Six off piste

This fine Zambian gal named Adeline Chi Chi (on the right. Yes boys, she’s happily married!) is where it all began. Adeline and our family have never met in person. We were introduced thru a friend, Doc Erik. Through chance, she was from the same city in Zambia as Latitude 15 hotel. That’s how magic happened.

Upon completion of the school this week (November 2018) she wrote me this note.

Hi there!
Congratulations on the school! Audrey and Rodney have been sharing the updates with me. What a job well done. It’s difficult to get projects done this quick in Zambia! I am so happy for you, and I hope Audrey and Rodney were able to manage the project to your standards. I threatened them not to mess up. (Joking).

Thank you for your big heart. Thank you to your wife and children. Thank you for your sacrifice of time and money. I have seen so many children my dad helped who were once street boys and now they are doctors, teachers, and engineers. I remember he got Ba Mwali from the village. Everyone had given up on him. He was a non functional alcoholic, and dad saw something in him. He brought him in our home, trained him and helped him clean up. It is so life giving to see he continued on his own . I told him he is very lucky to have met you and work with you. It’s a lottery win for him. Never in a million years would he have been able to build a school like that.

You have truly inspired me. My dad’s project and school went down since his stroke. Since he was the main financial resource for everything, it became difficult to continue to run. After his stroke everything fell on my shoulders. I was the only one who could help. I managed for 5 years because I was doing very well financially and had lots of properties here but I was young and stupid and I lost everything in a bitter divorce and had to pay alimony for a year. At that point, between dad’s hospital bills, the orphanage, church, and school, it was difficult to keep up. I had to talk dad into giving everything up.

His dream is to see everything running again like it used to. He believes in the power of education. He loved helping the less fortunate. I didn’t want to do it anymore because I just wanted to build my own life back. Giving became to stressful.

Your project has revived my spirit and inspired me to resurrect my dad’s work. ❤️. Thank you.

School for 400, Where there was none.

Pilots, doctors, writers, computer techs, parents, anyone and anything can happen. Have faith in the process.

Ba Mwali is the man on the ground, the principle and local project leader along with Audrey and Rodney. Without them, the vision and hard work, this school never happens.

Thank you for your courage and service Key, Dad, Grandpa from the beach

“You Americans,” he said, “live in the faire [to do]. The avoir [to have]. In France, we live in the être [to be].”

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181104-why-the-french-dont-show-excitement

This 4,500-Year-Old Ramp Contraption May Have Been Used to Build Egypt’s Great Pyramid

https://www.livescience.com/63978-great-pyramid-ramp-discovered.html

Kenyan school changed an American boy’s life

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-45919557

It helps to know some Finns but every word of this is spot on

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-Finnish-thing-ever

Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY