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

Hey folks,

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

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

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

Yo. whats happenin people?

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

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

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

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

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

Brian

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

some pics fo ya:

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

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

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

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

Some numbers on the models we're erecting in Wyoming:

Each turbine is 80m tall. The rotor diameter is 77m wide.

Each turbine costs $3 million.

The output potential is 1.5MW. This is equal to the power consumption of 400-600 homes.

The expected lifetime is 20 years and the payback rate is 5-7 years (ie 13-15 years cool profit).

So bottom line, it's a clean energy cash cow if you have $3 million laying around.

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

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

Above are some pics from the job site.

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

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

okay well, I hope all is well with you good people.

until next time,

Brian

Hey people,

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

The US has lots of wind. At times the corridor between Texas and Minnesota has been called the Saudi Arabia of wind. Meaning it is as rich in wind as Saudi Arabia is in oil. Hence all the hype. Solar is big too, just not as cheap as wind… yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

gidddddyup. Homeboy’s goin corporate!

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

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

I got a job as an assistant teacher in a local elementary school special education classroom to help pay for the website development. My readjustment allowance from Peace Corps covered the initial expense but this job would keep my head above water. I helped a group of teachers facilitate a classroom of 10 autistic boys. This was an experience in itself. As far as I understand, in most cases autistic people’s minds operate normally – they just have difficulty communicating with the outside world. So it’s like you can tell they’re thinking and processing, but sometimes it takes them a few minutes to respond to what you say. It also takes them a few years to adjust to how our world operates. At times, this is frustrating for non-autistic people. Imagine what it’s like for those boys though. These women understood their frustration. They had tremendous patience. I learned a lot from them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

brian

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

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

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

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

Anyway, these diagrams go for simplicity. Simplicity is the first step toward progress.

oh stick people. you are good people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, the waiting game.

I thought these sounded good. Very simple, right and wrong are very clear...

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

—Mahatma Gandhi

The drawing pretty much explains itself. Read the bottom first. If you have any comments or questions about it, please let me know.

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

Much of my last three months of service, I spent going between Assomada and Praia, an hour car ride each way, running around Praia in a sweat-soaked button down shirt in summer heat trying to either get a job in renewable energy or sell a renewable energy implementation idea to someone of interest, basically anyone I could find who would be interested to hear it. In one of the meetings, I had the chance to sit down with Abraão Lopes, the Minister of Energy and Industry. I presented the proposal. He liked the proposal. He told me they were interested trying to convert Chão das Caldeiras, the neighborhood in the mouth of the volcano of Fogo on the island of Fogo, to 100% renewable energy.

“This will be a test. Your first test. If you pass this test, we will talk further about your project.”

He gave me further details of what he wanted to see. I responded, “I’ll get you a proposal as soon as I can.”

The impact of Mr Lopes’ response occurred to me on the walk home. I actually had no idea how to do the things I said I could do with Desol (the company/strategy I started to implement renewable energy), I mean, it sounds like it would work, but I don’t have the skills or resources necessary to put together a community assessment for renewable energy systems, much less the knowledge of how to install them. I took a deep breath and regrouped.

In the following weeks, I found a school in the US that had recently opened in response to the job surplus in the renewable energy industry, the Northwest Renewable Energy Institute. They offer six-month courses on wind energy to prepare people to be wind smiths, wind turbine technicians. The school hopes to open up further coursework on solar and geothermal systems as the program grows. I have applied to the school and will attend classes starting October 5. I hope to learn essentially the same thing that I proposed to do – assess, design and construct renewable energy systems for any type of community.

Later on when the time is right, I hope to meet with Mr Lopes again and make headway on his offer.

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

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

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

Education is learning about how to explain to youth what we already know. If you educate youth, you’ve been able to share something complicated and break it down to a young person. You, as the teacher, have clearly absorbed the information and presented it in more easy to understand methodologies. So it’s like when learning about space for instance, you clearly need people researching about stuff we don’t know… the side between the unknown and the known… but it is equally as important as transmitting that information among the people and into a language coherent to youth. For they will be the ones who will take what is antiquated and keep that motion going forward into the future.

There is your balance. Adults are the physical side of the world molding and turning our kids into products of what is possible, as to what is being achieved at that point in time. Adults are responsible for introducing our youth into a world we are wonderfully creating but, as flawed as our world is, accepting many things that still need great attention. The beautiful balance of it is – is that we need our youth to teach us about the future but we need our elders to prevent us from going too fast.

The train can be going too fast or too slow. And we must recognize at what pace we’re going. We must realize when the train is slowing down.

Right now, I think our train is coming close to a standstill. Our elders have stopped the progression of the youth. During the Bush Era, we found that not only did our corporations and government slow down the rapid progression of the United States, but our economy is now suffering from the damage done to a body of people that has stopped thinking about the progression of the union.

Our culture has ceased adapting our lifestyle to the growing pains of innovation. It is important that Americans, and all ambitious people around the world learn about some things that may work given the simply evolutionary invention of the Internet:

If the concept of education declares that youth are the mentors of what the future could be, then business must be where people make financial sense of the learning, of where society is in terms of development… what they are prepared for...

First business

The best way to do business highly involves being able to effectively use the Internet. The Internet is where you can find the cheapest way to do the best work. To do the best work, do this you must be effective at using the Internet.

Then fame

If you can navigate the web well, you will gain both riches and fame.

Then transparency

The only way to be completely transparent is to tie a video camera to your head and film every part of your life. What if a President wore a camera tied to his head? Okay, this is reaching, but I believe the Internet is showing us that transparency can make life easier and more interesting – company websites, simpler - facebook, more personal

Then government

A government runs on taxes. Several internet ventures like Kiva and Globalgiving – basically every online lending service – run on handouts from people, and are growing rapidly. People are reinventing taxes – If we come up with a website that would divvy out government sponsored contracts and let people take out a series of grants to pay for them, you’ve opened the drawing pool of companies, and essentially deregulated taxes.

So the steps to the maturity of the Internet could look something like this:

Education

Business

Fame

Transparency

Government

It seems like this would be a reasonable the path to the future given where we are now and what a tip of the iceberg we’ve just stumbled upon with the whole the Internet and all.

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

If you’re doing something, you either like it or you don’t.

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

If you end up doing nothing at all, you either like it or you don’t.

If you like it, keep doing nothing. If you don’t, do something.

The point is that there is no point. Unless you count keeping a conscious meter of how happy you are gauged by the things you do, as a point.

I would count that as a point. Or I guess I could say, that is what I do when I’m awake, which may be something or nothing depending on who you ask, but I guess you’re asking me because you’re reading this.

This simple phrase posted above and directly under the title of this blog, succinctly summarizes what I think about this life. To my knowledge, Prince first said it prior to his musical performance at the 10th annual Webby Awards, the Internet Oscars, in 2005??. I caught his performance on Youtube a few months after the show. When those words came out of his mouth on my computer screen, I froze. It immediately became the centerpiece to a philosophy I can’t let go of, yet still can’t quite coherently explain. It goes something like this:

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

The quote at the top is a reminder that what we think is equally as important and real as what we see. Surely, people have solidified a solid foundation of knowledge based on many assumptions about our physical world, but there’s a lot we haven’t yet uncovered. There is still a lot we don’t know about this life, this temporary journey through a coexisting physical and mental presence – we still have war, we still pollute, we haven’t yet smoothly adapted to the forces of Mother Nature. And in a day where our highly structured Western society forces us to conform to an often well-justified degree, we’re still a bickering, polluting, destructive species. Until we do (adapt to the forces of Mother Nature), it is important we continue to question, debate and consider alternative lifestyles that see fit so that both our physical and mental worlds may reside in harmony.

The world I grew up in, in the US, taught me to listen for 16 years in school to our “wise elders” who believed they knew what I needed to know so it would be less painful when I finally entered the “real world,” a realm of life that was talked about like a never-nearing monster of struggle. It also taught me to fear the things I wasn’t sure about like terrorists, or slimy immigrants coming in to steal Americans jobs. It also taught me to feel sorry for poor people in a land far away and be forever grateful for my fortunate upbringing.

I was taught listen, fear and be grateful – actions that asked little of my creative ambition or potential innovative qualities. I was taught not to believe that everything I think is true, but that I know nothing and should listen to my elders. I was taught to believe my elders would take care of me and prepare me for later on when I entered a world full of stress, enemies and guilt.

I’m still waiting to realize that wisdom and why it was necessary to strip me of 16 years of my youth before entering the real world. And I’m still waiting to find out who these enemies really are. All I see when I see difficult people, are people who because of some often well-justified reason in their own mind, have become bitter and angry at the physical world around them. Their mental world has been damaged and they take it out on the physical world.

If there is anything I’ve learned in the last year and a half as a junior/senior high school teacher, it’s that older people care less than young people. Young people still believe life is just about sex and music. They listen to you when you tell them your opinion rather than wait to interject their own. There is an optimism unmatched by anyone who has let the cynical world weigh down their shoulders. You know, there are too many grouches in this world for our own good. Old people are making everything all that much harder for young people to keep the faith.

And I’m trying to make a statement here that means just that – keep the faith. Everything you think is true. Whatever you think is more important than whatever you see and if you think you’re right, you must speak up. You must let the world hear the voice of opposition. If you do choose to fight the status quo, you must use reason to make your point. Reason is the single most influential tool any man can use.

When people back down in an argument using words like title, money, education or experience – those are fancy words that mean a person has lost their ability to reason. When a person pulls those excuses out of the bag, you know you are right. Have patience though, lame excuses for failure will soon be trumped by the slow, but progressive maturity of the Internet by unveiling the honest democratic soldiers. When that time comes, reason will once again return as the centerpiece of good conversation. (what??)

One point I’m trying to focus on in my professional life is to help wean ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels and government. Right now, if the oil ran out or the government disappeared, the world would fall apart. It doesn’t have to be that way. Nor should it.

If we can lessen our dependence and our impact on our planet and each other, it would lessen the impact of inevitable human error. The revolution we’re getting closer to everyday is about independence, it’s about fending for yourself, lessening your dependence on other people. It’s about growing your own food, your own livestock, producing your own energy with the wind or the sun or both. It’s about walking more, biking more, constructing and using public transportation more and driving less. It’s about rethinking our lifestyle and retooling the machines that are supposed to make our lives easier, machines whos impact are in sync with nature.

Of course, this is what I think. The lobbyists, the communists, even the drug dealers – they all have their point of view and they are all equally right to some degree. We’re all granted the freedom to believe what we like. In the end though, the point of view that matters most are the ones that influence the greatest body of people – be it through political will, military personnel or a drug that makes you feel damn good. Be it as it may, in 2009 most people don’t have the pull that it takes to influence a body of people and likely won’t, given the available positions of democratic pull dominated by those falsities of modern-day culture – the titles, the cash flows, the education and the experience, unless it happens on the Internet. Yeah, that’ll be where it’ll happen.

The two things everyone does have is a mental escapade and the ability to reason in the physical world given what we’ve learned on our own. Whether or not all the voices get heard is another story, but until that time comes, for the people reading these words, I believe there is a lot the world is losing out on because people have been convinced that what they believe is not true. It is. What you think is as real as what you see. And we must make what goes on inside our head, a reality. And in order to do that, it’s a matter of convincing the rest of us how right you are.

So thank you Prince. You are truly an individual – as a musician and as a person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time’s a ticking.

This simple phrase posted above and directly under the title of this blog, succinctly summarizes what I think about this life. To my knowledge, Prince first said it prior to his musical performance at the 10th annual Webby Awards, the Internet Oscars, in 2005??. I caught his performance on Youtube a few months after the show. When those words came out of his mouth on my computer screen, I froze. It immediately became the centerpiece to a philosophy I can’t let go of, yet still can’t quite coherently explain. It goes something like this:

Everyone lives in two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. We enter both worlds the moment we are born. The physical world consists of our family, our friends, our homes, our buildings, our cars – essentially everything we can see and touch.

Our mental world consists of everything we think, everything that goes through our mind. It is a collection of our experiences and thoughts we continue to build upon as we live our life.

The quote at the top is a reminder that what we think is equally as important and real as what we see. Surely, people have solidified a pretty good foundation of knowledge based on many assumptions about our physical world, but there’s a lot we haven’t yet uncovered. There is still a lot we don’t know about this life, this temporary journey through a coexisting physical and mental presence. Now, we still have war, we still pollute, we haven’t yet smoothly adapted to the forces of Mother Nature. And in a day where our highly structured Western society forces us to conform to an often well-justified degree, we’re still a bickering, polluting, destructive species. Until we do (adapt to the forces of Mother Nature), it is important we continue to question, debate and consider alternative lifestyles that see fit so that both our physical and mental worlds may reside in harmony.

The world I grew up in, in America, taught me to listen for 16 years in school to wise elders who knew what I needed to know when I eventually entered the “real” world, a realm of life that was talked about like a never-nearing monster of struggle. It also taught me to defend myself from the things I wasn’t sure about like terrorists, or slimey immigrants coming in to steal Americans jobs. Or how it taught me to feel sorry for poor people in a land far away and be forever grateful for my fortunate upbringing.

I was taught listen and fear – two actions that ask little of my creative ambition or potential innovative qualities. I was taught not to believe that everything I think is true, but that I know nothing, that my elders would take care of me and prepare me for later on when I entered a world full of stress and enemies.

I’m still waiting to realize that wisdom and why it was necessary to strip me of 16 years of my youth before entering the real world. And I’m still waiting to find out who these enemies really are. All I see when I see difficult people, are people who because of some, again often well-justified reason in their own mind, have become bitter and angry at the physical world around them. Their mental world has been damaged and they take it out on the physical world.

If there is anything I’ve learned in the last year and a half as a junior/senior high school teacher, it’s that older people care less than young people. Young people still believe life is just about sex and music. They listen to you when you tell them your opinion rather than wait to interject their own. There is an optimism unmatched by anyone who has let the cynical world weigh down their shoulders. There are too many grouches in this world for our own good. Old people are making everything all that much harder for young people to keep the faith.

And I’m trying to make a statement here that means just that – keep the faith. Everything you think is true. Whatever you think is more important than whatever you see and if you think you’re right, you must speak up. You must let the world hear the voice of opposition. If you do choose to fight the status quo, you must use reason to make your point. Reason is the single most influential tool any man can use. When people try and try you because of title, money, education or experience – those are fancy words that mean a person has lost their ability to reason. When a person pulls those excuses out of the bag, you know you are right. Have patience though, lame excuses for argument’s sake will soon be trumped by the slow, but inevitable maturity of the Internet and the return of reason as the centerpiece of good conversation.

One point I’m trying to focus on in my professional life is to help wean ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels and government. Right now, if the oil ran out or the government disappeared, the world would fall apart. It doesn’t have to be that way. Nor should it.

If we can lessen our dependence and our impact on our planet and each other, it would lessen the impact of inevitable human error. The revolution we’re getting closer to everyday is about independence, it’s about fending for yourself, lessening your dependence on other people. It’s about growing your own food, your own livestock, producing your own energy with the wind or the sun or both. It’s about walking more, biking more, constructing and using public transportation more and driving less. It’s about rethinking our lifestyle and retooling the machines that are supposed to make our lives easier.

Of course, this is what I think. The lobbyists, the communists, even the drug dealers – they all have their point of view and they are all equally right to some degree. We’re all granted the freedom to believe what we like. In the end though, the point of view that matters most are the ones that influence the greatest body of people – be it through political will, military personnel or a drug that makes you feel damn good. Be it as it may, most people don’t have the pull that it takes to influence a body of people and likely won’t, given the available positions of democratic pull dominated by those falsities of modern-day culture – the titles, the cash flows, the education and the experience.

The two things everyone does have is a world going on in our head, our constant mental escapade and the ability to reason in the physical world given what we’ve learned on our own. Whether or not all the voices get heard is another story, but until that time comes, for the people reading these words, I believe there is a lot the world is losing out on because people have been convinced that what they believe is not true. It is. What you think is as true as what you see. To make what you think… what you see, it’s just a matter of convincing the rest of us how right you are. And I hope you do.

So thank you Prince. You are truly an individual – as a musician and as a person.

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

couldn't embed the vid. prince has restricted all his shit... guess he has his reasons

http://www.spike.com/video/prince-kiss/2795066

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,

Brian

I wasn’t the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because I won the crowd.

Win the crowd and you’ll win your freedom.

-the royal guy who bought Maxiumus

I cried. I cried out to God to please kill me. I had just about given up. I can’t go a day without failing miserably. Without someone telling me I’m wrong and how I’m wrong. I was sick of it to the point of crying. All I want is for people to leave me the fuck alone but all I get is constant critiquing. People constantly stomping on my goodwill, taking it as an opportunity to continue avoiding their own misgivings.

The only way to win the war on morality is to have the confidence to stand up to people’s bullshit. You have to believe in yourself enough to put people in their place, or in another argument – you have to have an ego. Morality is all about not having an ego. But to live in this world, you have to. Unless you just continue to get broken and continue picking yourself back up again. Well, I’m back up. But if any minute of my life is a prediction of the future, I’ll be back down there soon enough. Man, I hate life as much as I love it. Such is your balance - enjoy it while it’s good and keep the faith when it’s not.

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

While life certainly goes in circles, is there anything that is constant? What stays constant while our relationships and our moods and our agenda continues to change? Time. Apologies for sounding cliché, wait, wait… I have a point.

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

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

Just giving students a little personal attention in class totally changes their behavior and their class performance.

Regardless of what their family life is like at home, everyone likes attention. They like older people to tell them they’re special and that they are good at things. They also like criticism. It effects them and they are then willing work to be in the teacher’s, the older persons, good graces, to please them, to get a pat on the back.

Now if you translate this into a professional position, what would be the best way to get that employee to both, perform at their highest level, and enjoy what they do? Maybe all they need is a little attention from the people above them. Well, that’s one argument.

You want people who are very good at what they do. You want the most talented, articulate, knowledgeable people in their field in charge of the oversight of that department.

Okay. How do you get good people to work for you? You pay them a lot of money or… you give them a lot of flexibility. You let them decide how things will get run and let make their own decisions on how to go about their work.

The more flexibility you give them, the less money you have to pay them. If they are doing something they love to do and have total flexibility to doing it, they wouldn’t require much more money.

You give them enough flexibility, you won’t have to pay them at all because they would have figured out a way to make money themselves.

What do you need to be happy in a job?

Money and flexibility. If we can argue this is true, let’s put their sum equal to happiness:

Flexibility + Salary = Happiness

If your flexibility in a job goes up, the amount of money you need to be happy goes down:

(Flexibility + X) + (Money – X) = Happiness.

(Flexibility + infinity) + (Money – infinity)(0) = Happiness.

Like I just argued, if you give people enough flexibility in their job, you wont have to pay them at all.

In fact, if they’re good enough, they would figure out how to make money themselves.

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

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

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

My student pulling me aside outside of class to ask me to change the curriculum tells me several things:

Fist, he cares about school and about preparing himself for university. I can’t imagine he’s the only student who feels like way either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the drawing board.

The greatest challenge I’ve faced over the past few years has been fighting people’s egos. People don’t like to be shown up. I rode with cyclists in New Zealand who wouldn’t give me the time of day because I was doing something more hardcore than them. “Let me be my own hero you asshole,” was the type of feeling I got. Then here in Cape Verde, I try really hard to get a few ideas moving along, then all of a sudden once I do, it’s like I’m in their way as they further the ideas I got moving… having forgotten what it was like before I was around. All I ask for a little respect.

Humility man. For life to get more awesome the world over, people have to be humble and focus on their job rather than protecting their fragile sense of personal satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The experiences we have throughout our life are stored in our mind. We refer to those memories every time we make a decision. Sometimes our decisions turn out the way we thought they would. Sometimes they don’t.

Every time we try something new, regardless of how it turns out, it serves as an opportunity to learn something we didn’t know before. When we learn something new, our brain stores that knowledge in our memory and helps us make better decisions in the future. As long as we keep trying new things, we’re in good shape.

Now, to allow many people to live among one another and continue trying new things, we have to establish order.

A long time ago, we figured out that if people agreed on a set of rules, many people could live in harmony. We then found out that not everyone always agreed with the rules. Then we had problems.

As we have evolved, we’ve had many disagreements over what our social order should be. Those disagreements have turned into conflicts and those conflicts have turned into wars. We all agree we need to set boundaries, but we’ve never been able to agree on where the lines should be drawn.

When we finally sit down and decide what our boundaries should be, we have to communicate with one another. To help us better communicate with one another, as individuals, and remind us about where we’ve been, as a society, we’ve developed things to help us remember what we have learned. What we use to document our experiences serves as a medium to convey ideas. For example, a person writes a book about his life. You read the book. You imagine the story. The book is a tangible medium that conveys an idea from the author’s mind to you, the reader. Whether or not it physically happened, is beside the point. What matters, is that the idea is communicated from one person to the next.

Over time people have become more efficient in conveying their ideas and emotions: language, music, books, television, movies, etc. Each medium of communication brought about new ways to transmit ideas between people.

As people get older, they are more likely to accept the ideas they’re familiar with as how things actually are. They are less open minded to new ways of thinking. For example,

A few hundred years ago, people thought the world was flat.

A few decades ago, people thought we’d never get to the moon.

A few years ago, people couldn’t imagine something like the Internet.

If you thought otherwise, people might have thought you were crazy.

When the Internet hit the public in the mid 90’s, it initiated one of the greatest economic boosts in history. People figured out that communicating on one network was, at the very least, a good thing for the economy.

Whereas earlier methods of communication transferred ideas from person to person, the Internet makes it possible for infinite people to contribute to both ends of an idea. Thus eliminating the communicative barrier between groups of people and individuals.

The Internet is the first perfectly democratic network of communication. Individuals can gather around a particular idea, anytime, about anything. And there is always competition for organizations to identify with clientele because they compete on the same platform.

On the flip side, the Internet gives individuals the freedom to explore anything they can imagine and document anything they want.

Perfect social order and unlimited personal freedom. Never before have both of these concepts coexisted at the same place.

A traditional republic is structured such that elected officials represent the interests of a larger group of people. They do this by creating boundaries that ideally best suit the people they govern.

This system is naturally flawed.

It is impossible for a small group of people to accurately address the needs of a large group of people. A consensus of a group of people can’t be made without representation from every person.

On the Internet, people have the ability to freely and fairly share their ideas on websites. Conversely, people choose to visit whatever idea/website they please. People can speak for themselves and listen to whom they please. No authority, no bureaucracy.

The Internet embodies what a government is supposed to do: facilitate ideas to provide structure for a group of people. The structure of an Internet political system would be built on ideas. Whoever comes up with the best idea would ‘win the popular vote’, so to speak. In other words, people would be rewarded solely for their ideas.

If the Internet could potentially provide a governmental-type structure to a group of people, where would we start?

Well, what do people want?

Identification seems to be pretty consistent anywhere you go. Since we started creating order, we’ve organized things by association using names and symbols. As we’ve become more advanced, we’ve come up with things like Passports, ID badges, and ringtones to identify ourselves with our nationalities, affiliations and favorite songs.

Identification is the root of organization. As we pummel through time, we continue to invent ways to establish our individual identity.

‘Social networks’ deserve more credit than we give them. Professional networking, connections, hookups, favors, friends, friends of friends, even dating… Networking is essentially the fundamental basis of social structure. Within social networks, we break down elements of our persona to further categorize and define our identities.

Online social networks have quickly become an industry worth 10-figures. In a very short time, many young people with access to the Internet, have made it a habit to explore the increasing number of facets within social networks. The ability to create a personal profile allows people to further explore their own identity and easily share it with friends. Furthermore, right now social networks are tapping into cell phones and email accounts making them an even better point of communication among friends. Young people can’t get enough of it.

Sure, people can create false identities or lie. But as the Internet world is becoming more transparent, our false identities are becoming increasingly difficult to hide.

The user-generated content comprising online social networks probably define its users more accurately and thoroughly than any form of identification we’ve ever come up with.

Now, people can create an identity for themselves and are willfully sharing that information with other people, all over the world. The only disconnection is between those with the Internet and those without the Internet.

The utter simplicity of microfinance has rocked the way people think about poverty. Everyone wants to ‘help the poor’ but the problem is that when people donate to large humanitarian institutions, they have no idea where their money goes. Just like any organization, there is a percentage of money that is wasted through the inefficiency of business. Not to mention corruption.

Microfinance institutions, such as Kiva.org, send field partners into impoverished areas seeking people with ideas for business whom are just short the money to get started. The partners create online profiles for the entrepreneurs on the microfinance website. Lenders, internet users who visit the website, can lend all or part of the money the entrepreneurs need to get their idea off the ground. Once enough money has been lent and the loan is fullfilled, the microfinance institution pays the entrepreneur through a local microfinance bank. The entrepreneur starts the business and pays off the loan, normally within 24 months. Then the money gets funneled back through the line and ends up in the bank account of the lender.

At each step, the field partner writes a short summary of what is going on and notifies the lender through email.

The only liability is that the entrepreneurs will pay off the loan. In my research, I haven’t found a microfinance website with less than a 96% payback rate.

A long-term goal of microfinance institutions is to offer interest on the loan, similar to a savings account. I believe this money would come from convincing the local microfinance bank for a share of the interest.

With microfinance institutions climbing up the backside of the financial world, modern business practice looks like it might meet them halfway.

Capitalism worked well for the West. The idea built solid communities, a well-rounded education system, tons of businesses, even Professional Wrestling. Through capitalism, individuals develop and implement ideas into a group of people. When an idea works, the person is rewarded with money so he may perpetuate his idea and his lifestyle.

Money is important in building a society, but only to a certain point:

Below this point, money = opportunity,

Above this point, money = trouble.

When a person has an idea, he needs money to be able to turn it into something. His focus should remain on expanding the idea and figuring out how to sustain it within a community. Once he values the money more than the idea, bad things happen.

In recent months, the media seems to be discussing two major types of business. Let’s call them ‘old’ and ‘new’. Old business sticks with its rigid bureaucratic hierarchy and rewards tenure. New business tries to identify new ways to think about things and rewards creativity.

When I think of the two, two things come to mind: Enron and Google. (Of course, I’m biased, but I don’t think I’m wrong.) Old business constantly feels pressure from investors to report profits. Businesses, like Enron, are doing anything they can to do this, even lying. Google, on the other hand, came out of nowhere and has quickly amassed unbelievable amounts of money by implementing their own style of marketing.

In short, old business values money and new business values new ideas.

We’re realizing the bad things money can do to society at the same time we’re recognizing the value of new ideas. The developed world has reached the peak of capitalism and is in a state of transition.

What does this mean?

We discussed two ideas that can further explain: microfinance and new business.

First, microfinance does more than help the poor. When a lender provides an opportunity to someone less fortunate, he receives an intangible emotional gain.

From an economic standpoint, emotional gain counts for nothing. As microfinance institutions try to make their idea financially profitable, people are realizing the finite value of money. People want what’s best for themselves. New business philosophy (essentially not selling out) is an example that people are starting to comprehend the value of emotional gain. If this continues, the intrigue of microfinance could potentially erase the dichotomy between the rich and poor.

Second, new business is about new ideas. It’s about discovering new ways to think about things.

If money talks, as the saying goes, and the value of money may be under reevaluation, what else is it trying to say?

The physical world is a place where many people try to learn new things and try to live in harmony. The virtual world is where they can.

I believe when we are born, we become conscious of two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. The physical world is what we see and the mental world is what we think.

For all of human history, we have been trying to live together in our physical world. The physical world is the science, the order, the government, the ideas of life.

At the same time, we have been trying to explore our mental world. The mental world is the art, the expression, the religion, the emotions of life.

The two worlds have always coexisted together: art and science, social order and personal expression, government and religion, ideas and emotions. Each can’t exist without the other.

The two coexist through time.

Over time, we’ve continued to share ideas, concerning, to some degree, a combination of both worlds.

Over time, one entity from each world has clearly become a frontrunner of plausible social structure: government and organized religion.

They are equal and opposite.

Governments manage social order and follow, to some degree, a moral code. Organized religion follows a moral code, and has, to some degree, structure.

Right now, the world is in transition: the two major players are at odds and our two worlds are coalescing on a virtual platform.

The open platform of the Internet is revolutionizing business as we speak. Social networks are reshaping the way we observe a group of people. Microfinance is bringing new value to money.

As far as security goes, all problems stem from some combination of social and personal restriction. The more we use the Internet to identify with what we need, the less reason people have to make trouble.

Over time, our two worlds could potentially coexist in peace.

Over time… hmm.

Where is the Internet? Can we touch it? Is it a thing? A computer is tangible, but like a book, its influence can’t be physically touched. The computer is just the medium between you and the thoughts of another.

If books can convey a story, and computers house the Internet, what then are people? Are they not a conveyance of thoughts as well? They are tangible. They can be used for many things.

Just like a book, just like a computer.

The mere presence of everything in the physical world, including the human form, is a product of our imagination.

As we’ve cruised into the 21st century, technical communication and the Internet have continued to be more of an influence in our lives. Aside from the impact the Internet has made on the economy, just observing the amount of time I personally spend on a computer is worth noting:

10 years ago, I only used computers for typing papers at school. Say maybe 4 hours a week. Now, if I had it my way, I’d probably spend no less than 4 hours a day on a computer.

So, 10 years ago, computers took up less than 3% of my life. Now, they take up almost 17% of my life.

In other words, 17% of my life I spend sitting in one place, exploring my thoughts and the thoughts of other people using my fingers, my eyes and my mind.

Other than using my fingers to type and my eyes to interpret what’s on the screen, what other purpose does my body serve when I surf the Internet? The more time we spend exploring our mental world, the less we depend on the physical world.

17% of my life sitting in the same place.

That’s a significant change in lifestyle. Will this percentage continue to increase?

Over time, we could strike a peaceful balance between our two worlds.

Over time, we could decide one world is better than two. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen.

With each of us spending increasing amounts of time in the virtual world, will our physical world one day become obsolete?

If we are in fact living in two separate worlds and it is possible they will coalesce, what should we do?

Well, our natural resources are drying up, most of the planet is still underdeveloped and the boundaries we’ve drawn in the developed world are dangerously tight. Since order is the one thing we never seem to have gotten right, it’s likely the best idea would prevail if we were to put our faith in an open source democracy.

What is in store for us next, we can’t be sure. What we can do, is hypothesize:

There are four perpetual beings of life in our physical world: earth, virus, species and intelligence.

There are four possible threats to our physical world: natural disaster, disease, ego and a new world existing only in our mind perhaps a completion of the physical world.

How will our story end?

Well, how did it begin?

I guess first it was the earth. Then maybe some water. Then virus’s and organism’s came together. Shortly after, humans stumbled into the picture.

The earth has been around a long time. We’re at a point right now where we may have figured out why it is we’re here. This is the most exciting thing ever. Ever… in the history of the world. It would be a shame to see billions of years of evolution wasted on civil dispute.

Over time, we will have no time.

So this story will end as it began. With a statement as simple to understand as it is to follow through when you believe in something,

Everything boils down to this: the things we know and the things we don’t know. To figure out the things we don’t know, we have to try new things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A war hero – who defended the American spirit,

and a self-made man – who pursued the American dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Internet is popular. What are people looking at?

Top 25 Websites (US only)

1. Google – explore

2. Yahoo! – explore

3. Myspace – socialize, express

4. YouTube – socialize, express

5. Facebook – socialize, express

6. Windows Live – explore

7. Microsoft Network (MSN) – explore, express

8. EBay – buy/sell - marketplace

9. Wikipedia – learn, educate

10. AOL – explore

11. Craigslist.org – buy/sell - marketplace

12. Blogger.com – create, document

13. Amazon.com – buy/sell, marketplace

14. Go – explore

15. Photobucket - express

16. CNN - Cable News Network – learn, educate

17. ESPN – entertain

18. The Internet Movie Database - entertain

19. Flickr – express, network

20. Microsoft Corporation

21. Comcast.net

22. WordPress.com – create, blog

23. The New York Times - learn

24. Weather.com - learn

25. AOL Instant Messenger - network

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

What influences people?

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

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

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

What are a government’s responsibilities?

Is there a right answer to this question? I believe so.

There are essentially three perpetual beings of life on this planet:

Earth

Virus

Species

Earth would include dirt, water, plants – anything involved in the solar cycle.

Virus would include diseases, cancers, or illnesses that any sort of plant or species could contract.

Species would include any living organism, including most importantly, humans.

Now, these three beings can work to the detriment of human existence by either the forces of nature, or carelessness of humanity, through:

Natural disaster

Disease

Human conflict

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

Disaster relief for something like Hurricane Katrina,

Healthcare for preventable diseases and illnesses like malaria (this to a certain degree, for example, the government shouldn’t buy smokers a new lung, maybe limit this to unpreventable illnesses),

And Security from continual human conflict - in times of war or in keeping law and order.

So, I’m suggesting the government’s role is not preemptive, only responsive. Beyond these three responsibilities a government can only serve to educate its people how to prevent these three things from happening. Thus you have a fourth, and endlessly subjective, responsibility of government: education.

Regardless how you define it, education is essentially the act of learning. And you cannot define what people can or should learn. You can only offer them opportunity. So therefore, I think it is the government’s responsibility to offer its citizens as many opportunities to learn as possible.

I think a smart government would promote opportunities to learn how to prevent human catastrophe – in other words, how to live a low-impact, healthy lifestyle and work with people to avoid conflict. What would those opportunities look like? Going by the theory of the Wisdom of Crowds, if you asked enough people, I think you’d find your answer. I’ll just check the Internet.

Time and money to spare:

If you have both, you must be bored.

If you have neither, you must be happy.

If you have one, you have the ability to change the world.

To do so, you must be willing to gamble.

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

Fans of cement like to point out that it is the most widely used substance on the planet after water.

-The Economist, Concrete Proposals Needed article, p104, December 22, 2007

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

-1984

Nothing great is easy.

-Socrates, Republic

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

-Vince Lombardi

Internet growth = 21.8% of the world has access,

2000-2008 – 300% growth

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

By the power of truth I, while living, have conquered the universe.

-V in V for Vendetta

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theory is for children.

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

According to this website,

106,456,367,669 is a rough estimate of the number of people who have ever lived. Granted, we’ll never know, but instead of just saying they couldn’t know, these people put a little formula together and got this number.

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

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

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

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

What makes me shake my head? Whenever I do something dumb, I stop and kind of curse at myself. I try to ingrain in my memory not to do it again, or how to avoid this problem the next time around. I try to realize this as an opportunity to learn something and possibly improve my life. If I screw up again, I would do the same thing. So I guess what makes me shake my head is when I don’t learn from opportunity.

How many people in the world have opportunity? How many people have opportunity to grant opportunity? How many people are wedged into the human system such that they, if they chose, would have a chance to reasonably influence a number of people? Not many.

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

What about consistently being good? If you’re consistently a good person, I think people will grant you influence. They will respect you and show you that respect through their own goodness.

I think though because the way our society is structured, it’s difficult for truly good people to get money and power. It almost takes being ungood to reach those levels of authority. And, subsequently those people with authority can distort people’s image of how they should live their life. You don’t necessarily have to be good to have influence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Modi ki bu sta?” How are you? I ask everyone on the way to work.

“So na moviment, bo?” Just moving, you?

“Sem, mi tambe, so na moviment.” Yep, me too, just moving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Island Money, April 12

The first question I ask my seniors the first day of their last trimester was, “can anyone explain what is going on in Iraq right now?”

They paused, surprised by the seemingly irrelevant question.

“Bush gosta de guerra!” Bush likes war!

“Jobi pa Osama Bin Laden.” They’re looking for Osama Bin Laden.

One of them in the back laughed while he responded, “yeah, they can’t find him.”

Then, “Petrol!”

That’s right, OIL! I drew an ignorant map of the world focusing on the Middle East.

“In the year 2000, Saudi Arabia exported more oil than any other country in the world. Now, what country was and still is the biggest consumer of oil?”

“Estados Unidos!”

“That’s right. Basically, the government of Saudi Arabia realized how much money they made selling their oil to Americans and valued the protection Americans gave them against opposing forces. Over the years, the Saudi’s valued the oil and security more than they valued the respect of their people. Congruently, the American government also realized that the American people were very dependent on oil and made sacrifices to maintain that constant source of energy. Thus, oil has (arguably) become more important than accurately representing the best interest of their citizens.*

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

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

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

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

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

We, us, all of us here will always remember that date. Until we die, we will always remember this date. This was when Osama attacked America. He took down two of the biggest buildings in America.

“Yeah, with planes.”

“Teacher, why did he attack those buildings?”

“Because those buildings were the World Trade Centers. That was where lots of business was done. Lots of buying and selling, lots of money changing hands. Osama thinks that when people make a lot of money, they get corrupt and lose sight of their core responsibilities as individuals. He’s delusional though because he’s taking out his anger on innocent people instead of the figureheads responsible for the wrongdoing. (yeah, this was more opinionated than anything, what isn’t nowadays though?)

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

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

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

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

“My point is this: what can Cape Verde do to help the situation of the world right now?”

“Americans can stopover here on the way to Iraq to fight.”

“Nooo, no, no. Why would they want to do that? It’s peaceful here. You shouldn’t want to bring war here.”

They knew that. They didn’t know what else to say. Since Cape Verde won their independence from Portugal in 1975 fighting a war with Guinea-Bissau, in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde has been a peaceful country. And every Capeverdean is proud of that.

“So what can you all do to help this situation? What can we do to help heal many of the open wounds in the world today?”

Pause.

“Okay… where did this whole story start?”

Short pause, “petrol.” Yeeesssss….

“Exactly. And what is petrol?” Pause. “Petrol is energy. It’s what the Saudi’s sold to get rich, what the Americans use more of than any other country and comprises 78% of the total energy consumption in Cape Verde. People predict the world’s oil supply will run out before we die – some estimates predict we have about half a century. We must begin to look for other sources of energy.

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

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

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

“Fazi dessalinizador solar.” Make solar stills. They either said that because that’s what they thought, or because that’s usually the answer to anything off topic I talk about in class.

They continued though, “wind, solar, water… wave.”

“Hell yeeaah. Energy. We need to ween ourselves off our dependence on oil. We can do that by focusing on projects that use the natural resources we have around us: sun and saltwater. Look, there are jobs in this profession, there are people with money ready to pay us to build projects like the solar still. For anyone to try and tell you there is no job market in Cape Verde, tell them they are wrong.”

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

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

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

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

An experiment, April 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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