Coolest in the World: Evolutionary Fondness

Multiple Choice Question:  Which phrase best describes Jean Frederic Fahiri "Fred" Somda?


a) six month trainee in demanufacturing at Good Point Recycling in Vermont?

b) former attorney general of Burkina Faso?

c) a man whose parents were both dead by the time he was 5, whose brother and sister went to work in the field so that he could attend school as the best hope of the family?

d) a man persecuted by the government in Africa for refusing to prosecute a political rival of the president?

e) a lawyer who has studied the Basel Convention (mostly in French) and written a paper prioritizing prosecution according to risk vs. benefit?  (hint:  drums of toxic waste dumped on Ivory Coast is high.  A capacitor replaced by a monitor repairman is low).

f) a man who lived with Mexican women trainees, a Puerto Rican school teacher, a Senegalese businessman, and a motormouthed slob?

g) all the above.

When I'm at a loss what to write about, I like to write about people I like.  I learned from this man not to get pissed off and take myself so seriously.  How can I get angry when I see this guy, who has seen his father, mother and best friend die before him, from monkey bites and snake bites and botched childbirth, and who works his hands off, taking a 15 minute lunch, reading law books the whole time?  Who left his wife, daughter and son alone, to crawl through the brush across the border, with an arrangement that only one 11 year old girl should know where he was hiding and carry the messages back to the family?

If the people I get mad at met the people I like, this would all be worked out.  That's the dream and goal of WR3A.   We want to show the people who are benefiting from fair trade programs, so that people know what will be sacrificed in a boycott, and so people can have faith who should be in charge of making sure the reuse of electronics does not become an excuse to export "E=waste".

In the big, big picture, 50,000 years from now, I want there to be more people like the people I like in the world.  The people I like are my people.  If each of us takes the time to promote and advocate for the people we most admire, even when those people are "out of style", we can execute evolutionary fondness.