18 Years. Might as well be Me.

For me, the origin of this blog is a kind of central - well, some would say conceit - but sense of purpose that I trace back to late adolescence. At my 40th Reunion at Carleton College a week ago, I wandered the grounds, dared to speak deeply with old friends and mere former acquaintances.  Food service (SAGA), student governance, the college recycling program, Peace Corps interviews, dancing and romance... all in the orbit of my ego.

The origin of that Ego was a very religious or spiritual seeking period, contemplating becoming a Buddhist Monk, during high school.  My pal Jenny at our Carleton College 40th reunion last weekend noted that I had arrived at Carleton my Freshman year engaged to be married (to a different Jennifer), and how did that line up with the monastery mode I contemplated?  I said my guess was that a guy considering becoming a monk was attractive.  Jenny said she could definitely see that point.  And it was textbook Spiritual Materialism (Trungpa ref).  The adolescent was more likely to get laid by acting righteous.

This cuts two ways today.  On the one hand, even if I'm not particularly religious now, and more certain of uncertainty than of faith, I do advise young people that a 3-4 year period of spiritual exploration - even if Materialistic - will compound over your life. Like a launch pad. That period of striving to meditate and pray did, I believe, give me confidence the rest of my life to act as an Agent of Conscience - which was my stated goal at high school graduation. The root of the word "sin" is missing the mark, failing to hit the target you are aiming for. We all miss a mark, but the harder we try to hit it the less the arrow goes astray.

Another Carleton alum friend at dinner was speaking to me about my time as Carleton Student Association (CSA) President, when I was vehemently making noise about a 16% tuition increase.  I told him that the Administration told me there were two traditions to uphold... that Carleton was rare in giving the student association a vote on the budget.  And that in the history of the college, the Trustees had always been given a unanimous vote by Administration, Professors, and the Student Body Association.  I told my dinner companion that I said it was damn time to break that tradition if they were using students as a straw for federal Pell money (formerly grants, then converted to loans). I don't know if that vote against the tuition increase was the reason Carleton waitlisted my kids, but as I said to Admissions Officer Thibadeau, it was certainly their loss.  The point however being that my pal at dinner said that at the time, he thought I was making noise and posturing.  But he said in retrospect, I was absolutely right, and the colleges needed to be aware of the growing college debt they were introducing to a generation or two of students.

Right Wrong 2: African Ambiance at MIT Senseable City Lab

I'm looking for time to edit down the long post I've written for "what the NGO's and MIT got right, what the NGO's and MIT got wrong" piece.  That's a problem for me, finding time to edit stuff.

The 14 months that have now passed since March-April trip to Ghana in 2015 have been in large part the editing or digesting of the experience there.  I'm still re-editing things I wrote at the time, I'm still reviewing interviews we filmed.  And new information keeps coming, even as the situation is evolving.

Wahab - our business partner in Ghana - has been back and forth four times to see his cousin Kamal, CEO of Chendiba Enterprises.  And I continue to take calls every week from young men I met there.   Kamaldeen has now finally graduated the engineering school program (he had been working at Chendiba Enterprises to help pay for his studies).  And Awal, the "lead guy" of the wire burning men at Agbogbloshie, still calls several times a week.  When Wahab's here, it's easier, because my pidgin English is really rusty.  Wahab and I help ground each other's wires;  my compassion for Awal keeps Wahab from spanking his ass for calling and shilling, and Wahab's grown up expectations of the men (and Awal is definitely a man, not a "child labor orphan") who will twist a guilty knife is welcome intervention in the role-play.  I've had good and bad experiences intervening in Africa, and having time and partners from the area give needed perspective.

What I need to say about Jim Puckett, Kevin McElvaney, and the MIT team, PBS and @Earthfixmedia is important, but I do owe it to them to take the time to edit.  They deserve the same compassion and patience we show Awal and the company at Agbogbloshie.  And this extends of course to Dr. Jack Caravanos and PureEarth, and the StEP team, and everyone in the business of "saving Africa".  I need to edit, and to demonstrate the dignity these researchers and journalists deserve.

It takes time.  Primum non nocere. Don't rush to judgement. Listen to your human subjects.  Basics.

Spiral Economy Trumps Circular Economy: Part 3 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man"

In northwest Arkansas, forensics, speech and debate was a way to get out of town, visit other cities and states, and compete with really smart people (often) in dialectic, rhetoric, and drama.

One of my favorite one-act plays then was Mark Medoff's 1969 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man: A Red Farce". I watched it performed with success by Fayetteville High School '78 Seniors Bill Owens and Michael Rudko... two intellectual giants of FHS.

The one-act play shows the interaction of a dirt poor native American selling stuff to white American tourists, who stop and seek to feel good about themselves for offering to buy things.  Medoff captured the conceit... the liberal do-gooder, a white guy who feels very confident in his role as "savior", is confronted with "white privilege".

After rereading it, the play didn't really age that well.  The tourist is more Archie Bunker, less liberal than I recalled.  But lines like "we've been wearing African and Indian shirts to parties for almost a month now" was fresh stuff.

Criticism isn't attack.  In order to win, we must improve our game, including the one called "circular economy".  We must demand our fellow do-gooders work as hard as if they were making O-rings for the space shuttle.  And just as NASA studies the psychology of astronauts in the isolation of space, we must constantly check the self interests of any constituency our causes attract.

Hastily constructed "cures" for the environment, like Product Stewardship laws, and prescriptions for circular economics, are designed by good-hearted people.  No offense that social engineering can create a viper pit of unintended consequences.

Many African High Schools today still struggle under the leaky roofs I taught lessons under (Cameroon, 1984-86).  But the Arkansas high school I practiced drama for is not as far away from a school in Africa.   Yesterday, via Facebook, two photo posts from two schools (screenshots below), LITERALLY back to back, update me on a school from home, and one from West Africa.

So Western Schools still have drama classes, and African schools still struggle to provide enough desks.  But the latter problem is in part driven by rapid urbanization and increasing access to schools, even as the population of schoolkids increases.

Before a satellite circles the globe, there's homework.   It's necessary to know the weather forecast for a satellite launch.  And if we are to engineer a circular economy, it's necessary to get recycling, mining, and waste cycles straight.  We need to know how pollution got where it is.  

Those who drink the "80% of used goods exports are pollution exported as a ruse of reuse" kool-aid, and design a system around that, wind up responsible for Joe Benson and the destruction of the dream of Africans with mutual funds.  They followed a guy who does not know what he is talking about, and was making it up as he went along.  Sorry if they don't want to throw away all this hard work to save the world and start over... but one's ego isn't the end product.

- - -

Agbogbloshie's number one import isn't waste.  It's photojournalists.   And photojournalists who fly in and exploit the hard working, sometimes destitute, scrappers, can't be allowed to fly home and claim they saved someone.   Their reckless reporting put TV repairman Joe Benson in prison, they led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of working second-hand computers of Hamdy in Egypt, they led to the closure of Net Peripheral (the Peace Corps volunteer's 'wet dream' of sustainability, income, and internet), and loss of contracts by Good Point Recycling.

In theory, I'm pro circular-economy.  But this "circular economy" is being promoted by the same WEEE Policy job-hoarding bureaucrats, the same donation-photo-gimmick NGOs, and the same "strategic metals" and "big shred" and "planned obsolescence" capitalist interests as brought us the great #ewastehoax of 2002-2012 (the year the studies all started coming in, backing what my export pals taught me a decade earlier... that there is no money in "waste" migration, only in added value.

Sworn testimony by big metal shredding companies to US Congress...

Sworn testimony to UK House of Commons

No one ever gets testimony from the Geeks of Color.
No one interviews the Agbogbloshie scrapper.
No one finds the parent of the child posed on McElvaney's cruddy monitor.
No one asks anything, no one checks the facts.

I took a call from Awal an hour ago.  I can't always take his calls, we really don't understand each other much.  He was trying to find out when Wahab, the Chendiba Technician buyer, was coming back to Agbogbloshie.  I wasn't sure, think Wahab's in Accra now, but he may have skipped a trip to the scrapyard and gone straight to Tamale.   Wahab and the Techs in Tamale don't really have much to do with scrappers, but Wahab understands the scheme of Fair Trade Recycling, where if the Techs take the scrappers under their wing, more white people may be willing to sell to them instead of boycotting them.

Awal laughed when I told him about the "America Lion" which came to my office a day before... a very large bobcat came to inspect our office in Middlebury, confronting its own reflection in our building's office window.  It's all the buzz on Facebook today (30k+ views).  Employees at Good Point, students at CES de Ngaoundal, we are all connected.  Without the trade - and images are currency - we are engaged in, we would not be.

Doing a Good One for the Red Man was written in 1969, when Medoff was on faculty at University of New Mexico.  It was a product of 1960s liberalism, which showed a self awareness of the cultural gulf between do good trophy hunters, gatherers of mementos, and "spiritual materialism".

At times, there's a competition of vantage points and depth perspectives.  And that's my blog... I'm trying to defend people who are being treated like pawns, but I'm also aware that from another vantage point, I could be exploiting people in another way.  The photo with my student Nana was posed, after all... I wasn't as self-aware of the "currency" of cultural exoticism, though I was clearly aware of the value of photographing my class.  We don't want so much self doubt and growling at the mirror that the next generation gives up, parties hearty, and casts the whole thing aside with trollish conservatism.


Boy.