Delightful to be back ;)

I certainly owe you all another post. I have decided to intersperse stories of travel through eastern Europe with stories of IDDS in Ghana, according to my particular inspiration.

Today, I went to two how-to sessions and helped a friend make a presentation. Since then, I've been reading about recycling human excreta in the form of compost. (Don't worry, you'll get to read about that last one after a few paragraphs.)

How-To #1
The first how-to-session was about marketing "bottom of the pyramid" technologies, products that have been developed specifically for people who make less than one to two dollars per day. The session was run by a guy from IDE, International Development Enterprises, who came to visit us. I enjoyed hearing him present on marketing strategies, manufacturing requirements, and supply chains, but what I found most helpful was finding out about his interactions with treadle pump manufacturers.

When he was in charge of producing and distributing treadle pumps, he had to work with the manufacturers a lot. Usually, the manufacturers had poor quality control standards, would try to take as much of his money as possible, and occasionally tried to cheat him. He was forced to develop several strategies to keep from getting scammed.

The most important thing I learned from this is that... I don't particularly want to work with manufacturers. In fact, I still have doubts about whether I can believe in the power of a device to change the world enough to sell it to people. I want to focus on people and services much more than on devices themselves, and I'm still figuring out how best to do that given my desire to make things. Anyone who wants to chat more about keeping a human/services focus is welcome; I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

How-To #2
This session was "Learn how to draw like Nathan." Nathan is another IDDS participant who draws fantastically. He also does very informative quick sketches. I'm hoping to improve my sketching skills since most of my team (the build-a-kid-friendly-latrine team) learned English, our one common language, non-natively. Communicating via drawings and text is much faster for us!

During the session, Nathan focused on drawing basic shapes and combining them to create objects. He also discussed proportions, lighting, and using level of detail to direct the viewer's focus. We sketcher-extraordinaires-to-be suggested example images to Nathan and then practiced drawing them. If anyone wants to hear more about this, I'd love to tell more later...

Presentation
In my latrine project team is a really cool guy named Gago (or Gazang Caidan) from Tibet. He Has been working on a lot of projects in his home village, Nor Mgo, and decided to present them in powerpoint for everyone's enjoyment. He doesn't have much experience with computers (though he does pretty well with them anyway) so he asked for my assistance making the presentation. While we were putting all of the pictures together, we talked about his projects. From Gago, I learned quite a lot about buddhist monks, chinese police, orphanages, finding teachers and donors, the dalai lama, and how to care for yaks. I even got to eat a traditional Tibetan lunch!

Compost
Yeah, woo-hoo! Feces! Actually, it turns out composting breaks things down pretty thoroughly, killing parasites and other unfriendly pathogens. So at the end... I don't think you can really say the mix contains feces anymore. Thermophilic composting is especially good at getting rid of nasty buggers, since every known human pathogen starts to die off if you turn up the heat to 60 degrees C for an extended period of time. Thermophilic composting is caused by heat-loving bacteria that begin to warm your pile as they chow down. They survive like it best when you add a lot of delicious high-carbon snacks to your manure, shield your compost pile from the wind, and keep it at medium humidity. I learned most of this from Jenkins' The Humanure Handbook, if you want to hear more.

Secret Crazy Idea Purposefully Not Mentioned in the Opening Paragraph
I have this idea for a project I'd like to start working on. I'd rather flesh it out a bit more before posting more about it, though. If anyone is interested, I'd love to discuss the idea with you, especially if you enjoy romantic plans for making the world a better place, silly ideas, or critiquing.

And that was my day so far. According to Gago, the frogs currently croaking outside our hostel sound like baby yaks. Many baby yaks to you, my friends, good luck with women, and good night.

<3

St. Petersburg

Hello All!

I how have semi-reliable internet! I may even be able to upload pictures. I apologize for the delay in stories, as I am now already in Ghana. However, it seems best to just go back and tell them.

The first stories are from St. Petersburg. First, some things about the city:

St. Petersburg was built about 300 years ago. Many of the original buildings are still around. It is also the site of Russia's first conservatory, built in 1862. St. Petersburg has also historically been full of awesome people, such as my hosts, Aaron and Sasha.

Aaron had been studying performance and music composition at the Rimsky-Korsakov conservatory. Informally. (He had also been studying Russian and the art of conversation in non-native tongues.) Sasha, on the other hand, is a native Russian, Aaron's roommate and piano teacher.

I stayed in Aaron's room while we were in St. Petersburg. Sasha was pretty busy while I was in town. (He made sure to take a few photos with Aaron and me, though, and to invite me back for piano and Russian lessons.) While Sasha was out, Aaron and I ... wait for it... took tours of the city with two other conservatory professors.

Hehe. One of the professors was Max, who bought us all ice cream. The other was...(Aaron, I'm blanking on his name again)...never mind. The other spoke excellent English and told us about the modern period in Russian architecture.

I'll tell more about modern period architecture or stories of St. Petersburg on demand. Such demand may appear after viewing photos that I totally am going to put up soon. >.>

In the mean time, I send each of you off by quoting Sasha's final words to us: "Good luck with women!"