eric in malawi

"lovin' it" - little brother

meet my friend eric, one of the founders of NewDayKids. NDK increases the quality of education for the orphaned and less privileged one project at a time. its a non-profit organization that offers fund raising services to orphanage schools.

he's been in malawi working, documenting, and living in the community for the past 2 months. check out his site to see what he's been up to with E&K Orphanage.

the following is an entry entitled "infected and affected":

Recently New Day Kids was able to assist in the production of a video to accompany the presentation of INFECTED and AFFECTED: Portraits of a Community Combating Stigma
By POZ Magazine and Joan L. Brown, Photographer

Many of the children that New Day Kids works with are witnesses to the different types of negative stigma surrounding the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Stigma can be as deadly as the virus itself. It is the biggest obstacle to education and awareness.

INFECTED and AFFECTED will be shown at:
International AIDS Society Conference – Cape Town, South Africa
CDC’s 2009 National HIV Prevention Conference – Atlanta, USA
2010 International AIDS Conference – Vienna, Italy
www.infectedandaffected.com
www.poz.com

Matt the Travelin'/Dancin' Fool

Meet Matt.  The guy from Connecticut that managed to get Stride gum to sponsor his international bad dancing.  In 2003 he used his savings to wander around Asia. His friend started taking clips of him doing his signature dance move.  A few years later, that clip gets spread across the internet like wildfire and now the guy is internet-famous. In 2006, he goes on a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents. In 2008, he took yet another gum-sponsored trip but included all the people that had been writing to him.  He sparks major passport-envy in me.  

Locations pop up at the bottom of the screen and the first time I watched the video I either said "Oh wow! He went to _____!" or "Where the hell is that?" Ok, so he's dancing in Mumbai, Bhutan, Zanzibar, Ireland, and Iceland and all of a sudden the music starts picking up momentum and then there's a collage of clips where people start rushing toward him to join in the bad dancing. And this is where my eyes start welling up with tears. Its overwhelming.  @1.00 exactly into the video it stops being about Matt dancing and more about the people that decided to join him.  They're all ecstatic and lively and cutting a freakin' rug, man.  The locations continue to change and somewhere in the background Matt is there, but now its a wonderful blur of culture and laughter. 

So of course at the end of it, I go to his site, wherethehellismatt.com. He did a lecture at Champlain College.  Here's my Cliffnotes for the 3 part series: 1 of 3 - Rwanda, 2 of 3 - Antarctica, 3 of 3 - Tips Traveling Abroad.  The entire lecture was interesting.  He has a great sense of humor, comes off as a humble Joe and is pretty Johnny-on-it with the pictures.  In Part 1 of 3 he talks about his experience in Rwanda.  

Here's an excerpt of what he said:

“As it happened, I landed in Rwanda during Hope Week, which is the 12th anniversary of the genocide that happened in 1994. So they have a lot of things going on there. I ended up going to a commemoration ceremony at the site of the mass graves, where they have something like 50,000 bodies were dumped into these ditches and covered up with concrete. It’s a very recent tragedy that happened in their history, so it’s within the lifetimes of most people there, not these kids fortunately, but most people in Rwanda have the emotional scars from that experience and especially during that week. I can’t compare it to any other time since it was the only time I was there, but it just kinda hangs over everything. One of the reasons it was really important to me to go there was I know that all the images that I’d seen out of Rwanda were of this horror and this tragedy. One of the things that happens is it separates us from those people. We think that their lives are constant misery and that this suffering defines them and you don’t ever see any kind of positive, joyful images coming out of places like that. But I’ve been to Africa before and I knew that that was not the reality.”

The world is more than just a buffet of tourist attractions and there is much more to a place than what you see in the news (or read on wikipedia, thank you.) I hope that my future travels continue to chip away at my own assumptions, boost my empathy, and make me incrementally more globally aware. 

(Sigh) 

So Matt's got his sweet dance moves... what's my shtick? TBD  ;)

Summer of Social Good

"You're in my Top 8!"

"Are you on Facebook?"

"Didn't you get my txt message?"

Twitter = mass txt messaging that can be searched

I'd rather randomly see someone from elementary school on the street than have them "find" me. I don't have text messaging on my phone and I enjoy how appalled people are that I don't. I tell them to just call me. How novel.

Call me jaded. Call me cynical. Tell me I take it all way too seriously. Whatever.

What's more interesting than my shattitude as a non-user, is the potential of the millions of people that do use these social networks. Take Mashable's Summer of Social Good, for instance. Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter benefiting the likes of The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund, and Livestrong. The power of sharing meets the power of giving.

$3571 raised so far

63 days

1535 hours

92142 minutes

5528521 seconds till the end of summer

RT that!

"i forgot how much i like pickles!"

postscript: Steven Johnson wrote an amazing article in Time about Twitter. Read it. Almost made me want to create an account. Almost. :)

Spirit of Adventure

I went to see Up the other night in 3D.  The first 5-10 minutes are done without any dialogue.  Carl meets Ellie as little adventurers and they show the progression of their love together.  This isn't The Notebook where you're sobbing hysterically at the end of the movie.  Those first 10 minutes destroyed any hopes of mascara staying on my face and the emotional smorgasbord continues throughout.  My favorite Pixar movie to date. 

Director Pete Docter intended for audiences to take a specific point from the film, saying:

Basically, the message of the film is that the real adventure of life is the relationship we have with other people, and it's so easy to lose sight of the things we have and the people that are around us until they're gone. More often than not I don't really realize how lucky I was to have known someone until they're either moved or passed away. So if you can kind of wake up a little bit and go, "Wow, I've got some really cool stuff around me every day", then that's what the movie's about.

What a nice swift kick in the ass to remember that there are no real happy ever afters in life because there are no real finish lines. My life is one gigantic adventure. I have no idea what's going to happen or where it'll take me and that is so damn exciting. 

brand exposure: globalgiving

interested in how i'm finding the organizations i'm writing about?  sure you are.

who: globalgiving

where on the internet:  globalgiving.com 

when:  thursday at work

how:  i told my coworker about plum-valley and he said i should definitely check out mashable. turns out that they are hosting a Summer of Social Good. which, in and of itself, is so awesome it will get its own entry later :)  one of the partners for the event was globalgiving.  i'd never heard of them before and their involvement in this event gave me enough motivation to click the link.

so what:  this turned out to be one of those serendipitous things in life. one of the first things i do when i go to a site like this is visit their about me link. before i get caught up in your website's bells and whistles (or lack there of), i want to know what your mission is and who's on your team. 

1. the bells and whistles are there and they are fantastic. clean layout. navigation is a breeze. the tone of the site doesn't have that sally struthers gut-wrenching effect either. very up-beat and dare i say, cute. 

2. Vision:  Unleash the potential of people around the world to make positive change happen.

    Mission:  Build an efficient, open, thriving marketplace that connects people who have community and world-changing ideas with people who can support them.

3. professor harrison's strategic planning course made me care a lot about who a company entrusts to accomplish their mission. check out their bios and list of partners. it reads like the Dream Team that went to Barcelona in 1992. seriously. 

watch the one minute video to see how globalgiving works.

honolulu habitat for humanity

habitat for humanity is one of those top of mind organizations. and even though i've yet to work with them, the degrees of separation between myself and habitat are very few.  nicola, my good friend from college went to zambia and costa rica with habitat and one of my best friends, chandra, has worked with them through her church. 

my birthday is fast approaching and i thought i'd organize an adopt-a-day with honolulu's habitat chapter.  volunteering nirvana would be something like having a date in mind, committing to being there, intrinsic value in exchange for your help. win-win in my book. this was not my experience today.  on their website, honoluluhabitat.org gives the break out of the "cost" to volunteer.  $25 per person, $500-1K per team (with varying perks) or build-a-thon for $5K.  when i started working on dates with them, i was sent forms that were not the same listed on the website. the updated forms require $75 per person or $1K-2K per team.  the 300% increase raised my eyebrows.  there is apparently a monetary threshold at which my brain/instincts say, "that's reasonable" or "really?!" and when i did ask why there was such a dramatic increase, the answer was "since inception no one ever thought to increase the cost. and since this is a huge source of revenue for us, it makes sense." 

i fully appreciate the fact that while organizations like habitat are for not-for-profit, they still need to generate funds somehow to function (and thrive).  i'm not bucking at the idea of making donations. what disheartened me was that by upping the ante to $75, its not very feasible for the average person.  15 of my friends were willing to donate $25, give up a saturday from 8am - 4pm, and were excited to hammer/saw/spackle a house in waimanalo. forking over another $50 on top of that would be me asking them to sacrifice something else out of their recession-thrashed budgets. 

habitat is working incredibly hard to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world. that is not up for debate here. what i do want to challenge is the knee-jerk tendency to default to larger organizations.  in this instance, $75 would likely go toward supplies and overhead costs. OR i could volunteer somewhere for (gasp) free and give my $75 directly towards a propane stove for AIDS orphans in India.

either choice moves me toward my goal of making positive change in the world. another win-win. gotta love that. i plan to work with habitat in the future, but for now, for this birthday anyway, there are many other cause-worthy fish in the proverbial sea. 

the idea

i work full time.

i'm getting my MBA.

i have a life.  ;) 

i have a mortgage.

i have car payments.

money and time. not something i have a lot of. 

i want to do service projects domestically and internationally.

there are incredible organizations out there that deserve exposure and need my/your/our help.

this is my effort to not be a sayer or even a check-writer.

i want to prove (to myself and others) that even without money and time to burn, IT CAN BE DONE.

i'll do the research, the fundraising, the planning, the trip.

candid, raw, and as sans bullshit as possible.

i'll show you how i did it, in the hopes that you will do the same.

all you need to do is stay tuned :)