What Happened?

In case you haven't noticed, this trip wasn't like the others as far as this blog went. Mostly you'd notice because I haven't said much about anything that was happening or what I was actually doing.

I ran into a couple problems early on when it came to recording a public history of what I was up to: telling the story affects the participants. It's tougher to write about something when you see and are working with your subjects.

I've left a few things out of what I've posted here. For example, the day before my story of putting up food tents, one of our biggest projects were destroyed by organized crime leaders, who also reportedly sent out assassins looking for my boss. Amazing story, but posting it had some really obvious hurdles-- primarily the safety of my colleagues and superiors if I went into any more detail than I have in this paragraph already, as the people involved have political affiliations. And anyway, none if it (thankfully) happened to me. I was never in any real danger.

Unlike the time when I was accosted a few blocks from my house by what at first appeared to be a one-armed homeless man and who turned out to be a two-armed (former?) prison gang member with the infamous numbers gang . Thankfully I didn't know enough to be scared by a 27 tattooed on a guy's wrist until I told people about it later, and I was in a well-lit, populated area when it happened. So nothing came of it, despite a thinly veiled threat at the end of the encounter. I just had to keep track of my own personal safety. I didn't have a car to hijack or anything.

Unlike my friend and colleague who drove down to Cape Point with her visiting boyfriend and almost lost their rental car. They drove down the road slowly on the way to the national park, on a slight downhill incline when they spotted a baboon on the side of the road. They slowed down to look and take pictures of the baboon. The baboon noticed them, ambled over to the car, opened the unlocked back door, and hopped in. It took a perch on the center console, and started baring its teeth at the human occupants. In case you didn't know, baboons have a strong enough grip to crush the bones in your arms if they have a notion and opportunity to do so. So my friend and her boyfriend, after being unable to shoo the thing out of the car, both opened their doors and dived out themselves. Luckily the baboon just grabbed their lunch and jumped out a second later, because the unoccupied car started rolling downhill. They had to chase it down, jump in, and lock all the doors.

And as for doors... well, actually I already told that story.

The day to day work honestly was a bit slow for me. I've been explaining it to people this way. I came to South Africa expecting to find a community in need, get to know them, their values, and the obstacles they faced day to day, and then assist them in whatever way I could using what skills and training I could muster. And I feel like I did exactly that. Only the community in need turned out to be American and European college students serving alongside me as interns.

Without going into too many details, because a few things had gone awry, the office was something of a logistical mess when I came in. Nobody knew who was responsible for what, tasks were being duplicated constantly, and nobody could access basic resources like templates for training or marketing material. So I fixed up a couple IT projects in the office to help alleviate those issues. Also while I was at it, I set up two extra broken computers, extended the office WiFi network's range with an extra router, got the dysfunctional printer working, and generally taught and reassured people with IT woes.

I'd like to think they all went on to help the kinds of people I was picturing helping when I fly down. I think the odds are probably decent they did. But it's going to be a long time before we really know, since most of the projects are currently under construction.

In my spare time, I got to meet some remarkable people, especially near the end of my trip. One of them sent me a Facebook message after we'd parted ways:

"Great to spend time with you Joel; just sorry that your experience wasn't as great as it could have been," he said.

That surprised me a bit. I hoped I hadn't come off as complaining about not having a good time. 

"Thank you!" I sent back. "I hope you take any apparent disappointment as me being a perfectionist about my approach rather than any shortcomings in what I found." 

His reply was one of the most flattering comments I've gotten in a while: "I took it as being less of an experience than someone of your caliber would be stimulated or challenged by.....: )"

Regardless of whatever anyone takes my caliber to be, I'm looking forward to hopefully a more challenging experience next time-- not because South Africa and Heart Capital don't face challenges, but because next time I'll know how to better find them myself directly. When I do, I hope I'll have better stories that I'll be able to share on the spot.

The Door Story

Something happened here at Bryant street recently. To understand it, you'll need a couple background stories.

First was several weeks ago when I sent a short list of things that needed to be fixed in the apartment to my super, including the fact that my bedroom door wouldn't stay closed unless locked. He came in and decided the best solution was to give me a new lock. He installed it and gave me a new key, letting me keep the old key as a souvenir.

Next was about a week ago when I was having drinks with a couple guys who were from Cape Town originally. I told them I was living in the neighborhood of Bo Kaap.

"Ooh. Pretty place. Dangerous though." One said. I was a little surprised, I'd thought it was a very safe place. "Yeah," he said, when I told him that. "Well I had a couple friends living there, they had stuff stolen out of their car twice and their house was broken into. So be careful up there."  He did at least assure me that they'd never been mugged.

A few days after that, earlier this week, I was eating breakfast when Natalie, one of my five housemates, asked if I was going to be home in the afternoon the next day. I told her I was going to be at work. She looked perturbed and asked what I was going to to about "the visit." When I asked what visit, she asked if I'd checked my email. I hadn't. Our landlord was apparently showing someone around both my room and Natalie's since we were both moving out soon, and asked us to leave our rooms unlocked. She's the most security conscious of us and didn't like the idea, but I assured her it'd be fine for one afternoon.

Now, our house isn't big. The layout is like so: immediately after walking in the glass entrance door you'll find the room of my Swiss-French housemate, Hubert, who spends a lot of time here with his brother, Fabian. When they aren't working in high end hotel consulting, they're surfing in Muizenberg. After walking past his room you'll enter the small common area with kitchen and dining room table. To the left again is French hospitality intern Amandine's windowless bedroom, and down a short hallway to the left is German wedding business intern Natalie's room. Then are the two bathrooms before you get to the glass doors to the back porch. There is also a set of stairs leading up a floor and to the back of the house. At the top of the stairs, furthest from the front entrance you will find the room of Duy and Slobo, the German-Turkish Model and her German-Serbian stuntman/stage fighter husband, and opposite that, my room. All the rooms have individual locks with very old fashioned looking keys.

Short version: closest to the front door is Hubert, the ladies are in the middle, and furthest from the door are me and the married couple.

So, that night, about 4:30am, I wake up to a loud banging on the front door. My first thought is someone is very clumsily trying to attack us or break in. I figure Hubert will be the one to take care of it, since hes closest to the door. But it keeps going, and going, and going. Finally I hear room door downstairs open, and then the front door, then Amandine and Hubert talking rapidly in French. After a few minutes of this, I get out of bed and stumble downstairs to see what's up, followed shortly by Slobo, who said he was about ready to beat up an intruder.

There were Hubert and Fabian, who explained that they had lost their keys. I was the only one whose number they had, and my phone was off. They were the ones who had been banging on the the door until Amandine had let them in.

So they'd gotten into the house, but not their room. Hubert needed to get his laptop out of there for work, where he was supposed to be in a few hours.

While they pondered, I stumbled over to one of the bathrooms, since I was already up anyway. While I did my business and thought about looking up lock picking techniques, I heard three more loud bangs, but not on glass this time.

Here's what I found when I came out:

That's Amandine and Fabian. When Hubert stepped back out of the hole he'd kicked in his bedroom door (which apparently is made mostly of cardboard), I was the one to tell him the landlord was showing someone the place in twelve hours.

I'm not sure how the viewing went the next day. I wasn't there. I don't think any of us were.

But I do know that, to add even more insult to injury, we later tried both my room key and my old room key on Hubert's room on a whim. The second one fit the lock perfectly.

Quick note on photos

Hey folks, having some technical issues with the photos here. The service I used to use to seperate photos within albums for each blog entry no longer works. So in the meantime, you can see some of the photos from the trip so far here.

Also, there's a video for you. Check it out here.

A Reversal

Looking back over the last couple weeks, thinking of what to put here, I've realized something a little weird. The things I'm doing that are the most remarkable to normal people seem to me to be background. Meanwhile the stuff I find the weirdest to adapt to and deal with is what's background to most normal people.

In other words, stepping out of a 16 seat van with twenty people in it on a highway in Mozambique, and negotiating sandwiches from street vendors in Portuguese? That's normal for me. Sitting at my desk figuring out when I should write up a report or talk to my boss about the progress of my work? Almost completely alien.

What I've been doing here hasn't been exactly the photo worthy moments you might expect of me going out into a township and getting to know people and their problems. Mostly I've been at the back end in the office helping people who help people help the beneficiaries we're trying to serve.

For example, when I came in, I found out that the company was 95% temporary interns, all of whom were very smart and skilled, but none of whom had institutional memory beyond six months. Nobody in the office had any easy way of figuring out who was doing what, leading to a lot of duplicated work. Plus there was no working way for people to share files beyond emailing each other.

So I fixed that by activating a file sharing system and an app that now functions as a directory and project management tool. Setting it up took an hour or two. Most of my time since then has been showing it to each intern and signing them up so they could use it. Now even if the people leave, the work remains, and whoever comes next will have a much easier time figuring picking up what we leave behind.

Interesting to me. Probably boring to 98% of people reading this. But it does help the people in my office who are teaching business skills and getting nutrition to poor people. It's just not all that direct.

The direct stuff is coming.  I've just started working with a project that uses technology for education, and seeing if it will work in poor communities.  I'm not  100% certain that it is going to work.  But we can get it pointed in the right direction.

 But that will come after tomorrow. As of 25 minutes ago in this time zone, it's now my birthday. So I've got a few other things to do first.

Fresh Tofo Coconut

My girlfriend flew down to visit me in South Africa on the condition that we’d get to spend some time traveling together outside of Cape Town. Which is my excuse for going on vacation less than three weeks into work.

Tofo, Mozambique, was probably a quiet beach and fishing village twenty years ago. Actually it still is, except that it’s been dwarfed by a small army of guest houses, restaurants, and scuba shops, not to mention the numerous signs pointing to each scattered everywhere around the sandy roads. It’s not crowded by any means, but I can’t exactly call it a secret either.

It was my first time in the tropics for over a year, and there were two things I wanted that I hadn’t gotten in my first 24 hours: fresh mango, and fresh coconut. We’d spent the day and the previous evening exploring the shops etc near the beach and wandering and swimming at the beach itself. Highlights included meeting week-old kitten, body surfing waves, and miraculously running into a friend of mine from grad school on a dirt road outside of town.

After swimming in the Indian ocean, my girlfriend and I headed back to our towel and belongings to relax for a bit. She turned to me and said that at this point, she was afraid that if there were fresh coconuts to be had around here, someone would probably have been selling them there on the beach. All we’d seen were bracelets, paintings supposedly made by the seller, and one oddly insistent teenager who really wanted to sell us bags of bread rolls.

So, when we first spotted the guys coming over to us with the baskets of cheap bracelets, our first thought was ‘here we go again.’

My girlfriend suggested deterring them by making out. Unfortunately, while fun, that only served to delay them. Once we’d stopped and she was resting her head on my shoulder looking at the waves, one of the guys walked around from behind us, squatted down directly in front, set his basket of wares next to him, grinned, and offered a hand for a high five.

After we each gave him one, he asked us where we were from. After telling him, I asked him where he was from. Instead of giving us the quick answer and trying to hawk bracelets, he told us he was from Tofo, that his brother managed a nearby backpackers hostel and let him stay from free and launched into a description of his normal day. I asked him how many languages he spoke. He said English, Portuguese, Tsonga, and Afrikaans. Tsonga being the local language, I asked him how to say hello and thank you. He told us.

After a bit of this, he selected a bracelet and held it over my wrist. I told him I wasn’t interested, so he held it to my other wrist.

“Sorry, still not interested.”
“It’s very cheap.”
“No, thank you.”
“You know how much?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Why don’t you want one?”

This went on for about five minutes until out of nowhere the kid said. “fresh coconut?” That got my attention. I asked how much, and instead of telling me, he told us to wait and ran off. He came back with a coconut stripped of its outer green layer. I asked how much and he said cheap, pulling out a knife to chop it open. I tried to stop him saying if it was too much, I wouldn’t buy it. He asked how much I’d pay for it. I considered and said 30 meticals (about US$1). He made a noise like I’d hit him in the stomach. My girlfriend suggested 35 meticals, earning a look from him saying “you’re not helping.” Then he cut it open and set it on the ground in front of us.

The bargaining then swung from 35 meticals to 150 meticals, to him asking for our sunscreen, my shirt, my flipflops, and one of the towels we’d borrowed. We settled on 70 meticals, though he wasn’t happy about it. When he found out we only had 25 meticals in coins and a 500 metical bill (a bit less than US$17) he then raised the price again, and tried to tempt us by offering bracelets, the sunglasses of a friend who came over, and even the keys to his house. They only had 350 between them in change, but the friend said he could make change at his shop. He asked me to give him the money, saying he’d come back with it. I instead offered to go with him. He insisted on me giving him the money. I insisted more. More laughing and noises like being hit in the stomach.

So I put on a shirt, made sure my girlfriend was okay to be left there with the original salesman and a second friend who’d showed up with his own basket of bracelets. She said yes. So I put on a shirt and followed the guy back to the shops.

On the way he tried to sell me beer, rum, soda, and I don’t remember what else. People saw me coming and tried to sell me bread, cashews, soft drinks, alcohol, and fruit. None of them was about to break ranks and give me change without having me buy something.

I finally bought a bunch of bananas from a lady who claimed she could sell them for 20 meticals and get me change. Then she only had 400 meticals in change, saying I should take a papaya, too. Then she turned out to have 450 meticals in change and wanted me to buy oranges. She did not offer one of the coconuts I spotted that was identical to the one the guys were trying to sell me. Eventually she gave me another 12 meticals, and I decided paying a little over US$1 for a bunch of bananas was okay.

Meanwhile my girlfriend was fielding questions from the original seller.

“So, he is your brother?” he asked.
“No.”
“Your friend?”
“Sure, he’s my friend.”
“...but you kiss.”
“Yes.”
”You sleep together?
”Yes.”
“So he is your boyfriend, not your friend,”
“Yes.”
“You are going to marry him?”
“Maybe.”
“You are going to give him children?”
“We’ll see.”
“You can have one or two.” And with that pronouncement, he followed me and his friend off the beach.

After I left the fruit stand, the guys caught up with me and asked me to give them the money. I said we’d go back to my girlfriend and the coconut first. They kept asking, I kept walking. The friend called the original seller stupid in Portuguese and they all started laughing as we walked back. The seller asked for my shirt. I said no. He asked for a banana, and I gave him one.

When we got back, they asked again for 150 meticals. I said he’d offered 70 and I’d already given him a banana. He tried to take the money from my hand. I pulled it back, counted out 70, handed it to them, and handed the rest to my girlfriend, who immediately put it in her swimsuit top. They asked for more, I said, thank you, no, and started drinking from my coconut. I think that was the point at which they decided not to stick around to cut it in half for me, as originally offered, and they left.

Even if I had to scoop the meat out of the small opening with two fingers, it was great coconut. Satisfactory experience all around.

I wonder what getting that mango is going to be like.

Finding Housing

When I landed in Cape Town on a Friday, I had this idea that I’d have an apartment by the following Monday. That was a silly idea.

I started by asking other interns about where they thought I should look.The top three areas I heard from anyone were Observatory, Sea Point, and Gardens. I’d started out in a hostel in Observatory. It was close to our office, and it was a student neighborhood with a history of cafes and performing arts patronized by people of all races even during apartheid. That sounded like just the neighborhood for me.

So my second night there, I asked the hostel staff where I should go for the popular bars, restaurants, etc. They told me to go to Lower Main St.

I followed the directions they’d given me and found the street they were talking about. It was cordoned off with police tape. Someone had just been robbed and shot by a stranger who got away in a car.

I went back the next day during daylight hours at the Obz Cafe, across the street from the crime scene, and sat at the bar for lunch. I chatted up the bartender and asked him what had happened. After telling me, he also told me that a week previously, one of his friends had been shot and killed by complete strangers who wanted to rob him. He'd had a wife and three young children. When I left after paying the bill, I said again I was sorry for the loss of his friend. He shrugged and said, “that’s life.” I think that attitude got my attention more than the actual shooting did.

I decided to look at a safer neighborhood, one where I didn’t get ominous looks from hostel staff when I went outside after the 6pm sunset. Sea Point overlooks the Atlantic Ocean to the west, with beautiful sunsets. It’s very safe, with a street of restaurants and shops just a couple blocks up from the promenade, as well as access to the new MyCiti Bus system, a clean, cheap, and reliable bus service that could get me to work.

I thought I had found the place for me when I answered an ad for an apartment share on that main street with two young “artistic types.” But when I came to the address, the guy wasn’t home, saying his roommate would show me around.

She did. The apartment’s shabby looking halls had five foot posters of naked women in various fantasy-inspired backgrounds. I’m not sure how I’d describe the color of the water in the kitchen sink, but you couldn’t see to the bottom. There was a nice balcony, but the door to it was broken, detached, and leaning sideways against the open doorway.

I talked later to someone in local real estate and for reasons I didn’t entirely understand based on “rental stock,” this was pretty standard condition of Sea Point apartments. I did keep looking, but didn’t have much luck. So I expanded my search to Gardens and downtown.

All in all, it was more than two weeks until I finally found a room with internet and a full-size bed that would rent to me for the remaining month and a half.  It's in a bright orange house in the historic Bo Kaap neighborhood (pictured above), just up the hill from the restaurants and bars of Long and Kloof streets, shared with a German couple, a french intern, and two other roommates I haven't yet met. My bed feels like a sheet wrapped around a box of coat hangers, and I'm still waiting on promised repairs to a window that's permanently cracked open, but it's home.

I spent a couple nights at a nearby hostel while I worked out the cheapest way to get money from my American bank accounts in US dollars into South African rand for my German landlord. While I was there, I sat at the obligatory bar and talked about the work we're doing in the townships, and housing came up.

Most homes in the poorer areas are made by the residents. If someone puts up a shack, usually of corrugated metal, it's flimsy, gets hot in the summer and keeps no heat in the winter. But the real problem is that if a neighbor wants to build a house, they realize they can save money and materials by using the outside of the wall of an existing house as the inside of a wall on their first house. So all the houses are joined together by shared walls, which is fine, until one of them catches fire. Especially if the one thing between firefighters and another burning house is another unbroken line of houses.

So maybe my bed is a little uncomfortable, but when you think about other people not that far away living in these shacks for most of their life, finding my room two weeks isn't much to complain about.

That said, there's something we can do about housing for the people who need it. Among other projects, Heart Capital has started getting into housing. Maybe not a typical house in Bo Kaap, that would take more time and money than most people in townships can afford. But we've met an entrepreneur who's developed a low-cost, easy to build structure using recyclable plastic bags filled with sand, a strong plastic mesh, concrete, and plaster. It's fireproof, well insulated, very sturdy, and can be built in a few days for roughly US$1,000. Originally dubbed e-khaya by developer Dr. Johnny Anderton, we're likely to start rolling them out as a new business called Heartland Homes.

Reaction so far from residents who have seen the structures has been positive. There's even talk of using some to house Heart Capital interns like me in the future. So even if things aren't exactly equal yet, we can hope for good housing for people out here who actually need it.

First Week of Work

I’d been told to be ready on Wednesday at 6:30am to be picked up. This being Africa, I was picked up around 6:50. The sun wouldn’t rise for another half hour, and no matter how many layers each of us was wearing, we all felt under-dressed for the morning chill.

“That white stuff on the grass is pretty, eh?” my boss said as we drove by, about forty minutes later. I looked where he was pointing.

“You mean the frost?” I asked.

“Is that what that is?” he asked.

Winter in southern Africa is cold enough for people here to be uncomfortable and remark on it frequently, but not enough to actually teach people any systematic way to deal with the cold, for example, closing doors and windows. As a result, while it’s hardly gone below 55 during the day, whatever temperature it is outdoors will be pretty close to the temperature indoors as well.

We were headed to Kayamandi, one of the region’s “townships,” areas that during Apartheid were reserved for non-whites. While the legal segregation has ended, the poverty of those put there in those years endures and have left them functionally segregated. Most of the townships consist of illegally-built tin shacks that, because of their lack of legal status, have no official channels to clean water, sewage lines, or electricity, and if they have any of these things have only gotten them through precarious home rigging of power lines and pipes.

One of the many problems of life in a township is that the only access to fresh nutritious food is through distant supermarkets with escalating prices. Since most of these areas on the peripheries of cities aren’t ideal farming land, normal cultivation isn’t an option. So one of the social enterprises that Heart Capital has invested in and taken on a large share of running is FoodPods. FoodPods is a system by which township residents are given the training , space and materials to grow fresh produce in crates of soil.

What I got whisked off to help with last Friday and was headed out to do on Wednesday was assist with the second FoodPods site, which would have been done weeks ago had everything gone smoothly. Never count on anything going smoothly when you’re trying to fight poverty.

One of the many challenges has been putting up shade-netting food tents (pictured above). These help protect young plants and allow for growing in a wider range of conditions. Apparently putting these tents up had stumped and frustrated all attempts for a good long while. The weekend before, someone brave and intelligent had finally come in and spent hours just getting the pieces of poles sorted and arranged to be the correct length, checking each 4m x 9m tent, and putting in the poles. They had then been rolled up, and when I got there they were handed to me.

Now, Heart Capital’s mission is not to bring interns in from all over the world to do construction work. They hire community members as day laborers to do the real work. We’re brought in mostly to figure out the tricky bits, like putting up these tents.

Just as I was being handed the job of trying to put the tents up solo, someone came up and said a twenty-two year old from the township had shown up looking for work. My boss looked over and said to send him to me.

I’ve worked with teammates and colleagues before. I’ve had classes of students. I’ve interviewed and trained new hires. But when he walked over and my boss left the job to us, I realized for the first time in my life that I had a subordinate. And that he was looking to me to know what his job was.

So I tried to get to know him a bit better, without much success. I got his name, but more complicated questions in English were beyond his limited vocabulary. I couldn’t even get across the idea that I wanted to learn some words in Xhosa, to show that as far as languages were concerned, we were on an even footing.

But I could get across the basic idea of what I wanted and soon we were measuring and marking out the site for each of the tents. Part way through he pulled out his phone and cobbled together something like a sentence to ask what social networks I used.

I walked over and said Facebook. He shook his head and launched Whatsapp on his phone. The same network that pretty much every student in my program who isn’t from the US uses.

I think a large part of my mission here is going to be figuring out communications, especially with the people we serve. Language is going to be a barrier, but after that, we’re going to have a lot more in common than I think some people expect.

Back Out There

Hello again! I'm sitting in Cape Town, South Africa, and by popular demand, I'm back and writing on JTrek about the experience. I've come down to work an internship helping disadvantaged communities in townships. I'm working with impact investing firm Heart Capital. My first day was originally going to be Monday, but when I arrived Friday afternoon after about twenty hours of travel, I was picked up and whisked off to a work site to get started. Then a shower, then a goodbye party for three departing interns. Then my first night of sleep in a bed for a couple days.

I'll be here for two months. I'm currently exploring and reaching out to contacts in town. I'll update this blog with my usual stuff: photos, stories and more (that's fit to print) from my adventures. Stay tuned!

Last Day in Addis

My last day of classes was Friday. So I made sure we had some fun. I got the kids on their feet with games, improv, and then writing and performing skits.

When I first sat them down in randomly assigned pairs to write a script, I asked them to make four things clear from the beginning: the location, the characters, the relationship between their characters, and some problem for the characters to solve.

So I spent my last half hour with these kids watching them play grandparents, pickpockets, waitresses with crazy customers, professors, and of course students. All using English skills I certainly didn't hear from them on the first day of class.

It had only been two weeks, but at the end of it, when I was saying my goodbyes as the class filed out, the question I kept getting over and over was when was I going to come back and visit. I wish travel were that simple.

Traveling the way I and many other people like me do, you pick up and adapt to being places very very easily. And it becomes a way of starting a life, or many mini-lives, in a way. You find your place in a community where people look up to you, where you find the people you look up to, the dozen friends who will come to your birthday party, you favorite places to go and spend time, eat, listen to music, watch the game (whatever the local game is). And if you've done it in enough places, you can do it almost anywhere there are people.

The catch is that you stop noticing things sometimes. It's not until someone in culture shock next to you exclaims that there are farm animals in the road that you realize how normal it is to you to see donkeys, cows, sheep, goats, and horses wander around the collection of rocks you've already started to think of as the sidewalk, or the lane-less, traffic signal-less, divided strips of chaos and concrete you think of as streets, winding through half-cement skeletons of houses constructed by bareheaded men standing on scaffolds of tied-together poles of eucalyptus. If you're not careful, the women in white shrouds going to church for saints day become just strangers, background noise, to whatever life you've constructed.

It's when that life abruptly ends at an airport that changes things. When the kid wants to know when they'll see you again and you have to admit that you don't know. Even if you don't finish the out loud sentence: I don't know if you will at all. It may very well happen. But Ethiopia is not close to where my family lives or where I pay rent, and flights are long and expensive. And I'm only just now getting used to the idea that my time on the planet is limited and I won't be able to do everything.

On Friday, when they were writing their scripts, one of the kids raised their hand to ask me a question. I came over and they said they understood that the scene needed a problem. But did they have to find a solution to the problem, or was it okay to leave it unsolved? I told them they didn't have to find a solution. Their time was limited. And in any case, some problems don't have one.

If all goes to plan, I'll be picked up for my flight in a little over two hours. Whether it really feels like it or not, it's time to go home.

...and by home I mean crashing in New York for a few days, performing in a theater festival in San Francisco, visiting friends in Portland, home to Seattle for a week or so, out to see family in Eastern Washington, down to explore Santa Barbara with my girlfriend, and then flying back to New York again a week or so before grad school orientation. Which for me, taken together, is about as much home as I can ask for.

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Check out this entry's Photos.

A Small Gift

Today, July 9, happens to be my birthday. I had a great party this evening with a fantastic home cooked Ethiopian dinner and then about a dozen of us going out for traditional music, dancing, and drinks. I have pictures from all of that that I will post with this. But this post will be about another story that happened to occur on this day.

Because our class is made up of 13-to-16-year-olds, a little under half of whom are girls, we three male teachers realized a couple days ago that our women's bathrooms weren't properly equipped with everything our female students needed. So one of our friends who's been helping out with administrative tasks did some shopping for us and bought a costco-size pack of small packs of sanitary pads. Jeff made an announcement today that we had put them in the womens' room before lunch. As lunch ended, we noticed several of the girls hadn't returned to class on time, and speculated that it had something to do with inspecting the wares. 

A little later, I noticed a small wrapped gift in Yosef's cubby (each student has one in the main classroom) with writing on the wrapping saying it was from one of the girls, Hayamanot. I thought that that was really cute. I hadn't noticed before, but the two did sit next to each other in the next class discussion. Yosef's a good looking kid. I thought we might have our first couple on our hands.

At least until it occurred to me that the gift was about the same size and shape as one of the packs of sanitary pads. Then I started thinking it was sort of a mean joke (though not the first and nowhere near the meanest I'd heard about here-- ask me or Jeff sometime about the "bleach is not juice" story). I was amused but felt a bit bad for Yosef. A little later I noticed his bag was in the cubby and the gift gone, and nobody seemed too angry about anything, so I figured no major harm was done.

Until after classes ended, and one of the girls, Beti I think, asked me to come back into the room. She said they had something for me. A group of students, mostly girls, appeared with the same wrapped gift, and most of them were trying unsuccessfully to stifle giggles. The "present" hadn't been for Yosef. It was for me.

I could piece things together so I was feeling and looking pretty skeptical.  But I removed the wrapping made of paper and toilet paper twisted into ribbon, and found a box originally use for batteries. Still big enough to hold the sanitary napkins. I clearly was expecting a joke present, so when I opened the box and found little bits of toilet paper, I was a bit surprised. So I used the paper wrapping to fish around until I pulled out the gift.

It wasn't a joke sanitary napkin. It was a pair of small chocolates. The kids had actually wanted to give me something for my birthday. Remember, these are the scholarship kids. Most of them are quite poor, and more than one of them are orphans. I felt sheepish for having opened that sort of gift with obvious skepticism. But they didn't mind, and were clearly pleased to have given me something. It wasn't just Hayamanot. Three other girls had written their names on the wrapping and they mentioned a boy or two who they said the gift was also from. I thanked them as they left for the day, all of them still smiling and giggling.

I think that says more about Ethiopian hospitality than anything else I could write about tonight.

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Check out this entry's Photos.

Internet Access Is Important for Development

I've come here and secured this internship to learn a few things about sustainable development. Sustainable development roughly translates to "how to make the lives of people in poor countries significantly better today without making them worse later on." I'm a booster of the internet and its ability to accomplish these goals.

People can be skeptical about this for two reasons: one, many people mostly associate the internet with World of Warcraft and funny videos about cats, and don't see how either are likely to help poor people. Which would be entirely fair, if that were all the internet contained. We'll get to that later. What I want to talk about is the second, more salient reason: for most people, the internet isn't always all that reliable.

It's true. But the thing is, in a place like Ethiopia, almost no infrastructure is any more reliable than the internet back home. Roads flood, electricity cuts out, running water loses pressure or vanishes entirely. In some ways, the average Ethiopian is better mentally prepared for the instability of technology than the average American iPhone user whining about how his device takes longer than 15 seconds to load Facebook. Sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't.

Take this current weekend for example. Yesterday, Saturday, we we explored a museum and monument to those who had lost their lives under the oppressive Derg regime, kinda sorta crashed a wedding at the orphanage where Dawit grew up and now teaches, bowled, played pool, saw a movie, and went out to bar with a couple graduation parties. Big day, lots of fun, lots done.

Today on the other hand, was entirely different. After dealing with one morning power outage and almost no water pressure (toilets couldn't flush for example) we set out for a more modest goal: make copies of three documents in time for class tomorrow. After more than five hours trying all over town, we gave up and came home to cook some dinner. As soon as we started chopping the carrots and eggplant, the power went out again (and with it, the use of the electric stove). Unreliability is not new and had quite an effect on our days.

Another example: Jeff's vacation. Just as I arrived in town, Jeff's 14 day vacation period ended. In the beginning, he had planned on renting a car with a couple friends, and traveling. Even with the local, Amharic-speaking friends helping out, it took them ten of the fourteen days to find and rent a car.

The critical piece missing here that causes a ton of these issues and delays is information. We don't know who has a car available, what price they want, and what minimum time they expect. We don't know what copy shops are open where, where, and whether their machines happen to be working today. Come to that we don't know the hours any business keeps, when someone will be out of town, what transit routes are where, and what roads are jammed, under construction, or clear.

All of these problems of information can be solved by widespread internet access, especially at home and on mobile devices. The internet is the place where anyone can put all of this information from anywhere, and where anyone who needs the information can access it from anywhere. Maybe it won't be reliable at first, but having it work even sometimes will save time, money, and stress.

But more than that, it can be a way for individuals to get access to some kinds of support they might have a hard time finding elsewhere. I saw one particularly important example today at an internet cafe we tried in a last-ditch effort for a working copy machine. This is not a gay friendly society, so I was somewhat intrigued when I saw a young man watching a video of what looked like a white, gay couple, talking to the camera. It was a video from the It Gets Better project. I can't obviously draw any conclusions from this. But at the very least, it's touching to theorize that someone can create a video in New York and make someone on the other side of the world feel better about who they are.

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Check out this entry's Photos.

First Week of Lessons

It's been a while since the last time I taught a classroom in a developing country. This time it's been Monday to Friday, 9am-3pm, and I'm one of two TAs helping Jeff, a teacher with over two decades of experience. In fact I was one of his students, first in 8th grade, then again in 10th grade. Jeff was the humanities/geography teacher who, when I returned to Seattle from my big trip around the world, rolled out the blank world map and told me to show him where I'd been.

First lesson I've learned standing on the other end of the classroom? Get your students' names memorized ASAP. Everything becomes easier after that. As a tutor, I tend to engage students individually if I can, and my being able to tell, for example, goofball Adugna from quiet, precise Natnael instantly is absolutely necessary. In fact, after about two days, I couldn't see how anyone could possibly mix them up.

As a classroom experience, it was pretty intimidating for the first day, but then, once I engaged a proper lesson plan and saw it really work in the room, it all felt much smoother. I'm not that good a classroom teacher yet, but I'm feeling pretty confident, especially after getting to know each of the kids' personalities and quirks. We've worked with them on reading comprehension and analysis, word roots and vocab, typing, grammar, speech, and a book out of a curriculum called Global Issues and Sustainable Solutions (which contains more or less what it says on the tin).

It's been great getting them to stand up and practice English by either reading Shel Silverstein poems (and seeing who knows enough English to laugh at which parts) and to get them doing improv games. "Gumbies" was a big hit today-- you put people in pairs, one person can talk but can only move when their partner (who can't talk) physically moves them. There're at least two more theater teachers inbound to the school, so this is only the beginning for these kids.

But one of the funniest moments from school this week is something that wasn't in the classroom. It was in the cafeteria. I'm going to finish this post with a JTrek first: a video. Before you watch, there are a couple things you need to be familiar with:

1. Ethiopian food is traditionally eaten with your right hand. You use flat injeera bread to scoop up the food and stick it all in your mouth.

2. A traditional way of expressing affection and intimacy for someone, usually a family member, is to feed them by hand. It's called gursha.

So, this is what happened when my fellow TA, Dawit, talked one of our students, Hayamanot, into trying this out at lunch:

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Check out this entry's Photos.

Farenji Returns to Habesha Land

This place has changed.

It's fascinating coming back to a country you haven't been to in a long time. You start remembering things you had forgotten. Buildings, smells, words, and views all start looking familiar again. It really is striking how much I'd forgotten in only three years.

Even more striking though, is what's new. Last time I was in Ethiopia, I stayed with a family whose only running water came out of a shared spigot in a shared makeshift compound, fenced in with corrugated metal. The bare cement walls formed only a room or two for the multiple people living there, and to bathe you needed to go catch a minibus to a public shower. Most of what I saw in Addis was like this.

But now there are five, six, or seven story buildings springing up like weeds. There's even a proper skyscraper or two built for the African Union headquarters. A foreign development company is building a municipal railway that should be completed in two years time. And that same family I stayed with is probably now in one of the public housing apartment units, about ten stories high. I won't know for sure because my host's couchsurfing profile has been removed, but it seems likely.

A great deal of this development has come from Chinese companies who import their workers, and a good amount of resentment is brewing. Partially it's because of the fact that all the jobs created are going to imported Chinese laborers instead of Ethiopians, and partially because the stuff they build... well, most of it isn't very good. It'll look great on day one, but roads for example keep falling apart or don't have enough drainage to prevent serious flooding in the rains. Generally speaking if something is falling apart or doesn't work around here, people who live here shrug and say derisively that it's probably Chinese.

I'm living next door to my 8th and 10th grade humanities teacher, Jeff, in an apartment on the campus of Hope University College. ILAE, the high school I'm interning with, shares space on campus for its offices and classrooms. It's not large, but the architecture is interesting. The school is brand new, the first class of freshman start this fall, so all of the rooms are pretty spartan. I've got a few donated world maps on their way which will help, and with any luck there will be some art classes to produce stuff as well.

It's not easy being a country with no major ports. Apparently only Djibouti has a port that does the country any good, and they capitalize on the monopoly-- things take forever to ship and don't come cheap. For example, unplanned power outages are big problem here. The college supposedly has had a generator ordered and on its way for months. Nobody knows where it is in Djibouti. But it's probably there somewhere. All the other possible port countries are either unstable, have poor relations with Ethiopia, or just don't have good roads to the country.

The result is scarcity and high prices. It was explained to me that most people here are living at more or less a subsistence level, while a wealthy elite tries to pretend the live in the west. They'll rent fancy houses with barbed wire fences, eat at western restaurants and frequent western-style nightclubs and bars.  Speaking of those restaurants, places serving pizza are surprisingly common (from what I see, local menu consensus seems to hold that a Margherita pizza has tomato sauce, mozzarella and oregano).

A local taxi driver took Jeff and I hiking up the side of a large hill for a view of the city. When we hit the summit (or as our guide, Shemeles, said when "mountain is finished"), I asked to see the other side, facing away from the city. Shemeles didn't recommend it, saying there was nothing to see. I insisted, and we walked  the twenty or so yards to the other side. We saw a wide expanse of farms and small villages. Shemeles told us that was the kind of place he had grown up.

"There? Darkness. No electricity, no education, no running water. Nothing. Only God." He said. Then he explained that people living out there in the "darkness" lived 80 or 90 years, while on the other side of the mountain, in the city, they might only reach their forties or fifties. As he put it, it was because out in the countryside, it was "clean."

As someone who is going to school this year to work in development, it's certainly food for thought. I'll expect a lot of this to evolve as my trip continues, and especially when I start teaching. Classes start tomorrow morning.

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Here's an interesting one: want a different view on Ethiopia and the work of ILAE? Check out Jeff's blog, Blairabouts. He's been here for two months now, and you can get an interesting perspective on life out here and the work of the school. Check it out!
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Check out this entry's Photos.

Almost out the door.

I always feel like I'm forgetting something when I leave. Closest thing I have to travel anxiety.

Bag on the right is my usual back pack. The bag on the left is 40lbs of goodies for the school and kids that I'm working with. Most of it is books, but also there are some school supplies, a soccer and air pump, and a few other assorted things they requested like cleaning rags.

I bus to DC this afternoon, then fly directly to Addis Ababa the next morning.

Time to get out of here.

Hitting the Road Again!

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been far, far too long. I'm getting out of this country. Out of this continent in fact. It's only going to be about three weeks this time, but I will be leaving June 25 to go to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for an internship with the International Leadership Academy of Ethiopia. And as always, you'll be able to read all about my travels, right here.

My 8th grade Humanities/Geography teacher is going to be my boss. If you know him, you know that's awesome.

With any luck this will help fulfill an internship requirement with the Masters degree program I'm starting at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs this fall. And I'm going to do it by teaching kids and maybe helping out a little bit with the administration.

And this time, you can get involved in the trip. You see the school needs a few things, so I'm taking donations for the following:

1. School supplies (e.g. pens, pencils, erasers, tape, paper)
2. Sports equipment (e.g. soccer balls, volleyballs)
3. Up-to-date wall maps (National Geographic style)
4. Cleaning rags
5. DVD copy of The Outsiders (We only want one of these!)

I will have an empty suitcase at a reading of ART I'm performing in next Thursday, the 20th (read more about that here). If you can't make that, get in touch with me (jtrekmail (at) gmail (dot) com) and I can arrange another time to meet you for these things.

More details as things progress. It's going to feel very, very good to be back on the road.

Travel Tip: Ignore the Hipsters, Get a Guidebook

It's been a while! I've been talking to some people recently who are going out and traveling the world, and I'm really pleased to see people doing that. However, one of them said something to me that made me realize  many of them are making a basic mistake because they think they're "in the know": They don't want to get guidebooks.

Now I understand the impulse, we all want authentic, unique experiences, and how could we possibly get that from any mass-market paperback carried by so many people. But not getting a guidebook is still a mistake.

I've already talked about what's wrong with setting your main goal to be  *trying no to be tourist*. This is closely related to that in terms of philosophy. Just because the tourists are doing it doesn't mean you shouldn't. Here's why:

Guidebooks will tell you more practical information, more conveniently, efficiently, and quickly than anything else you can find on the internet or pack in your backpack. True, there are other sources of information (local friends are the ideal) but a guidebook is better than nothing. At many points in your trip, if you don't pack a guidebook, nothing is exactly what you're going to have.

It's true, not all of the books' contents are gold. Restaurant and hostel/hotel information is often out of date, and will probably be decidedly on the beaten path by the time you read it. But those aren't the useful part of the guidebooks.

The useful part of the guidebook that you want immediately include the name and location of all transport hubs, local laws you wouldn't otherwise know about, local customs to know that help you be a respectful visitor, a brief (and usually hilariously written) history of the place you're going, a rough idea of how to ask for basic things in the local language, and here's the surprising one: the most common local scams travelers fall for, and how to avoid them.

It's that last one that all of your "cool" friends without guidebooks are going to wish they knew about. The rest, you *could* find with a lot of time, effort, and a stable internet connection. But a book is cheap, portable, easy to access, doesn't rely on electricity, and can tell you all of the information in a fraction of the time you'd spend otherwise. Time you can then spend actually enjoying your travels.

If the idea of getting a guidebook still sticks in you craw, just think of it this way: you have to know the rules before you break them.

Have fun!

Carpooling.com Comes to Help Share Rides in the US!

When I was sitting in Berlin, Germany, trying to figure out how to get to Munich in time to meet my buddy for Oktoberfest, I figured a few things out online.

One: because of the timing, a bus ride was going to cost at least US$200.

Two: again, because of the timing, a train would cost nearly double that.

Three: There's this funny little site I can put through Google translate and get a ride in someone's car for 25 euro.

Granted, the ride (pictured above) was barely up to getting us there, and in fact had to be push-started onto the German autobahn (....yes). But it got us there, cheap for the season.

The site was mitfahrgelegenheit.de, and it has since spawned several sister sites in more than half a dozen languages across Europe (including the queen's English over at carpooling.co.uk). It was one of the first sites I put in my "useful travel links" section at the bottom (which you should check out if you haven't already). But it remained restricted to Europe.

But not for long.

The company is coming to establish itself in America under Carpooling.com. And while it's partially aimed at simply easing commutes and carbon emissions, I think it has the potential to revolutionize budget travel in the United States.

You see, budget travel in the US is a problem. Major bus lines either make far too many stops to be practical or are restricted to the eastern seaboard (not to mention the seriously sketchy reputation of a certain canine-named carrier). The trains are comfy but expensive and run at laughable speeds and frequencies compared to their counterparts in Europe, developed Asia, Australia, India... pretty much anywhere else with trains. Plane rides are long and expensive, we don't have EasyJet, Ryan Air, Air Asia, or Tiger Airways out here. Even tickets on our discount airlines like Southwest and Jetblue can cost ten times as much as the airlines listed above. And unlike the rest of the world (Europe aside) there's no reward to booking at the last minute on any transportation method. It just gets more and more expensive, requiring passengers to book their tickets more than a month in advance.

Besides-- gas prices be damned-- the real way, culturally, to travel across America, is by car. There is nothing in the world quite like a good, old-fashioned American road trip.

Voila: Carpooling.com. Pay a driver who's going your way a negotiated amount, meet, ride. And this could be as easy as inviting or RSVPing to a party on Facebook. It's the 21st century answer to hitchhiking.

I'm going to be very excited to watch how this site develops and launches here in the USA.

CouchSurfing Show Coming to TV?

I need to check my couchsurfing messages more often. This was sent to me about a week ago and I only just saw it now:

Hey Joel-

How's it going? My name is ------- and I came across your profile as an experienced New York host while searching around for something specific (which I'll get to in a minute). I'm a New Yorker, born and raised, and have lived in New York (state and/or city) for most of my life. About a year and a half ago I was living in Barcelona for 6 months and came across this phenomenon called 'CouchSurfing'. I signed up, and hosted a couple different people in my time there, as well as met a handful of others.

Anyhow, why am I reaching out to you? I pitched the idea of CouchSurfing as a TV show to a production company in LA, and they love the concept. We signed a contract and are now moving forward with the project. So, our first order of business is casting. We need to find a few hosts that will be the 'stars' of our show. The vision is to have a few different people (or groups of people) welcome strangers from around the world into their homes. New week, new episode, new surfers. The hosts, and their homes, remain the constant for the audience to develop a relationship with. You get the point, I'm sure.

As you're a frequent participant in the CouchSurfing community, I thought that maybe you would be interested in applying, or maybe you know someone you think would be an ideal candidate (ie. 'character'). In any event, if there is any way you can help, I'd greatly appreciate it. You can email me at ----------- if you are interested or would like to discuss further.

Needless to say, I shot off a quick "yes, please!" But even if I don't get to be part of this project, I will certainly be keeping track of it.

EDIT (6/5/12): Just got word back, he wants me to send in a 3 minute video audition. He says "DO NOT be shy.  Show your personality.  We want to get to know you." Time to start planning some shots!

Wherever the Wind May

Somehow or other I've got myself a stretch of a few months, starting around June, when I'll have no responsibilities in New York City except to keep my rent paid. Last year I was in a relationship and a couple shows. I don't have those things right now. I could probably get them, but I'm starting to seriously consider other options.

So, what will I do? A few things have sprung to mind:

1) Latin America, I met a few people working in NGOs to help distribute safe drinking water to communities in Central America especially. I'd need to do some research on current safety conditions, but I like the idea of a summer helping poor communities improve their health and free up time they would have spent getting water to help themselves or their communities in other ways. Of the international options, this really has the advantage of cost and distance.

2) Mediation, For probably about the same amount as I'd spend on the trip above, I could enroll in a professional mediation training program.  Mediation seems like a good way to put my skills to use, and if someday I could use them in an international context... professional peacemaker? I kind of like the sound of that. That said, competition is fierce, and people know so little about mediation that I'd need to do some heavy, heavy marketing. Training could happen just about any major city in America. Speaking of which...

3) Epic American Road Trip, Even if I've been around the world, there's a huge swath of America I've never seen. I doubt I'd do this alone, because of the money for fuel, car, etc. It would probably be the most expensive of the options I've got here so far. Also the least resume building. But the most likely to really show me something new.

4) Hollywood Bound, So I've done the starving actor thing in NYC. I'm told there are ten times as many jobs and a hundred times the competition in LA. I've gotten paid to do my thing here onstage and into microphones. What if I spent a couple months seeing what can happen for me in front of a camera? I'd be swapping apartments, and probably figuring out a way into a car of some kind for the short term. No idea how that would work. But it's a possibility.

5) Capital Work, Internships and temp positions in DC? Weather may be absolute hell over the summer, but I've met a couple people who seem to doing things. If nothing else, it's a real resume credit to be used someday, and I can really get the lay of the land when it comes to the "industry."

That's just the first few that have occurred to me. More ideas coming, and I'll certainly be open to suggestions

I'm a... Wizpert?

I was just invited to join Wizpert.com as a paid expert in Travel. Thank you, Michael Weinberg!

It's an interesting concept. I give them my skype name. People find me on their site as a qualified expert on budget travel. They call me on skype for advice. I'm paid an expert's fee by the minute.

For JTrek readers, friends, and family, this does not mean I am now charging everyone for advice. Just if you find me on Wizpert and don't actually know me. If you're reading this, and you want travel advice, please feel free to contact me, and I will not charge you a dime. I like helping people with travel because it means more people go traveling.

That said, Wizpert looks like an interesting concept, and I'll be curious to see how it plays out.