'Shroom Cabins Everywhere

Look at these straw bunkers that pop up all over Nepal in the wintertime. This is where everybody's mushroom supply comes from, so people can make delicious mushroom curry and whatnot. Wanna learn more about 'em? Check out my guest post about Nepal's Ubiquitous Mushroom Shantys over on Avant Gourd, a fabulous food blog.

Srsly. Check out Avant Gourd!

The reason I refer to these as mushroom "cabins" is because they remind me of the cabins at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp, where about half of my best childhood memories were created.
Here's a picture of me riding a snowboard off one.

The Tale of Two Cups: An Appropriate Technology Joint

I'm a packrat, but the useless junk I hoard mostly isn't actual garbage, it's just stuff that isn't useful (but will be someday. I know it!)

But when I went to India a few months ago, I came back with not one, but TWO disposable cups stashed in my bag, which I had saved after drinking coffee/tea from them. I saved them because they serve the same nominal purpose, yet represent wildly different circumstances and versions of disposability.

Wikipedia defines appropriate technology as being "designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political and economic aspects of the community it is intended for." So how appropriate are these two disposable cups for the communities they're distributed in?

Here they are.

On the left is a heavily textured paper cup from Costa Coffee, from a kiosk in Delhi's cushy airport. The textured zig-zags on the cup are thick enough to protect your hands from the coffee's heat, so you don't have to use the little cardboard rings many coffee shops offer. The thing is a joy to hold. It's like a teddy bear...kinda. Fun to touch, is my point. The heat protection feature serves the second purpose of making the Costa cup a more pleasant tactile experience than most disposable cups.  It's also a huge waste of non-recyclable paper, as most disposable paper cups are, but this one was neat enough that I  now keep it on my desk, full of pens, after having...uh..rinsed it out first, of course....

On the right is a red clay cup I saved (then broke accidentally) from a tea shop in Kolkata. The city's streetside tea stalls and small shops typically have big plastic tubs full of hundreds of these cups. It holds about an ounce of tea, and when you're done drinking it, you chuck the cup in the street, where it shatters and contributes to a large pile of rapidly disintegrating red clay shards from other people's morning teacups. I say "clay" and not "ceramic," because although these cups have clearly been dried somehow, they haven't been glazed at all, and they don't appear to have been fired to maximum hardness. Fuel to heat a kiln full of these cups could get expensive, and they use a lot of them. If 0.1% of Kolkata's population used one of these cups per day, the city would use ~5.4 million per year.  Looking closely at the cup, it is clear that it was thrown on a potter's wheel, and most of these cups that I used were remarkably consistent in size, shape and wall and base thickness. Anyone who has tried throwing pots on a wheel knows that making anything is tough, and making multiple, consistently sized tiny cups would take a lot of practice. BBC's Judy Swallow claims to have seen a potter churning out these cups at a rate of one every eight-seconds, making thousands per day. Plus, her last name is Swallow, and we're talking about tiny cups here, so...

Some people pay serious cash for good pottery, and it seems like these cup throwers could make other awesome things too. Maybe they do, and I just don't know. The cost of attractively glazing and firing pro pottery is probably a huge deterrent.


Appropriate technology is all about winners and losers, so which one of these cups wins?

Given the easy recyclability of unfired clay shards, and the minimal (I think) number of steps between digging clay out of the ground and making pottery out of it, compared to wood being pulped and made into paper cups, the clay cups win on the environmental front. Also, paper cups typically aren't all paper. That waxy coating on the inside is actually plastic. Not easy to recycle or biodegradable.

Another reason the clay cups are better is that a bunch of individual skilled laborers can earn money manufacturing the cups. More countries should use products that are human-labor intensive rather than machine-labor intensive. Undoubtedly, Costa's hand-massager/paper cup is made by machine. And the number of people paid to maintain that machine and feed materials into it is likely fewer than the number of people making a living throwing Kolkata's millions of clay teacups. It seems that the clay cups are appropriate tech for a market where people need jobs. And also for a planet where resources are finite, and need to be recycled.

What to do...what to do...

One-time-use clay cups won't catch on in the U.S. for countless reasons. But reusable ceramic mugs are ubiquitously available, and are better than paper or throwaway clay cups in every way possible. Plus, it is easier to propose a toast and clink cups with a mug than a paper cup. So take your own mug down to whatever hip coffee den you call home, or use the washable cups they have there for you.
It's easy Mmkay?

FAQ:  "What's with the word "joint" in the title of this post...isn't that some kind of drug thing?" 
--Well, perhaps, but actually that's a reference to the immortal Spike Lee, who labels many of his films "A Spike Lee Joint."

How are Nepal's Migrant Workers Doing in the Middle East?

During Indra Jatra, Newari people disperse into the woods
around their towns to gather wood for a
massive bonfire at home that night.

Estimates for how many Nepalese people have moved abroad for employment range from 2.6-4 million, or ~15-20% of Nepal's population.  Many Nepalese migrant workers now work in the middle east, where waves of conflict are destabilizing dictators like Jenga towers or whatever simile.

The Kathmandu Post and other papers published in Nepal's capital have dutifully printed stories from the AP and Agence France Presse about the recent protests, clashes and dictator overthrows. However, I have seen little coverage of what the developments mean for the tens of thousands of Nepalese families with relatives abroad in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya etc. How are these families coping? Are Nepalese laborers abroad participating in protests?

The protests in the middle east could have economic consequences for Nepal. In 2010, 23% (!) of Nepal's GDP came in the form of remittances from workers employed in other countries. And that figure doesn't even include remittances from India, which are probably huge thanks to India's open border with Nepal. I don't know how much of that figure came from countries now embroiled in...imbroglios...but you can bet somebody is losing money. How will these protests affect the availability of work, and the pay, for Nepalese migrants? Hopefully some analysis will drop in the next few weeks. I don't have the resources/skills to do it myself, but I want to know.

Here's an article from Foreign Affairs about how the global recession affected highly remittance dependent economies. Surprisingly, to me, it wasn't all bad.

Also: Do you want to read a technical, jargon rich analysis of Nepal's Liquidity Crisis?

Woman Friendly Condoms that Help Africa

My ad concept for L. condoms.

Here's a cool thing:

Peace Dividend Trust's excellent Elmira Bayrasli recently blogged for Forbes about a woman named Talia Frenkel who is starting a new condom company, called "L.," marketing to women. They aren't female condoms, but the marketing isn't aimed solely at men either, and the condoms won't include certain ingredients (glycerin, paraben) that can irritate women's skin.

Frenkel is also employing the widely disrespected (among aid workers) Tom's Shoes model. For every "L." condom you buy, one will be given away in certain African countries where there's a ton of HIV and not that many condoms. Buy one, give one (BOGO).

As we recover from The Big Kerfuffle* in which the NFL and World Vision defiled the developing world's dignity by sending them American football merchandise, its nice to hear about a product that might fit with the occasionally misused BOGO model.

(To be fair, the NFL/World Vision weren't doing BOGO, they were using a Gift in Kind model, which also gets a lot of deserved smack-talk. Also, Tom's Shoes didn't invent BOGO.)

So why will BOGO for condoms be less of a scam than BOGO for shoes?

Because shoes can be made anywhere. The countries that receive donated Tom's Shoes definitely have their own cobblers, and when the cobbler's customers start getting free shoes from Tom's, the cobbler's out of a job. This violates the number one principle-that-Aid-Workers-copied-off-of-Doctors'-papers: Do No Harm.  If BOGO programs like Tom's Shoes are giving away things that could be made in-country by locals, they're not helping.

But condoms can't be made everywhere, and they definitely don't work as an individual or family enterprise like shoe cobbling and hair-cutting do. Sending condoms abroad with a buy-one-give-one program might mildly curb the profits of stores that sell condoms. But no stores sell only condoms, whereas many cobblers only make and repair shoes for a living. Plus, it sounds like some countries just run out of condoms and can't get replacements for months on end sometimes.

Side note: 700,000 condoms got heisted out of a shipping container last week! There's a huge condom black market, which includes counterfeiters that make shoddy merchandise.

Places with condom factories should help out places without condom factories, especially if those places without condom factories also have a huge AIDS problem.

So, this looks like a good idea to me.  Plus, as Forbes pointed out, L. brand condoms won't evoke the Trojan war at all. And lets face it, isn't it a little rape-suggesty to have a condom brand alluding to a device that was used to sneak soldiers inside the enemy walls so they could come out at night and brutalize everyone?

*Note: The Big Kerfuffle is how the NFL/World Vision t-shirt controversy was described over on Tales from The Hood. I liked it. So I used it too :-)

Updated to include links to the author of the post that inspired this post (Elmira Bayrasli) and to Peace Dividend Trust.

You don't need more time...

The words in this cartoon are from a blog post by Seth Godin. The title of the post was "You don't need more time..." and the entire text was "...you just need to decide." 10 words to describe a colossal quandary that vexes me (and I assume everyone else).

Many times I've wished for more time to figure out "what I want to do with my life." I'm young, I'm educated and I've been brought up by my family and my country to think that I can do whatever I want to do, and that I can try out lots of stuff and change course midstream as often as I like. When I graduated from high school, I wished I had one more year so I could beef up my cred and get a scholarship to a hot east coast hipster party haven. When I graduated from college I wished I had more time to figure out how to get a job &c. &c. 

I was offered positions in three countries when I applied to volunteer abroad with Mennonite Central Committee. I agonized for days over which one to choose.  The position I chose fell through and the other two were filled by other people. My initial agonizing had no effect on what eventually happened.
When my current position came to the table, I deliberated for about fifteen minutes, and haven't looked back.

I used to worry that the older I got, the less options I would have.
Now I understand that the number of options available to me will only increase with time. But even with an infinite amount of time, there will never be a moment of pure knowledge, delivered from outside me, about what I should do.

There's no way to find objective "knowledge" about what we should do, there are only decisions.

Decisions take time...but not tons of time. After we decide, we can get to the fun stuff.

This cartoon is a double tribute to Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid), two people that regularly put stuff on the internet that makes me think better thoughts.

I consider this post a sequel to my previous Hugh MacLeod-esque cartoon.

My short(ish), reasonable response to Scott Gilmore’s volunteer hate rant

My friend Claire Bryant  (not a White in Shining Armor)
with my coworker/friend Basu Karki. Claire blogs here.

Scott Gilmore is the founder of the Peace Dividend Trust and he recently wrote a rant called "Down With People" about why volunteers bug him. In my response below, I do a lot of blaming NGOs for problems with volunteers. So I want to note that Gilmore's organization is expressly trying to help make NGOs more efficient (thereby solving some problems discussed below) and for that I respect him and his org.

Scott’s Point: “Volunteer staff are never as effective as paid employees”
My response: Fair enough. If volunteers were good enough at what they do that they could get paid for it, they probably would. However, organizations that recruit or accept volunteers because they need skilled staff are going down the wrong path in the first place. The motivation for an org taking volunteers is rarely that they “need good staff and just can’t afford to pay for it.”  Relationship building, cross cultural interaction, providing experience in NGO work...these are legitimate reasons for orgs to support volunteerism. If organizations don’t know how to use volunteers well, why take ‘em? Gilmore’s argument depends on a massive oversimplification of circumstances.

Scott: “Volunteers are actually expensive.”
Me: If organizations are spending money to get volunteers, it’s because they want volunteers for some reason. If individuals are spending money on self-support while they volunteer, it’s their money! If orgs don’t want people participating in costly and maybe pointless volunteer experiences, orgs should stop offering those experiences.

Scott: “Don’t tell me it’s about the kids.”
Me: This is a legitimate complaint about the motives of many confused volunteers. If someone says “it’s about the kids,” when they go volunteer at an orphanage, they are oversimplifying their own motives. It is also a massive oversimplification to use this as an argument against volunteerism in general. Volunteers should probably get some kind of counseling before they start working, so that they, and the org they work for, have a clear idea of “the why” from both of their perspectives. Both volunteers and orgs need realistic ideas of what they’re getting into, and why. Getting worked up about the cliché of “whites in shining armor” posting pictures of themselves “helping children” isn’t getting us any nearer to meeting the needs of organizations while creating volunteer opportunities for those who want them.

Scott: “There’s a good chance you’re taking a job away from someone who needs it.”
Me: Also legitimate, also overblown. Organizations who offer volunteer positions are creating the situation of locals getting muscled out of jobs by volunteers. NGOs want to help local people? They should hire local people. Volunteers don’t show up banging on the doors of orphanages, demanding to be allowed to work for free. They go through channels that have been created by the organizations.

Scott’s Caveat: “If you actually have a unique skill that is actually needed and there is no one there who could deliver it, then yes go....Doctors, engineers, and eye surgeons, for example.”
Me: Short term medical volunteerism/voluntourism can actually do more damage than other kinds. Medical treatment requires lots of follow-up, and people who are getting serious medical treatment, like eye surgery, often want to be able to contact their doctor later with followup questions. A doc who parachutes in, does some operations, and then flies back to their busy life at home, likely will not provide the necessary follow-up care. Of course there are exceptions to this…but there’s a caveat for everything.

Scott: “I’m afraid I just came off like an angry ranting maniac. Which is fine. Because on this point I am.”
Me: Angrily discoursing on this subject (and most) grinds away the nuances that make it worth discussing. By cashing in (and raging against) volunteerism clichés, Gilmore has diminished the validity of his arguments. The qualms are legitimate, but this type of discourse solves nothing.

Is Peace an Emergent Property?

Flash card I made to learn"Ant"
(kamilo) in Nepali

I was browsing the "Peace" topic on social Q&A site Quora (one of my recent addictions), and I came across this chewy question:

"Is peace an emergent property?"

Since I'm now an expert on peace, having been volunteering in the field for five whole months, and I'm also an expert on emergence from having read one pop-science book about it, I will answer this question!

First, to define terms:

Emergence is what happens when many component members of a system each follow a basic set of simple rules, and the resulting system develops higher level order, or macro-organization.
 Example: Ants. No individual ant knows how big the colony is, or how much food the colony needs, or how many marauding ants there are from another colony that need to be fended off. Yet ant colonies solve all these problems through a simple system of pheremonal communication. Each ant knows how to send and respond to the same ~10 basic signals, and if enough of them do this, the whole colony develops its own emergent identity. The above paragraph is basically a chapter summary from the book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, by Steven Berlin Johnson. Read it, it is amazing.

Peace is a general state of well-being that requires having basic needs fulfilled on individual, community and societal bases. It is the absence of conflict. But more than that, it is an equilibrium of power, an appropriate level of equality and mutual respect among participants.

Is peace an emergent property?

Peace and its opposites occur at many levels of interaction: within an individual person, between multiple people, families and towns, within nations and between nations. At the largest scale, it is hard to show that peace is emergent. Arguably, a certain set of rules, followed by all nations, could lead to world peace... but it hasn't happened yet.

At a community level, though, peace is promoted (or not) through the actions of many individuals. If the people in a town all know that the only way to gain the respect of your peers is to be respectful toward them in return, and if people assume that respect is desirable, they will behave accordingly. Mutual respect will arise. The basic rules  (A. Respect begets respect between any two people and B. Respect is desirable) will lead to the emergent phenomenon of a generally mutually respectful community.

The same formula can be applied to all basic tenets of peace (equality, absence of conflict, power equilibrium etc.) 

Peace is an emergent property.

So why doesn't peace actually emerge in many places?

People don't all follow the same rules. Different cultures don't have the same ideas about what respect is, or what peace is, or who needs to respect whom. Individual humans are far less interchangeable than individual ants.

Some people argue that the human brain itself is an emergent system. Individual neurons have a relatively simple language of neurotransmitters that they use to communicate to each other and to the rest of the body. Through repetitions of these interactions, neural networks are formed, and the phenomenon that emerges is human intelligence and personality. So when emergent behavior occurs in human societies (which it does, all the time), what is actually happening is that a bunch of emergent systems with their own level of higher order are interacting to produce yet another even higher level of macro-organization.

That's pretty complicated, and prone to mutation, which is why the world isn't perfect, so there.

But seriously....

It is possible to build systems with relatively predictable and desirable emergent properties. Every piece of social software on the Internet relies on the idea of emergence. It is also possible to manipulate human systems outside of technology, so that the phenomena that emerge are desirable. That's what the Peace Promotion Project that I work for nowadays is trying to do. The PPP provides training to youth group members in subjects like conflict resolution, good governance and collaborative leadership. The youth group members, now called Peer Educators, agree that they will host events (theatrical productions, social events &c.) to share the knowledge they've gained in training with their peers. The hope is that communities will benefit by having generally peace-promoting info propagated through them via social channels.

Clearly, this post contains highly simplified descriptions about both the concept of emergence, and about how peace happens. But whaddaya want, I'm a volunteer ;-)

Want to talk about peace as an emergent property more? Email or comment, I want to discuss!

Peace.

appended: My uncle made an excellent point. "Absence of conflict" is not necessarily required for peace, as I implied in this post. Absence of conflict is impossible and undesirable. Peaceful ways of addressing conflict are more realistic and desirable pursuits.

Hands

Hands.
The tools of every trade (except soccer.)
The middle men (and middle women!) between thoughts and actions.
When I start drawing hands it is a sure sign that I don't know what to do with myself.

 

 

The Raging Volunteerism Debate

A lively debate on the merits and demerits(?) of aid/development related volunteerism is occurring in the aid/development corner of the blogosphere. As a current international volunteer and erstwhile domestic (U.S.) volunteer, I basically have to blog about it too right?!

This is a multifaceted discussion, and this post would get boringly long if I tried to hit every point. In some parts of the debate, bloggers have treated volunteerism as a sort of systemic problem in the world of international aid and development. There's a better way to look at this issue!

Let me persuade you:

Several questions make up the core of the discussion:
What is volunteerism? Why do people volunteer? Are volunteers useful, useless or downright harmful to the orgs where they work? What are the defining relationships between volunteers, paid workers, amateurs and professionals? Why do orgs offer volunteer positions? And, as Crystal Hayling of the Center for Effective Philanthropy puts it, “Whose Volunteer Experience is this Anyway?"

In asking that last question, Hayling was asserting that volunteering should be an altruistic pursuit.
“It is not about you!” she imagined exclaiming to her friend who had planned a volunteer outing to Cambodia with her teenage kids, only to have the locals thwart their good time by taking leadership in a construction project away from the (oh so construction savvy?) teenagers. The kids were disappointed and turned off by volunteerism after the experience.

To Hayling, the idea that the kids would want control and decision making power in their volunteer experience indicated that something was wrong. They should have been doing it to help the locals, not for themselves.

I doubt anybody has ever embarked on a stint of volunteering with purely altruistic motives. Volunteer positions frequently offer perks like travel to distant lands, interactions with exotic cultures, and in a time of rising unemployment (in the U.S. anyway), something to do for a few months while you’re jobless anyway. The question that comes to mind is “what’s wrong with volunteering because of the benefits you can reap?”