Interview with Ghana TV Repair Veteran, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

A Great Gift - The Ability to Interview Elders

Why do some of us become very attached to our grandparents, and others of us secretly dread the holiday base-touch?  Why do some of us spend thousands of dollars per year flying back and forth to visit elderly relatives, and others don't bother to make a ten minute drive, more than once a year?

The gift of boredom.  It's something perhaps lost on the current generation of non-fisher, non-hunter (I'm neither, either), non baseball-watcher generation.  The ever-ready internet is at our fingertips. The cell phone has balmed our boredom so thickly that even minutes lead to fidgets.

Will this reduce book reading?  Great books have made me better than who I am. Could I have finished reading them if I'd had internet in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s?  I appreciate many people who know history and still read books (many far more often than I do). But in wondering at my own weakness for distraction, I fear that great books will not die in fire... but in ice.

Master Baba of Tamale Ghana, retired Tech Sector, on the history of West Africa Television

#OwnVoices 1: Ten Years of Video of Firsthand Accounts of Secondhand Trade

For over Ten Years, WR3A has been collecting video interviews, showing firsthand accounts by both the Second-hand tech sector and recycling (scrap) sector in places like Ghana, Senegal, China, Cameroon, Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, etc etc.  There is a new hashtag for this. 

#OWNVOICES. It's  about marginalized people telling their own story, especially when it differs from - or opposes - "their" story as told by big money and charity industrial complex "saviors". 

It is Overdue.  Marginalized reuse techs - labelled "collateral damage" (2013) by Jim Puckett of BAN.org - have to to take the mic.

One huge takeaway from author Adam Minter's visit (his 3rd) to Middlebury last week was his ability to transition the story of Secondhand to "OWN VOICES". Google search top result for definition is a good start:

Open Letter to WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling Interns 2007-2019

Hello summer 2019 team, and past WR3A interns

Thought you'd appreciate this coverage of Adam Minter's new book, Secondhand.  He has already been interviewed by NPR OnPoint and Marketplace, and will be on Fresh Air on Cyber Monday.  The concluding chapters of his book focus on our work, at Good Point, and in Ghana, on Fair Trade Recycling.

This has been a long and steady slog. Adam's research was enormously supported by interns from 2007 thru 2019.  Adam was inspired to write this book at the 2013 Middlebury College Fair Trade Recycling Summit, and the research by interns at Memorial University, Univesidad Pontifica Catholica (Peru), USC, MIT, Middlebury, U of Amsterdam, U de Paul Cezanne, Univ Monterrey de Guadalajara, developed a tome of documentation and research (much of which was consolidated in the excellent 2018 MIT Press publication Reassembling Rubbish by Dr. Josh Lepawsky).

On Adam Minter's second trip to Ghana, he followed up on the fate of the laptop "Junkyard Planet" was written on

Jaleel of Chendiba Enterprises identified a bad video chip,