. Nothing. Right. But then I’d get bored. Or I’d be wasting my life. Or my education. Or I’d disrupt the community…or something.

I hate drunk Zambian men. If anyone ever calls me “baby” again after this trip, I’m slamming his face through the back of his skull.

P.S. The hammermill is looking gorgeous.

kuli mvula lelo

2008-01-09T18:14:00.000+04:00

Back in Zambia again. Funny how I forgot it and how it all comes rushing back. The sound of my Zambian cellphone alarm going off instantly evokes the sensation of waking up early under a mosquito net, disoriented and groggy-eyed, and scrambling out of bed to get dressed, jump on a mini-bus and trundle off to meetings with UNZA deans.

We flew through Nairobi. I rolled my eyes when we had to fill in extra MIT travel paperwork months ago because Kenya was “moderately dangerous”…but now it seems kind of eerie that the riots started days before we flew through.

Lots of rain here. The plan was to take a group of students to remote Mwape in Eastern Zambia, but the rains are so bad that Mwape roads are impassable. So, we're joining the other team that's sticking around the Lusaka city area. Mixed feelings. I love Mwape, and they really need help, so I feel like we're abandoning them...

On the other hand, I get to frickin build a screenless hammermill at Disacare! There are few things more thrilling than puttering around Disacare, hacking metal apart, and dodging welding sparks. Plus, once it's built, a hammermill is loud, noisy, violent, and satisfying. Hahaha, not to mention it also saves lots of backbreaking labor for African women, could provide a reliable source of income for Disacare (they would build and sell them) and some income for Light of Hope (a community organization who can run the mill and grind maize for a small fee.)

Disacare builds wheelchairs. Rough, rugged, tough, comfortable wheelchairs, suited for rocky, rutted dirt roads. It's run by disabled Zambians so they really know what makes a good wheelchair because many of them have to use one. One day when I've settled down a little, I'm buying a couple for my apartment, because they're friggin comfortable. They're definitely my favorite chairs to sit in at D-Lab. It's a fantastic idea...provide awesome employment for physically disabled people in a country that's mostly unemployed, and make mobility aids for other physically disabled people, one circle of wholesome goodness...only problem is Disacare's being smothered by cheap, nasty wheelchairs that are imported from China.

In the developing world wheelchair business, the big customers are large NGOs who buy the wheelchairs to donate them to those who need them. And it's really hard to convince a donor to buy a $400 top quality wheelchair instead of six $60 plastic chairs on wheels that fall apart and cause pressure sores. Imagine a cheap, white plastic four legged chair, the type that can be found on many lawns and porches. Imagine sitting in one of those every day for the rest of your life. It would be okay for the first few hours, but then it would quickly turn into a torture chair. Too bad that also sounds like a good idea: make lots of affordable wheelchairs for the developing world and distribute them. Too bad affordable also means low quality in this case, torture chairs not built to last a week in rough dirt road conditions. But what really breaks my heart are the people who think they're really helping out when they contribute to organizations that distribute these torture chairs.

I read an article this summer about a boy who uses crutches to walk and he raised thousands of dollars by scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro...and donated the money to Free Wheelchair Mission, distributor of torture chairs. How frustrating is that? So, the original point is that Disacare needs to diversify their products if they want to stay alive. Thus, they're looking into building and selling hammermills. Amy Smith--my boss, the one who sends me on these magnificent adventures--designed a screenless hammermill years ago, so we're building one with Disacare to see if it's something they want to build and sell themselves. Hammermills are a big deal in Zambia, because everyone eats nshima, which is made from ground maize.

Haha…something else that seems like a good idea. I’m sure it will fall down soon enough, but hey, at least it’s slightly hopeful for the moment.

P.S. Before I left Santa Fe, I tried to spend a night walking. I managed 11pm-5am. Incredible. Felt like a kid again scrambling over the moonlit hills and crunching in the snow. Found some places I’d never been before.

…but the take home lesson is I need to cool it and not overdo things. I was so tired and fried afterwards that I didn’t walk any of the other nights thereafter.

I cannot be played in record player X

2007-12-24T04:27:00.000+04:00

Simplify.

I'm trying so hard, honestly. It's just that complications are so tempting and ingrained. I'm king at fretting over trivial decisions. I figure I should eliminate the decisions entirely.

I used to live in the most beautiful place in the world. I grew up there. Funny how I had to move away before I could understand. I'm visiting home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, now. I go for walks at night. It's so cold and clear and dark and crisp, I try to burn the mountains into my mind, and the snowy piñon-shadowed hills into my veins. The only sound is the muffled crunch of my boots in the snow until I stop and then I'm left alone with my heartbeat and the wind drifting through the trees.

This is where I find contentment. I don't need anything. I don't want anything. My hands and face are so cold they hurt, but they're part of the scene, part of the landscape. I could walk for hours here, where there is more sky and stars than land and lights, I could walk the rest of my life here.

It's so calm. It's not happiness, it's space. Remembering for a moment how to take a breath in a whirlwind. Why shouldn't I spend the rest of my nights walking, breathing? La Llorona, wandering the hills, arroyos, and dirt roads...but I wouldn't be crying, I would just be there. I wouldn't need anything else. No other contact. No other adventures. No challenges, triumphs, failures, or trivialities. Just space.

Simplify. Is that why some people become monks and nuns? To spend the days meditating or praying, to strip away layer by layer to find bare contentment?

If I decided to, I think I could do it. Walk through the nights and eat just enough and sleep just enough in the day that I could continue walking.

Funny how I'm not wired that way. Funny how it's always such a struggle to get myself out the door, to jam my feet into boots and throw on a coat. It's cold and wet outside. Why would I want to tear myself away from this warm couch and warm computer where I atrophy and worry and decay and agonize and and bloat and stitch myself into a pile of discontent? Funny how I never stay walking for long because there are other things I must do, projects that are calling, obligations I must answer. I wasn't wired to mildly step out of everything. Humans weren't wired to be content. We have to keep moving, we have to try new things, find new niches, anything we achieve is forgotten as the next patch of greener grass comes into view. We weren't wired to stand still and catch our breath. Evolution marches on. Our genes march on. Our memes march on. They won't propagate if we remove ourselves from everything to find bare contentment. I'm here because none of my ancestors removed themselves, they kept marching. And by marching, I mean thrashing wildly at the world, life is never ordered.

One day, when I'm old enough, and wise enough, and strong enough, I'll step away and spend my life walking nights. But now I'm young and foolish and brash, and I can't shake the feeling that maybe there's something I should be doing, that maybe I can change something, that maybe someone needs me, that maybe I'm wasting everything by just walking.

Oh man, and in the meantime, sometime soon I'd better spend an entire night walking, just as a nice little reality check to knock some sense back into my head. Or knock it out.

Memo

2007-10-24T18:21:00.000+04:00

Dear World,

I love my job.

kuzizila

2007-08-31T21:27:00.001+04:00

Just returned from Mwape. 4 hours on a bus, then 2 hours on a dirt road in the Chieftainess' Land Rover. Jess has done this 5 times before, so it's all old hat for her. The Chief is a modern woman, seems lonely. I think she was reluctant to become Chief when her family unanimously nominated her four years ago. She used to be an assistant accountant at Zesco, Zambia's only electric company. She gave the paychecks out to the workers.

Mwape == remote. A teacher told us he bikes 43 km on the dirt road and climbs a particular tree to find cellphone reception to call home. No electricity in the entire village, except 3 solar panels: one at the school, 2 at the Chief's palace. So dark. But at night, you can always hear children laughing and shouting. Sounds like they're just over the next hill or down the road. One morning I awoke before it was light and heard a chorus of voices singing. Lay in bed and listened for a while, then got up and wandered down the dark dusty path to find them. Walked a long way and they stopped when the sun rose, so I walked back.

The children call out and follow when we walk by. Most know Jess's name already and they shout it when we pass. So many kids. I went to watch a soccer game on my own, and a crowd of 25ish children accumulated around me, quietly watching me as I looked over their heads and pretended to focus on the soccer players. A woman looked at the swarm of kids, then laughed and with a mischievous grin and told me in English her son was sick, could I touch his head and heal him? I never considered myself a "kid person," but here they smile at me and laugh with delight if I smile back and I just want to scoop them up in my arms and take them home with me. One of the Mwape reports says 48.8% of the population is under 15.

Soccer game was awesome. Fans stood on the sides of the dusty pitch and sang as players raced past. Each time someone scored a goal, everyone ran onto the field yelling and cheering. The soccer uniforms sure looked spiffy for a place where people battle with malnourishment and bilharzias. One of the most incredible sights I've seen: when the game ended, all the fans ran onto the field singing--the colors on their clothes swirled through the clouds of dust on the field as the sun set.

Mwape has so many problems. The basic school is gypped out of the textbooks it's supposed to receive from the government. There isn't enough classroom space, because there’s a teacher living in a classroom, because there’s not enough teacher housing, so they cut the classroom time for the kids. Drinking water is contaminated, it's hard to get chlorine, virtually no one uses soap and the place is so friggin remote that farmers can't sell extra crops for income because transport is so hard. But the community feels vibrant, even when kids have distended, malnourished little bellies. Haha. We’re so ridiculous. D-Lab is only here twice a year, well-meaning muzungus intruding. We don’t have a clue.

One five pin

2007-08-21T10:56:00.000+04:00

Tomorrow, we are going to Mwape. They have problems every season with elephants trampling and eating crops. Not in Kansas anymore.

Yesterday, back to the Hospital to meet some friends and another dean. We found a Zambian medical student who will travel with us to translate in Mwape. Walked through a ward. Nightmarish. Zambian doctors are brave, strong people. Haha, highlight, looking up in a developing world hospital and seeing a sign with an arrow: "<-- Biomedical Engineering Department" I smiled really hard.

Back to Disacare. More smiles. Lunch in the back, sitting in the dirt, talking to the mechanics, scooping scathing hot nshima with my fingers.

Out to Chilanga again to talk to the nuns at the Hospice. Peter/ Kayhana starting talking to me in the street and followed me on the bus there and back. Explicitly told him he couldn't follow me home. Nice guy...or crafty social engineer. Still looking over my shoulder and hoping he's not there. Eh, in any case, taught me a little more Nyanga. Hospice clinic is a little slice of heaven compared to hospital. Clean, bright, and full of nuns. What could be better?

Split tilpS

2007-08-20T10:33:00.000+04:00

I'm flying high on Zambia. Jess and I went back out to Chilanga, Freedom compound to see Leonard to arrange some plans for D-Lab. He was in the middle of running a soccer game to raise awareness for AIDS. It was so cool, I don't have the words. In the middle of an up-and-coming squatter's community, watching a soccer game, surrounded by curious ragtag children, watching Lenny walk around the soccer field and talk to people individually about AIDS. Those kids. I had a little posse of girls following me around, they must have been 4-5 years old, imitating what I did, sometimes we had little conversations with broken Nyanga and English, but mostly with smiles. I wanted to sweep them all up in my arms and take them home with me. And I don't even like kids.

Muzungu!

2007-08-19T10:48:00.000+04:00

It hit home today that I'm in the middle of southern Africa. The previous few days have been hectic, I haven't had much time to let it sink in--running from meeting to meeting around Lusaka with deans and more deans...at the University of Zambia, the Dean of Agriculture, the Dean of Engineering, another dean...then to the hospital to meet with the Dean of Medicine, and medical students there who have helped with D-Lab in the past. They have bars on the doors of all the offices in the University. Feels kind of like a prison at first glance, but heh heh heh, unlocking padlocks is waaay more satisfying than huffing at the stupid card reader at MIT that never recognizes my card.

My favorite so far was visiting Disacare -- a Zambian organization where various people with disabilities build wheelchairs for other Zambians. It is where Jess has been working to design and build bicycle ambulances. (Jess has been here 5 times before and she's showing me the ropes.) Saw a few Zambulances being welded together, met the workers, got a marriage proposal--great place.

But today, we took a bus (*they pack the busses full full, no room for aisles, packed right between the businessman and the potatoes) out to Chilanga, spent 1.5 hours waiting to meet up with people. (Transportation is especially unpredictably inefficient because all the presidents in southern Africa are meeting in Zambia this week, and they keep closing random roads.) It gave me the chance to sit by the side of the road and just watch people. Little kids always smile and wave back. Women carrying babies will usually smile and wave back, too, although a little more shyly. A soldier stopped and talked to me. He grinned and asked if I was "relazzing." Yeah, I said, I was relaxing.

Eventually, Jess and I met up with Leonard, who was running an AIDS training workshop at a church at a compound called Freedom. Every bench was filled with dark smiling faces, carefully taking notes about the immune system. Then we ran back to the main road to catch a bus over to the Hospice Clinic. We talked to a nun there about working with D-lab and checked in on the bike ambulance they have. The nun told us to come back on Monday when they're less busy, and the bike ambulance was broken--and looked as if it were never used. We agreed to take it off their hands, repair it and give it to the community of Linda nearby that had a bike ambulance already that they use regularly. Then we jumped in Kenny's (from Disacare) truck bed (woah, truck beds open on all sides here, not just the back!) with the bike ambulance, picked up a few hitchikers who jumped in the bed with us, and drove to Linda to meet Johnny, guardian angel of Linda. He runs a community center where we saw him teaching a class on clean drinking water to a room full of women and their babies. Sat and talked to some of the women who work at the center for a long time. Bussed back home again, more bussing for groceries, then home again and Emmanuel gave us an impromptu Nyanja language lesson. (Professor Emmanuel Matsika attended IDDS and is now hosting us in his home across the street from the University of Zambia.)

The astounding moment when it all finally set in was when I looked at my hand and was shocked by its paleness. The only other muzungus (whiteys) I've seen here were at the shopping block and the nuns at Hospice. You know you're in Africa when you forget you're white.

Robodog takes town

2007-08-14T12:11:00.001+04:00

I'm going to Zambia tomorrow.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole entire world, so just tell me that when I come back with malarial polio-infested yellow fever.

Among other things...
Objective #1: Find a new not-so-remote village that D-Lab students can work with during the rainy season
Objective #2: Touch base with contacts in Mwape, current remote village, and get updates on ongoing projects

A year ago, I decided my dream job was working for Amy Smith and traveling to the D-Lab sites. I'm going to lead trips to Zambia over the next year.

Someone pinch me.

Right on the heels of IDDS. I just had a few days buffer time to pack my room, move my stuff to my apartment, and pack for Zambia. This is insane. And [grin] wonderful.

IDDS -- a month of Fridays

2007-07-18T09:31:00.000+04:00

I think...we're finally through the valley of death [knockonwood knockonwood]. The last four days have been killer. All the organizers have literally been working 18+ hour days...and I'm fucking tired, but very very very content. Today, official day #2, was not so bad, and hopefully, tomorrow will be better. I've been so worried about the participants, worried about their flights, making sure they arrive safely here, have food to eat, sheets on their beds, pans in their kitchens...hahaha...latest fiasco -- scholarship checks. We have stipends for living expenses for a few participants while they're here. They are in check form. I started passing out a few checks and got a lot of blank stares. It seems many had never seen a check before. Makes sense in retrospect--why would you need checks if you live in a village in Tanzania? Here I was, I had written out these nice set of instructions with a map about where to cash the check, and suddenly it felt very very dangerous to hand this precious slip of paper to someone and have them try to cash it on their own. Especially when they would need the money for buying food. Great, I thought, I just organize a little field trip to the bank and we can all go together. Haha. The IDDS schedule is so bloody packed it's been infuriatingly impossible to find a time to take people over. Must try again tomorrow, not a complete disaster because we've been feeding them three meals a day so far.

Not to mention that I'm now locked out of my dorm because our keynote speaker, Paul Polak, has my room key, Amy Smith's room key, and my MIT ID card that I use to swipe into the dorm. And now he's in New York. I drove him to the airport, and he borrowed it (it was all on the same keychain) to get his bag out of Amy's room. We both forgot he had it and now it's far away. He's supposed to mail it to me, but I just discovered Tim sent me a postcard weeks ago to my address, and it's lost...meaning that the keys and such are likely to get lost too. WOOHOO! Bring it on. Besides, Paul Polak is an appropriate technology god, and in some twisted way, it's kind of cool that I lost my stuff to him.

Anyway, today was splendid. This really is a magnificent event. The energy is overwhelming. Tonight we had a mind smashingly awesome presentation from Peter Girguis, a professor at Harvard that harnesses microbes in dirt to make electricity. Seriously. And Shawn Frayne, D-Lab alum, who's inventing a revolutionary, deceptively simple, micro wind generator that uses a vibrating membrane. Kind of like the Tacoma Narrows bridge on a small scale. Bloody amazing.

...AND I LEARNED HOW TO SAY THANK YOU IN TIBETAN. (sounds kind of like "qua-gin-ch")

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax

2007-07-15T11:14:00.000+04:00

My life is exploding.

Cee, being the badass she is, brought me THAI CURRY PASTE! red and green curry!! From THAILAND!!! She bought it fresh in the market and bravely smuggled it through customs and airport security from Bangkok to Boston. Came all wrapped up in little bags with a rubber bands. [sigh] Just like everything in Thailand is wrapped up in little bags with rubber bands. [sigh] One whiff of the stuff and I nearly died from happiness convulsions. Which brings me to my shameless plug: Cee knows Thai food really well. If you're interested in making authentic Thai food, check out the recipes and scintillating photos on her website: www.realthairecipes.com. It's breathtaking.

IDDS starts on Monday. 29 hours. I've been thinking about this for years, and working on it for the last 9 months. I'm helping Amy Smith organize the International Development Design Summit. Hahaha. It's really a mouthful. This is crazy crunch time. between trying to make sure everything's ready for the kick off on Monday, and getting 40 people with different flights from the airport to here including all the hazards of international, delayed, and missed flights, to making sure everyone's suite has cookware (totally underestimated the effort on that one) to dealing with sheets and check in mistakes, not to mention interacting with the intense documentary crew that's here to film every fiasco, I'd say every organizer of this event (there's about a dozen of us) has had a harrowing, jam packed day. And I'm having the time of my life. And the event hasn't even bloody officially started yet.

Life has entered the surreal zone. A few days ago, TIME magazine did a photo shoot of Amy in D-Lab (because she does great things and everyone loves her). And there I was, fly on the wall, puttering about, trying to tie up more loose ends for the summit. I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm here. Other adventures include transforming a rat infested room into a shiny machine shop, cold talking to restaurant managers for donations [shiver, shiver], and meeting people from Tibet, Zambia, Haiti, Guatemala, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Brazil, Tanzania... as they trickle from the airport into the dorms. These are the people I'm going to be working with for the next month. I can't believe this is happening.

(and I held my own in a Spanish conversation with Carlos who just a few days ago was working with my man Gavin Boggs at MayaPedal in Guatemala! ...this is the summer my Spanish is going to get much, much better because there will be so many people to practice with...)

"Sometimes I sneak in at night and blast things."
Two wishes instead of plastic flowers.

It's hard and fun and boring and chaotic and goofy and disorganized and challenging and happening.

And just in case I've somehow missed you with my waves of emails, check out www.iddsummit.org. Come to the public events! Especially our keynote speaker, Paul Polak, this Monday, July 16th. He's a HUGE player in the appropriate technology realm...he founded International Development Enterprises (IDE). An example of IDE ingenuity: producing a Bollywood film to promote and advertise their treadle pump. It should be an incredible talk.

Round and round

2007-07-06T08:04:00.000+04:00

Hahahahahahahahaha! How amusing! Apparently, "I've been thinking a lot about happiness" for a while...it seems to be the common thread running through all my disparate posts in the past few months. Humdrum...my mind's running the same track over and over...

Breathing faster

2007-07-06T07:58:00.000+04:00

Best Fourth of July I ever had. Spent the day helping to build a raft out of some plywood lashed to a pair of old windsurfing boards with used bike inner tubes. We launched it on the Charles at Magazine beach about 8 pm, it stayed afloat beautifully. Three of us with 2 very tiny paddles and a paddle improvised with wood, screws, more bike inner tube. Rafted down the river about a mile, under the BU bridge, under the Mass Ave bridge. Lots of grins and comments from kayakers, canoers, and motor boaters who passed us on the way. It was dark by the time we reached the fireworks barge. Boston, being one of those patriotic revolutionary cities, always throws a grand fireworks spectacle from a barge in the middle of the Charles River. People crowd the edges of the riverbank and the tops of buildings, but we were in the front lines, floating on the water, as close as we could get to the barge without drawing attention of the Coast Guard. It was so surreal, surrounded by glinting sky scrapers that echoed and fractured the music from speakers along the river, we floated silently on the dark water between gleaming yachts and kayaks that darted between them. It was kind of raining, but we were already wet, and the water was warm. The fireworks were so close…every cell in my body shook, and the explosions reflected off the skyscrapers… There were other MIT kids with homemade rafts, but I think we were the only ones that didn’t get kicked off the river…

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness recently. It seems like I should be able to dissect its elements and engineer a state of being happy all the time, right? [snicker snicker] That’s how I approach problems. Like a scientific experiment. This is very sad, but a few days ago I started an excel chart to track my happiness. I’m convinced it comes and goes in periodic waves…and proving that to myself will somehow make everything better, right? Hahahahaha…I really should run away and lock myself in a monastery. I’m chasing all the wrong things.

Vintage whine

2007-06-27T09:43:00.000+04:00

I feel so stagnant. Something needs to change. I have to change something. I want to cut my hair short again. I’ve been looking at photos from Thailand, I like my hair short. Even though I know at the time, I just wanted it to be longer again. It’d also be a kind of “fuck you, world” statement. Ha ha. Just another cliché. I need to go to another country. Someplace else. Anywhere but Boston. I need more adventures, memories that stick out because they’re so odd. Even though I know, at the time, such adventures are AWKWARD and UNCOMFORTABLE.

Happiness is a bike. racing down mass ave at 3 am. random choice encounters. but only in small quantities.

[Hums] “I never loved nobody fully. Always kept one foot on the ground.”

Contentment is pulling myself out of sludge and WORKING on things. Making them done. And it’s not the DONE that’s happy, it’s the MAKING.

I like building things. Just like I like learning Spanish. Or Thai. It’s hard, but I should do it because it makes me happy. Instead of rotting into a soft sludge puddle of apathy.

I’ve been eating Boston too long. It’s that stomach ache rumble from too much candy. I didn’t think 3 summers was too much. Restless.

2007-03-29T08:29:00.000+04:00

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." --Mae West

More Whine

2007-02-10T22:54:00.000+04:00

My lungs feel like they’re size of a tea cup. I thought indulging in some self pity might be therapeutic.

Last week began with a few days of coughing and dull chest pain…which became sharp chest pain…became much worse…and then clima into a field trip to the ER. I napped on a comfy stretcher and floated in and out of consciousness between bouts of a flurry of different tests and blood samples. Highlights include the x-ray and the CAT scan. And the forensics magazine in the ER waiting room that was full of cheesy, melodramatic articles about assessing corpses. Some of them cited Wikipedia.

Finally, “You just have really bad pneumonia in both lungs.”

Great. My lungs are now inflamed sacks of fluid, which explains the pain. They sent me home with a prescription for antibiotics, lots of ibuprofen, and a warning to come back if I couldn’t breathe again.

Funny thing was that I felt fantastic immediately after coming back from the ER. Better than I had in weeks. It even felt as if I had been somehow profoundly changed by the experience. I wanted to run around and shake people and say, “Look! See? I’m changed! I’m a different person!”

My coughing decreased, the chest pain disappeared, and I thought I was going to make a record recovery. It stayed that way for a few days, and I was religiously careful about taking my antibiotics, drinking lots of fluids, and bundling up to protect my lungs from the freeze-dried New England air.

Then, night before last, the sharp chest pain reappeared. This time, it wasn’t enough to impede breathing…but enough to take 10 minutes of tears and grunts to get out of bed and grab my bottle of ibuprofen.

Dammit.

And now, a new development--yesterday I was winded after just walking down the hall. I guess all that fluid and inflammation doesn’t leave a lot of room for oxygen. Makes it hard to laugh.

If nothing else, it’s given me a good dose of empathy for people who deal with hidden pain on a daily basis. There’s not much I can do about my pain except pop a few more ibuprofen and sit it out. I feel strangely trapped. I can’t express to people when I’m in pain because it would worry them and there’s nothing they can do either. And there’s also this irrational shame that if I had taken better care of myself or done something different, I wouldn’t have pneumonia.

But I don’t want sympathy or empathy. I want it to go away. What really stings is to have felt like I was recovering so fast, and then crash down to a worse place than before. Clearly, I fucked up somewhere. Maybe it was last Friday night. Walking through that cold, damp, soccer field, and staying so long out there was not a smart move. Or maybe it’s because I haven’t been drinking as much fluids the past few days. Or I really should have taken the time off classes to just stay in my room and rest. Or spent more time searching for a voodoo doll in Tim’s room.

[Insert rose-colored glasses.]

Blessing count:

I’m young. If I were old or really young, this would kill me.
I had almost a week of feeling pretty awesome.
I’ve never ridden in an ambulance before. Great experience. Hope it never happens again.
Olin is full of really nice people. Probably couldn't have picked a better place to have pneumonia. A big thanks to Andrew Coats, Tim Hanna, Jessie Lin, and Ryan Hubbard for their help.
I will get better. Be a low pass filter. In a few months, this will all seem really funny and I’ll have loads of oxygen to laugh hard about it.

Common censor

2006-11-24T12:56:00.000+04:00

I've been thinking a lot about happiness recently. I went through a couple of weeks of being so happy I couldn't contain myself.
6 words: Amy Smith. Appropriate Technology. Dream Project. (YAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!)

Then came a couple of weeks of feeling like sludge on the floor. Buried beneath the floor. It's okay to be completely transparent about feeling happy, but when I'm down, I feel like I have a responsibility to put a lid on it, cheer myself up. The only thing worse than being down is pulling everyone else down with me.

I have mixed feelings about pretending to be happy. It feels so wrong. And makes me feel worse. But if I honestly display my ugly mood, it feels shameful. No friend in their right mind would let me go on my way if I told them I was sludge under the floor. They would feel obliged to try to make me feel better. Or feel guilty if they didn't try. What an awful thing to give a friend. But I only sink deeper if I isolate myself or pretend that everything's fine. Solution: I parcel out my unhappiness and spread it out amongst everyone, one little piece at a time. One word, a smile, a hug, a laugh from different people and it all adds up.

It's also becoming blatantly obvious that I am most satisfied when I'm being extremely physical. Backpacking by moonlight. The ache in my thighs from hiking 17 miles. Fumbling through martial arts (f*$#ing back kick...) Dancing until my mind floats away and my feet hurt so bad I'm crying. Biking in the pouring razor rain to catch the MIT bus. Walking for miles through cold crisp Vancouver streets. I need a boot camp. I want to spend the next several years aching and getting stronger. Best of all worlds: I find an organic farm run by martial arts masters. I alternate days between planting/harvesting/digging ditches and learning Tai Chi, Taekwondo, Capoeira, Karate, Aikido, Wing Chung, Judo, Savate, Hapkido, Jujitsu, Muay Thai, Kung Fu. And yoga. And every week I have to hike 10 miles into town to...umm...get the mail...
In other news, I finally found a thesis: Development is making people happy. Imagine measuring development in Gross National Happiness instead of GNP. Crazy? Bhutan's taking a shot at it and Britain's thinking about it.

I'm amused by all the things I think but would never dare say out loud or write down.

This just in...

2006-10-12T05:01:00.000+04:00

Life is so excellent it hurts.

I'm so happy that I'm on the verge of breaking down from the weight of so much happiness.

Swoon

2006-10-06T10:37:00.000+04:00

Mandelbrot gave me his autograph.
THE Mandelbrot.
Benoît Mandelbrot.
Father of fractals.
I have his signature.
It's here.
Right in front of me.
On my Ig Nobel program.
He signed it.
Mandelbrot.

Excuse me while I go scream joyous screams of joyness until I explode from pure happiness...

Face melt

2006-09-24T04:20:00.000+04:00

Life is good.

I know what I want to do for the next 10 or so years: sustainable development projects in third world countries. It's an idea I've been toying with for some time, and now all the pieces are beginning to click together...

Olin seems very simplistic now. All I have to do is check off the boxes, go through the motions. I might leave tomorrow, but I would miss too many people. It's hard to start in new places with new friendships...I might as well enjoy the ones here while I have the chance.

In other news, the Thai coup d'etat finally smacked down...kind of makes me sad that I missed it.

Awww...bloody hell

2006-08-23T10:04:00.000+04:00

I'm having my wisdom teeth taken out tomorrow and I'm fucking scared. Probably more scared than I've ever been in my life...actually, that's a lie...in Cambodia, there was this van with a jerry-rigged gas tank sitting in the front seat and feeding directly through the floor into the motor. I was convinced the van was going to blow up and and I was going to die a stupid tourist. Good thing it didn't.

Last year, when I went in for a consultation, I passed out after they had discussed side effects and when they started pointing to the nerves in my jaw x-ray. So...it's taken me a while to go back and now I'm having all these mini panic attacks that involve visions of bloody gums and nasty toothcracking. So far, the only thing I found that helps is to think of the stoic badassness of people being tortured in action flicks: Kill Bill, V for Vendetta, Boondock Saints...

And actually, I'm quite surprised at how effective it is.

See, violent movies don't really encourage violence, they just help wimps get through dental surgery.

Whine whine

2006-08-19T22:38:00.000+04:00

I hate Las Vegas.

Well, to be fair, I hated being trapped on the Strip…and even writing that out loud still makes me feel like a pansy, because if it really bothered me that much, I should have been more proactive—try harder to contact friends and friends of friends in the area, figure out the bus system, figure out someplace else to go in the city. Or even better, I should have had the chops to talk Ari out of it in the first place.

Ari wanted to get married in Las Vegas on her 21^st birthday. Unfortunately, her life lacked anyone worth marrying, so she invited Lyss, Maya, and I to come celebrate 21ness instead. Actually, we would have married her, except Lyss is already engaged, Maya has a long-term boy, and marriage is against my morals.

I never thought I would voluntarily go to Vegas. I dreaded this trip all summer. I winced anytime someone asked me what my end of the summer plans were. However, I love the girls more than I can express. We’ve known each other since the first day of freshman orientation in high school. I would go to the ends of the earth for them…even [sigh] Vegas. Okay, I know I’m waxing melodramatic, and I know that a Vegas trip for most people sounds like a good time, but please understand that glitz really gets to me. Like fiberglass cuts.

Playing poker between friends is cool. Giving your money to some mega corporation is not. Taking money from some huge corporation could be cool, except it won’t happen because they’ve been playing this game for, like, Chinese years (ask Ari), and they make the rules. Even if you’re lucky enough to win a few thousand dollars, the house doesn’t care because they’ve taken more thousands from all the other chumps who tried.

Yes, I know other people can and do making a living off of gambling. Good for them. But meanwhile, it’s effing aggravating to walk through a sea of slot machine zombies. [though clenched teeth] All those people pumping money into effing computers that are effing programmed to be psychological money sinks. [primal scream] Wake the bloody F up! THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS!!

[deep breath] …it helps to think of heartwarming underdog-beats-big-mean-casino-system success stories: the MIT blackjack team, Doyne Farmer and his roulette crew in the 70s …but it’s not possible for everyone to win…or else the casinos wouldn’t be so bloody rich, eh? And yeah, I know, I’m a gambling prude. As Lyss pointed out, gambling is also a form of entertainment. You can pay $8 for a movie, or you can spend an hour on penny slots. There’s a thrill in gambling, right? I’d rather see a movie.

I couldn’t really adequately express to Ari, Lyss, or Maya why Vegas bothered me so deeply. Several hours of airplane thought later…

It’s the same reason why I don’t eat at McDonald’s or Denny’s. The food isn’t particularly bad, but the focus is all wrong. They don’t care where the ingredients come from or where they go. As long as customers buy it, it’s okay. They don’t care about their employees or the health of the customers. They don’t even really care about the food they’re making. The focus is on profits, which cheapens the whole experience. They don’t love you, just your money. This doesn’t bother some people. Fine. They have every right to eat where they want. But I don’t want to support anything so cheap.

The Strip is a huge bleeping McDonalds. With sequins and tanning booth flesh. It’s so bloody shallow.

Despite all my bloated righteous ranting, I did have a smashing good time being with the girls, spending hours at the pool, eating our weight in sushi, drinking tequila shots with Maya, walking through all the lavish casinos (Where else would you find New York and Paris a few blocks from one another?), dancing on the bar at the simulacrum Coyote Ugly, dressing up to the nines to go bowling until 4 in the morning, and then walking all the way home because the shuttles had stopped.

But if I can bloody help it, I’m never stepping foot on the Strip again.

Sleight of hand calculation

2006-08-18T22:13:00.000+04:00

Airplanes divide my life into chapters. They're the blank space at the end of a page. This is where Boston ends. This is where Santa Fe begins. End of summer. Start of Olin. Leave Western World. Enter Asia. Everything pauses. This where I leave behind everything comfortable and start another awkward phase. A clean slate.

What a bizarre little rebirth ritual -- leave one world, one face behind, jump into a tin can and soar through the [cough] heavens to fall into a new life. Or an old life.

There's not much else to do in airports or sandwiched semi-reclining seats other than contemplate where I've been and think about where I'm going. A waiting room. Everything is removed and objective. My life on a microscope slide.

...such sweet sorrow...

2006-08-07T02:26:00.000+04:00

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.

--Paula Poundstone.

Lesser times

2006-07-13T08:39:00.000+04:00

This morning on my daily commute, I found myself waiting once again in the Porter Square T station. However, instead of immediately burying my nose in my book like usual, I took a second to look up and was stunned.

The platform was crowded with people, and they were all...reading. Books, magazines, newspapers, they struck various silent, pensive poses. The only sound was the echoes of classical guitar chords that someone was playing around the corner, and the whole scene was...eerily beautiful. [Insert meaningful conclusion about life here.]

It rained today. I pine for New Mexico skies. Another tribute:

Death by mud

2006-07-05T09:44:00.000+04:00

This past weekend, I biked from Boston to Maine and back again.

Before, the farthest I’d ever ridden on a bike was about 12 miles. It was on a mountain bike on the ridiculously sharp hilly roads near my house in Santa Fe, and it completely wiped me out. I distinctly remember finding a new appreciation for the bikers I drove by/dodged every day. How do they do it? WHY do they do it? After my little 12 miles of fun, I wrote off biking as something for hard-core masochistic uberathletes. I rolled my eyes when Ryan talked about biking 40 or 60 miles a day, but still quietly marveled that any human body could be capable of subjecting itself to such torture.

Then my roommate Liz in Thailand told me about her adventures biking along the west coast or through Canada. What really hooked me were her stories of how much you could eat, nay, *needed* to eat if you were biking. It sounded bloody fantastic. Stuff your stomach at night, burn it off during the day. I started seriously considering undertaking a long distance bike trip sometime.

Then, last week Chris called to say that we weren’t going to a Jazz festival is Montreal with Eve after all, and my consolation prize was an invitation to bike up to Maine with him.

“How long will it take?”
“I was planning on two, maybe three days.”
“Ummm…how far is it?”
“I don’t know. I figured we’d bike about 80 miles a day.”
My jaw shattered on the floor. [Stunned silence] “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well that’s about how far I bike when I’m being lazy. That’s not very much by biking standards.”

Right. 80 miles. A day. That’s farther than the distance between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. I don’t even like driving that far.

Chris told me that on the first day, biking hurts. The second day, it hurts more. The third day, even more. After that, it mellows out. Too bad we were only going for two or three days. Then he started laying it on really thick, describing the pure misery to be found in long distance biking. I think he just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into. The odd thing is, the worse he tried to make it sound, the more I wanted to go. Fighting exhaustion and pain, covered in mud, biking through a downpour? Yeah. Sign me up. I slowly realized that not only was I doing for the absurd quantities of food I would be eating, but I also really felt like I needed to prove something to myself. Prove that I could take it. Prove that I was tough. Prove that I wouldn’t fall apart at the seams. Prove my utter stupidity.

No matter how bad it got, I told myself, I could do it.

The first day was a blast. I felt so powerful. Like I could cycle forever. Then night started to come and my right knee started cramping up. We slept in a “refugee camp” as Chris called it, amongst endless rows of RVs and car campers, especially packed for the 4^th of July weekend. My knees hurt bad that night. I was limping, and my left hand felt all tingly and numb.

The next morning it hurt so bad to jump back on my bike. My knees screamed, and I wondered if my crotch was ever going to forgive me. “This can’t be healthy,” I thought as I winced and peddled gingerly. However, it was muscle pain and not bone pain, so it was okay to grit my teeth and just get through it, right? But it was *weird* muscle pain. Those funny little muscles around my knees. The ones that seemed to be there only for the purpose of giving me pain on this bike trip. It was so bloody frustrating. I had expected to combat muscle fatigue in my thighs or calves, or to pant and gasp for air, but nooooo…it was my friggin’ knees complaining, holding everything else back and making me feel less like a hardcore uberathlete and more like a wimpy chump.

Chris was incredibly patient with me. I asked him for advice on how to deal with my especially achy right knee and he said to take it slow, take lots of breaks, use lower gears…oh, and there was a trick I should know about. He recommended grabbing my knee with my hand and using my arm to push it up and down. I tried it…and, gosh golly, it worked. It took a little practice to pull it off and stay balanced at the same time…and it made me feel like a royal gimp. A super hard core royal gimp.

I thought about dropping out. I would stay at the camp, Chris could bike up to Maine and then swing back around and grab me on the way back. “I know from experience it sucks to put a lot of effort into something and then not go all the way through with it,” he said. “I would recommend going all the way to Maine, even if it kills you.” Right. Okay. Kills me. Right.

No matter how bad it gets, I can do it, remember? So I crept along the road at the fabulous speed of a mile an hour and thought real hard about how pain is only a perception and perceptions come from my brain and therefore I can choose to ignore it…right?

We biked past Hampton beach, and I thought, “Holy hell. I’ve been here before. It took a long time to get here by car, and I just fucking biked here.” A few more miles up the road, we stopped and had ice cream at an ice cream stand I remembered from another New Hampshire fiasco last summer that involved a van full of fire-hungry kids on a wild goose chase to find a nice secluded beach for fire spinning. I couldn’t believe I made it all the way to that fucking little ice cream stand.

My knee, however, just got worse. I wasn’t [gulp] terribly worried because when I got off the bike and walked around, it was okay. Hey, and you know what? Nothing made me feel more hard core than riding along the beach, on a road as flat as a pancake, grunting and sweating and pumping my stupid knee with my arm...and then getting passed by a couple of joggers. That was fun. I had to stop for a second because I was laughing so hard.

And then somehow, I made it to Maine. Weird.

Ha. and I thought it was bad in the morning. Turning around and biking back to our campsite was…definitely the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life. (Wow, I’ve been sheltered, eh?) It fucking sucked…but now I know that I’m a strong person and I don’t break that easily. Corny, I know, but it means a lot.

When I finally allowed myself to collapse at our campsite, Chris grinned at me and said, “Congratulations! You made it to Maine,” and I thought, “and I didn’t die. I’m okay. I made it to Maine,” and he said, “Now we can get some rest and bike back to Boston tomorrow,” and I thought, “Yeah. fucking. right. There’s no way in hell. I’m shot and this is stupid. I would do it if I had to save someone’s life, but I don’t need to prove to myself that I could do it by actually subjecting myself to the pain.” There was a commuter rail stop about 2 miles away at the border of Massachusetts and I fully intended to take advantage of it…I would just inform Chris as we passed it the next morning. That way he wouldn’t have much time to talk me out of it.

The next morning, I woke up, and my knees felt…okay. They started screaming again when I jumped back on the bike, but it definitely wasn’t as loud as the day before. Weird. Then Chris noticed that my seat was too low. So we stopped, had breakfast at an awesome little diner and he raised my seat two inches. Suddenly, biking started to feel very good. My knees still hurt, but it felt marvelous to stretch them out with every peddle. and I felt like an idiot. I didn’t know exactly how high my seat should have been because I’m not a expert biker, and it felt about the same height as my clumpy mountain bike at home. But at the beginning I had faint suspicions that it was too low and didn’t say a thing. Stupid.

Long story short, I made it all the way back to my apartment on my own power. And my legs felt fucking fantastic. Seriously. By the end of the day, my knees had almost stopped hurting entirely. A miracle.

150 miles. Wow. I biked 150 miles. And now, 150 miles doesn’t seem like such a long way anymore. And my leftmost fingers still feel kind of funny, but at least my knees are fine, right? I would definitely do it again. Without the knee pain.

Needles

2006-06-18T12:05:00.000+04:00

tango is a drug.

The past 60 hours I’ve been living in the world of the Boston Tango Festival, and I’m definitely humming on an altered mind state right now.

I played hooky from work [gulp] since Thursday to take classes during daylight and then dance late into the night. The classes are drills, difficult exercises with awkward strangers…straighter taller faster pivot ground yourself taller, dammit, taller, kick—shit. sorry. Try it again, twist ribcage torso turn looser no not loose there, tighten up…and all I can think about is how broken my feet feel, like someone’s been pounding them with a baseball bat in my sleep, and the weird way my back aches on the right side beneath the shoulder blade, the creepy old men—I wonder if some of them are here just because it’s the only time they get to touch someone else.

Then something weird happens. My aching feet go beyond pain and become stronger… My posture, which I’ve been struggling with all afternoon, snaps into the balancing point between relaxation and tension and I find this perfect Tai Chi moment where everything has been stretched and twisted beyond its limits to find a new…power. Speaking of which, if you dance tango or ever do, try dancing with someone who’s trained in Tai Chi. Holy shit.

When I was a young pollywog, I read an article about Argentine Tango that mentioned it wasn’t much of a hook-up scene. Tango dancers aren’t looking for dates, it said, they’re looking for something much more elusive—the tango partner. That one person who can read your touch and has the touch. Now as an older pollywog, I know that the not-hook-up-scene is a flaming lie….however the point is, the elusive tango partner part is not a lie. Good tango is addicting. Like crack, but oh so much more delicious. Everyone wants to find that perfect connection. Sometimes you get hints of it here and there with different people on the dance floor, but for me at least, it never lasts long.

I fell in tango love tonight.

The tango masters from Argentina held a showcase that was so intensely beautiful I wanted to cry. It was sharp and raw, with the precision of razor blade and the passion of a Buenos Aires brothel. If the world had seen what I have seen, we would forget about wars and teach all our children tango.

Before the show, there was general dancing. I had a good streak of great dances with good leaders. The skin of my soles melded to the leather in my spiked heels (I even made peace with those little torturedevicedemons) and there were many Tai Chi moments where my brain floated away and marveled at the things my body was doing. Two and a half years of stumbling and kicking people in the shins finally pays off…

After the show, I wanted to quit while I was ahead, but before I could escape, one more person asked me to dance…and…wow. We flew across the dance floor, every ocho, every sacada, every gancho, every volcada was the most delicious thing I had ever felt. Wow. I’m still reeling.

Tango love is different than romantic love. I’m not really interested in dating this person…but if only I could dance with him every day for the rest of my life…I think I’m going to start studying Tai Chi.

Slugs don't think

2006-06-11T12:53:00.000+04:00

I keep stumbling across these moments that are so piercing beautiful they knock me over. Last night, I was in the middle of the woods in Connecticut, watching people swingspinthrow flames underneath the moon. 100 fire performers gathered in one place can't be wrong. There was drumming...someone was playing a violin...and belly dancers by a bonfire. Yeah, yeah, I know--I'm a total hippie. Shoot me.

other highlights include sleeping in puddles and walking barefoot on gravel

and here's a token tribute to my long-lost brother who doesn't look so beautiful anymore:

Don't ask

2006-05-24T23:36:00.000+04:00

Sigh. Another semester at Olin flashes by and I’m still puzzling over Thailand. I think I'm just starting to realize how seriously it rearranged my insides. Ummm… this is an ugly attempt to write stuff down and convince myself that it happened.

Once upon a time, in the land of skyscrapers and alleys jammed with bored taxis, I found the right skyscraper at the back of the wrong alley and took the elevator to the 12^th sketchy floor.

“So what exactly do you guys do?”

“Have you ever seen The Life Aquatic?”

Welcome to the Coastal Preservation and Development Foundation. Sounds impressive, don’t it? Three guys packed into a sardine can excuse for an office, tapping away at laptops, trying to save the world one tropical island at a time.

On paper, CPAD is a [cough] grassroots [cough] organization working towards sustainability on the touristy island of Koh Tao. (www.cpadfoundation.org) They’re an all-around awesome group of biologists, scuba divers, business majors, and engineers based in Bangkok, the US, and other random world places. They even throw James Bond Ball fundraisers.

Not to mention the pterodactyls. Their Bangkok office was perched over this huge cage garden thing stories which echoed with unearthly screeches. Supposedly, they were just birds, but damn, they sounded prehistoric.

Ummm...right…so I had an internship at CPAD (interns don’t get glocks), working on a gloriously glamorous project. That's right, kids! It's everyone's *favorite* dinnertime conversation: SEWAGE, BABY!!! My swell mission: look at how waste water is handled on the island [cough]holesintheground[cough], examine how it's affecting the ecosystem, research alternatives, determine how practical they are, and James Bond. (<-- That's the gloriously glamorous part.) I hate to admit it, but I had a fantabulous time.

This sounds a little weird, but my sewage quest led me through a lot of paradigm shift musings. Honestly, how many people get to run around a tropical island and ask the locals, “Hi, I’m another stupid tourist. So…wanna talk about sewage?” I thought a lot about the way communities develop when tourism strikes, how I travel, and where I spend my money. And I found out that the holesintheground method isn’t half bad. It’s when stuff starts leaching into the ocean that problems arise…

However, the most awesome things that came out of CPAD were the side tangents. CPAD is looking to build a green research building on the island, so I started doing a little research on mud building in Thailand. (Mud building is awesome. My family’s house in Santa Fe is mudbuilt/adobe.) Soon I heard of the good works of Jon Jondai and his wife Peggy, and I ventured off to a small sustainable farm in northern Thailand called Pun Pun.

Took a 2^nd class bus to Chiang Mai after school. I found the right bus by reading the sign in FUCKING THAI! (Yesssssssss!!! I learned something!) I was only white person onboard…(I’m not a tourist, I swear…) Had a wonderful time at the Chiang Mai bus station teasing the taxi drivers who were trying to rip me off, then (following instructions), found my way to a random back alley with a random white truck, and jumped in. The driver was very friendly and I held up half a conversation with him in Thai. (A lot of it was me looking very puzzled and him trying to use simpler words.) I was joined by a couple of cute old ladies and baskets upon baskets of produce. Packed right in with the cabbages. Excellent. The ladies and vegetables were dropped off first at a market, and we drove out further until we were winding through a farming village. The driver pointed across a field. I jumped out. The workers in the field took one look at my frumpled school uniform and laughed. “Jon Jondai?” they asked. They pointed me onwards. I wandered through a tamarind orchard, ducked under a barbed wire fence and found someone who was constructing a solar oven. Ah…my hippie insides smiled so hard it hurt. This was Pun Pun. I found it. Over the next few days I was impossibly intensely content.

Wow, that place is…amazing. Imagine a cooperative community snuggled in the foothills with happy little kids running around speaking 3 + different languages (English, Thai, Burmese). It was the antidote to the smognoisepollutionblatantconsumerismhurryhurryfast that had been killing me in other parts of Thailand. I ate so much fresh passion fruit and bananas it’s a wonder I didn’t rupture. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen helping out: learning how to make som tam, thai prik, brown rice bread, curries, stir fries…I wish I could have spent months there. I’m definitely going to spend a considerable portion of my life on a farm somewhere. This sounds corny, but I feel like I have no connection to the food I eat. I don’t know where it came from, who grew it, how it was grown, how far it traveled… It felt so good to pull weeds out of the garden and mix mud bricks for buildings.

...and so many mind-bending conversations…

What am I doing?

2006-03-24T09:07:00.000+04:00

"I bet I can fit 500 marbles in my mouth." -Guns

Holy smokes, batman

2006-01-06T20:38:00.000+04:00

You know that feeling where your head's about to crack and it feels vulnerable and dull like an egg that was boiled three weeks ago and left on the table to collect dust? Neither do I.

I was in Laos a week ago. A week ago I was in Laos. Now I'm back in the land of freedom fries where everyone's huge and old. (Thai people are so small...and they age so well, Thailand feels like the land of children now. My mind is filled with visions of skywalks filled with Thai uniforms.) It's cold here. And the sky is brilliantly blue.

The refrigerator's different. This is more disturbing than it should be. Apparently, our old, brown, faithful fridge bit the dust the night before Thanksgiving, and now there's a looming, white, sterile, foreign intrusion in our kitchen. It's very white. And big. And it doesn't hum--it makes a quiet, hissing, boiling water sound instead. Reality blinks every time I walk into the kitchen.

Scratch

2006-01-06T08:22:00.000+04:00

"Don't eat those beets, they'll make your teeth turn red." -- The Mad Prince

Control burn

2006-01-03T06:02:00.000+04:00

I'm leaving Bangkok today at 8 pm. Weird. How do these things happen?

Ironically, I've been pretty careless this whole trip about eating streetfood and [gasp!] drinking tap water, but my body waited until the day before I leave to get sick. (Mmm...20 hour airplane ride with an unhappy stomach...sounds thrilling...I blame the ever-sketchy Shangrila restaurant in Chinatown. Stay away. Stay far away.) Actually, it's not half bad. It's given me the excuse to lie in bed all day and collect my thoughts from where I'd left them.

The most tragic part is that my appetite took off running at the first signs of trouble. All those mouth-watering Thai dishes I wanted to try for the last time...one sniff and my stomach jumps into my throat. Rice, bread, and salt-water it is, then. (BTW, ginger is pretty damn effective at stamping out nausea. )

I've spent the last month traveling with Eve and my family. I didn't realize it would be so hard to travel with other people. I felt so responsible for them. When I travel on my own I tend to get incredibly lonely, but I don't worry too much about myself. I can deal with just about anything: strange food, street-cons, pushy tuk-tuk drivers, cold showers, grubby rooms, filthy streets. Suddenly I found myself worrying about 4 other people. What could they eat? Where should I take them? How can I protect them from making all the traveling mistakes I've already made?

I feel like I've relived Thai culture shock twice through Eve and my family...I had to experience Bangkok through their eyes in order to show them around. I'd already settled into Bangkok pretty comfortably, but when they arrived, I had to force myself to remember all the unsettling things I'd stopped noticing.

That aside, it was absolutely smashing to hang out with my brother and Eve. Good times. Ask me about Mike's special passport sometime.

Highlights include:

Riding the train 1st class
Dancing on the beach in thunderstorm winds
Random haircut while waiting for a train in Surrathani
Surrathani's night market
Watching a game of kataw (think volleyball with feet)
Trekking in Northern Thailand (yummm...silkworms and green chile)
Battlescars from bamboo rafting
Laos (and spilling hot chocolate, coffee, tea...)
Vampyre and the Jazz club

Modes of transport I've used in Thailand/Cambodia/Laos:

Foot, bike, taxi, tuk tuk, public bus, skytrain, motorbike taxi, subway, friends' cars, riverboat, canal boat, train (1st class, 2nd class sleeping, 2nd class sitting, and third class), inter-city buses (VIP, 1st class, and 2nd class), songthaew, pick-up truck, airplane, elephant (okay, that one doesn't count), mini-van, mini-van with a rigged gas tank (shudder, shudder), long-tail boat, ferry, and express boat.

Best way to travel between cities: train
Best way to travel within Bangkok: riverboat
Best way to travel within Bangkok runnerup: skytrain

No coup d'état. Apparently it was a rumor spread by Thaksin for nefarious purposes. Whatever.

Dead people have feelings too

2005-11-30T17:27:00.000+04:00

News Flash: There are rumbles on the street that a good old fashioned Thai coup d'état is in the works.

Apparently, the Prime Minister of Thailand,Thaksin Shinawatra, is an...umm...interesting guy. (Think Bush, except smarter and richer.) He's been using his prime ministerly powers to privatize Thai companies and then buy them. For example, he already owns 2-3 oil companies and he tried to privatize and purchase the electric company, but he was shot down by the courts. He also recently used public money to fund a private venture called "Night Safari" in Northern Thailand (A tourist-trap zoo type thing). He made an agreement to open trade agreements with Kenya if they would give him 135 African animals to put in this zoo. A bit twisted, eh? Not only that, but it appears that Thaksin has recently been less than respectful toward Thailand's king...a *very* big mistake because the king holds the respect and the hearts of the Thai people. [However, to his credit, although it seems all his actions have his wallet at heart, many of them *have* benefited the Thai people, i.e. the amazing skytrain in Bangkok...]

Conveniently, Thaksin also owns most of the media in Thailand. When an ex-friend of his created a TV show that criticized the government, Thaksin it shut down, so the ex-friend started holding the show in the biggest public park in Bangkok and thousands of people were showing up every Friday to watch it. A week from next Friday, they've asked for a half-million people to show up, and who knows where things will go from there...

Disclaimer: All of this is word-of-mouth and half-assed internet research, so I could be spewing 100% pure hogwash.

In other less exciting news, my blogging time has recently been pillaged and plundered by my new love: that's right kids, the sport of kings: THAI BOXING!!! One of the scariest things I've done here so far was to walk up to the Thai boxing club after school one day and ask if I could join. Hey, I may be a pansy, but give me a little understanding: everyone else in it is Thai, and I felt more than ever like a stupid white bumbling farang the first time I stepped onto the mat for warm-up exercises.

It's funny how the most frightening things I try end up making me really happy. (Case in point: studying in Thailand) Now, several nights a weeks I stumble home with burning thighs, aching feet, and a ridiculously huge grin plastered on my face. I still punch like a girl, but I'm getting better...

Did I mention that our boxing instructor is also the NATIONAL CHAMPION in his division? He's this really cute small smiley guy, but apparently he knows how to kick ass in the ring. He's really down-to-earth, and he makes sure to spend one-on-one time with each student. My mind keeps trying to fold itself around this fact.[Waitaminute...you're the friggin national champion...and you're asking me to kick you? Grin. Okay!] I'm very tempted to ask him to slug me, just so that I can say I've been punched by the Thai boxing national champ.

One of my new found heroes is a past Thai boxing champ, Nong Toom. (S)he wore lipstick and a bra in the ring, had an incredible 50-3 record, and then used his(her) championship winnings to fund a sex change operation. She was then barred from Thai boxing and now works as a model/actress. Intrigued? You should check out the movie _Beautiful Boxer_.

If you want a sex change, Thailand is the place to be. There's a hospital here that's famous for it. One of the tremendously awesome things about Thailand is that the Gay/Lesbian/Transgender/Bisexual/Queer community is largely accepted here. Part of the Thai culture is a "don't worry" attitude...if you can't do anything, don't let it bother you. This attitude has its dark side, but it also generates a nice sort of tolerance...if your son is gay, that's just fine.

It seems like every thirtieth person I see is a ladyboy (like Nong Toom). The lesbian scene here is really interesting. It seems pretty polar: butches (toms) and femmes (dees) and not much in between. Just like Thai ladyboys have an uncanny ability to be gorgeous, I've seen many jaw-droppingly handsome toms. It even seems like the straight girls are expected to be a little bit bi. It's not uncommon for middle-aged married women to have a young mistress or two on the side...

Halloween night, someone told me the Thai slang phrase "yet kang" means "I fucked a crocodile." It's used to emphasize a statement. Something like, "I totally bit the dust, yet kang." The hogwash disclaimer should be repeated here.

Running List of Thai Pronounciations of Laura:
Rala
Wala
Lorla
Lala
Rawa

Thai names tend to be rather long, so everyone here has a cute nickname (i.e. Pom, Ice, Boat, Wan.) In light of my farang name being so hard to pronounce, I've been itching to pick up a nickname of my own. I like the sound of "Not." Short, simple, with infinite punability potential and some interesting philosophical interpretations. Then again, I'm probably just going through another phase like the time in 6th grade when I found out my Dad wanted to name me Xinovia, and I had everyone call me Xinovia for a year. Whatever. Phases are fun.

"Thai Beer kicks like a Thai Boxer." -- Koh Tao ad

"Please offer your seat to monks." -- Bangkok Skytrain

ZOUK IS AMAZING!!! My new favorite Bangkok past time is to head to Fogo Vivo, a Brazilian bar downtown, take advantage of the lady's hour for a free chocolate magarita or caipirioska, and then jump into the beginning zouk class. It's kind of like the reverse of salsa with a tango connection...yummm... I think I need to spend a while in Brazil sometime...

Tomorrow is the last day of class. yetkang. How in hell did that happen???

I'm going to Cambodia on Friday. It's weird that going to Cambodia from here is easier than going to New York from Boston.

This is why I want to be Buddhist:
"I remember a Tibetan monk who had been tortured in a Chinese prison for 22 years. When he reached Dharmasala, the Dalai Lama asked him: 'What were you scared of most in prison?' He replied: 'I was afraid that I might lose my compassion for my torturers.'" Holy hell monkeys.

Whew. I have 1,001 travel stories to tell and no time right now to type them out...maybe after finals.

Until next time,
Not (your mom)

Dames are just dead fish covered in perfume...

2005-10-05T15:30:00.001+04:00

A second installation of random thoughts/photos...(you can run, but you can't hide)

First, an apology to Ms. Rayona: I didn't realize it was such a pain to post comments on Blogger. If I wasn't a pansy, I'd be writing my own blog page from scratch...

Secondly...ummm...the guard at the international dorm next door was stabbed last night. [Notthinkingaboutitnotthinkingaboutitnotthinkingaboutit]

Laura at a temple in Petchaburi. (No, no, the other Laura.) This is where Naught taught us the Buddhist way of praying...

Red dragon fruit. (This one's for you, Janet!) You can barely make out all the tiny black seeds. For such a flamboyant fruit, it sure didn't taste like much.

Buddamonthon Park, located between my apartment and school.

Top six things I bet you didn't know about Thailand:

There are 7-11's everywhere. The Bangkok challenge is to find a stretch of street where there are less than two 7-11's within eyesight.
The taxis are sparkling clean. Apparently the Thai government just subsidized a huge project to rehaul the fleet and make all of them hybrids. Way cool.
You don't need any special training to be a Bangkok taxi driver. Just show up with your driver's license...or your brother's uncle's neighbor's driver's license. (It also may explain why most of the taxi drivers here don't seem to know how to get where you want to go.)
Whatever you do, don't diss the monarchy. It's very highly regarded. The current king is the longest reigning sovereign in the world, and he happens to be an accomplished jazz musician.
His majesty King Bhumipol Adulyadej was born on December 5, 1927 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. There's even a square named after him in Cambridge, kind of near Harvard Square...
Supermarkets here have an entire aisle devoted to rice. It's also pretty common to find fish being grilled fresh right in the middle of aisles.
Thai streetfood is amazing! I've been pretty damned adventurous about it, and I haven't gotten sick once. (Knockonwood)

Fish, anyone?

Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho. This guy is enormous.

A short discourse on Thai uniforms:

I have to admit I wasn't thrilled when I first heard I'd be wearing a uniform to school. Who wants to be an anonymous conforming automaton, right? They've since grown on me for assorted reasons:

Packing was a snap--I packed less for this trip than I've taken on 2-week vacations
No tedious clothing decisions in the morning
Everyone looks great in a uniform!

Until next time...