What's next?

Time flies when you're being pressured to perform. As much as I'd love to reflect and write and add personal effects and all that, there just isn't enough time in the day. It's 3 am and I'm just getting to this post.

First, I looked up Samsung's initiative with the solar powered education system. Very cool idea. Which led me to this solar powered charter school in the U.S. (www.starschool.org) VERY VERY cool place. Which then led me to their navajo peace making website that works in conjunction with the school... ahem... VERY, VERY, VERY COOL (http://navajopeacemaking.org). This school uses sustainable all over it's website and it appears to have every right to. Of course, as I said, time flies so I was not able to do a thorough inspection, but from what I've seen so far? Amazing. Naturally I loved this idea for Kenya. I loved the idea of solar power for electricity because honestly, in thinking about providing education to people I had this overwhelming, nagging thought that hungry kids don't study! You can't just hand out books without handing out at least some type of food. A refrigerator, freezer, or microwave would certainly help with that issue and solar power is just the way to get us there. But back to the school! I like this school for so many reasons, one of them being their curriculum. The school is located in Arizona in a remote region near an Indian reservation. The founders of the school had incorporated Navajo culture into the school culture. The children are not only able to learn about some of the lessons and morals important to Navajo Native Americans but they get to exercise it practically in their daily education practices. The peacemaking is one example of how the school has attempted to preserve native culture within their school and students.

Somehow I also stumbled upon this other website (http://www.solarenergy.org) WELL they just have an extremely extensive education program on this site, and once again did not investigate as much as I would have liked, but a lot of their programs seem to be done online. They've got online textbooks, online instructors, online certification programs and even more strange is it's an entire already developed curriculum based on learning and becoming certified in solar power? WHAT?! I digress, I don't know how much of the program is online and how much is an actual... physical... education system? But either way I'm impressed by how much they have been able to develop this ...program... and how much of it is available online.

PHEW! that being said, I'm moving on to a reaction.

So! I watched the trailer for Tough Bond and for some reason I was... surprised. It's not that I had a glamorized view of Kenya, I most certainly did not but... I guess I just didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what huffing glue looked like and I didn't know what the boys would look and sound like or how active they might be. Somehow just seeing it there and putting together the imagery with the narrative by Orrs has thrown together a reality that just... isn't the same as what my mind portrayed. I don't really know what makes it different except for that it may just be more real. I've been thoroughly excited for this trip but for the first time I'm actually concerned. Concerned for what is to come, what I will hear, what I will see and how I will feel. I guess I tried to imagine a Kenya in America and have been working with that image, but the Kenya in the film is nothing, seems nothing, at all like America. The fatal American character flaw, not being able to extend your imagination beyond the confines of your own life and experiences.

Overdue post

WARNING: This post quickly turned from good spirited into a rant. It stops abruptly due to that realization.

I will start this blog by saying there was once a jail somewhere, or maybe it's still there, that was plagued by insurmountable violence. The inmates were unhappy and aggressive. I will end this short story by saying once the walls were painted pink the violence subsided. No other jail adopted this method. It wasn't popular, even though it did work.  I can't honestly tell you I know why the pink walls worked, I can't. But I can say that if I was the creative director of a prison or the owner I would say to my inmates some of you will be in here for the rest of your lives, we don't have many options, but what color would you like for the walls? Because you see it is not me who has to live in this place I am not the one who does not to go home at night and so if the least we can do is ask, what might make this punishment a little more bearable, a pink wall isn't so much to supply.

So somewhere an Italian man is giving a Ted talk on how he listens to the voices of his clients in order to help them and that it was successful. But do we adopt that plan of action?  Or do we go on with the original grey walls because THAT is how we know to go about things.

The first thing I've come to learn about helping others is to throw out everything you think you know about a person or people you've never met. There is nothing I can tell a local person about their culture that they do not already know.

I resented the conversation in class that spoke about our trips being ... Well for lack of a better term, completely self-serving. I resented it because I honestly cannot see myself as better than any other person. I cannot see myself offering to provide some great relief when I know for a fact that I don't come from some sort of supreme livng circumstance. That being said I did begin to realize that my entire existence at Lehigh makes more privileged than many people. Lehigh in itself puts us in a position to look down on the rest of the world and so in that way, okay, I give in my higher education does make me the white man. But to put that aside, if that is even possible, I go back to my motivation for this class and my conviction that I am not the self-serving and imposing service student. I joined the class to learn everything I can. To learn about a country, a culture, and a people but most important to do that with a first hand experience. For that reason I'd known that I wanted to hear the stories of the people around me. I wanted then to act out the milestones in their lives, sing their sorrows, speak their aspirations above all I wanted to encourage expression in any way. Because the more I know about them, the more open dialogue becomes the wider the path of knowledge becomes and the easier that transaction behind to flow, from ignorant to informed and from culture to culture. And when the expression is out of the way and all that is left is the impact of what has been shared, awareness follows. The very sudden awareness of all you have been privy too and all u have missed. And suddenly awareness lends to insight which lends to creativity and that is when collaboration takes hold. This is important because there is no success without an active partnership. I respect the person who said u need to build a relationship with the people you aim to serve and that is true.

Schooling the world

I've watched the documentary "Schooling the World" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnzVNO_J6sk) and felt a huge sigh of despair welding up in my chest. I identified with this documentary in so many ways. Each scene that progressed brought on another thought or experience that seemed so relevant to the point being made in the film. Yet, the reoccurring topic for many of the people who provided testimonials, was that people (everywhere) use school to make money. And for once, I wanted to be the sociologist, anthropologist, NGO owner who says, "money isn't everything". But I can't do that. It saddens me because I know for nearly my entire life, all I have ever considered a reasonable goal was to make money. It is only recently that I decided to explore my passions, part of the reason why I enrolled in this class was to discover what it is I love to do.

Passions are a privilege of the wealthy. In my family we've done many of the things mentioned in the film, except maybe on a smaller scale. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY; and it is true that this is the place that shaped my culture and my education about my ancestors. I was lucky that I was allotted the opportunity to even learn about my culture, because so few people are. When I got old enough, I began going to school in Manhattan because a) Manhattan is a production capital and b) schools in Brooklyn did not produce graduates.  There are many things to say about getting educated in Manhattan as opposed to Brooklyn but to stay on topic I'll fast forward to moving even farther out and attending college in Pennsylvania. All these decisions, essentially, were based on the idea that the farther I can move away from poverty, the less likely I will be sucked into it. If I could see professionals, if it became a tangible entity than there is no reason I can't one day be in a Manhattan sky-rise and eating at every fancy restaurant on the upper west side. My father, for a long time, warned me against my propensity to have material goals. He told me that I was being naive in my ideas of what makes a good life and though I now agree that he was right, that truth is still very hard to swallow. How do you survive if you are not making money? and a lot of it? Did I go to college, did I move away, did I sacrifice just to end up just like my parents? In some ways I feel that is exactly what will happen, and not because I made the decision to pursue higher education, but because I did it with the intent to live someone else's life without yet, discovering my own.

This resonated so much with me as it was portrayed in the film. The burden of education is not that it includes sacrifice, but that it is consistently geared to produce students who want to live someone else's life. There is no room for internal reflection, or personal growth in today's education system and global economy. What there is room for is greed, power, and fear. So much of today's problems, including problems within the global market itself, is the loss of values and the diversity of values. Studies have shown that people would rather spend time at work, then time at home. Family life is now a burden to the average professional who is much more conditioned to structure, regulations, and productivity. I appreciated the statements made by some of the women in the film, that talked about the value of earth and water. How parents taught children to preserve and respect these resources, and how to develop a relationship with their environment. I wonder, if we could all just wear a pair of glasses that would allow us to withdraw from the material values that are plastered in every area of modern society, would really be able to "see" what is around us. By that I mean, If I had the ability to look around Manhattan, and instead of being in search of fame, fortune, big apartments, and pride; I saw art, creators, culture, things that inspire me as an individual. Wouldn't that be the most popular thing on the market!

But that is always the compromise.  To spend time on yourself means to waste time, to be less productive, and to lose opportunity, that is what we are taught. At the end of the day, if you do not want to work in McDonalds, you have to live life by these rules.

In psychology we talk a lot about stories. How telling stories is so extremely powerful in human understanding and development. In English we talk about different ways stories are told, different vehicles for communication other than language. And I see a vital part of global education being wasted. The opportunity to be an individual and the opportunity to share your story. That is how you preserve culture, that is how you develop self-understanding, and that is how you share knowledge. Before we are taught to compete, we should be taught to understand. A life lived without an understanding of the world and your specific function in it, is a life that ends in corporate drones or hapless merchants.

I'd like to believe in humanity, and I'd like to believe in change. So maybe that starts here, with how we provide education to those who have none. Maybe we do teach philosophy instead of engineering, and theatre instead of programming. Maybe we teach people how to value themselves and each other for what they have to offer before applying it to modern societies standards of what it means to be successful and to have "made it". Or maybe that is idealistic and impractical and a luxury of higher education that I have now adopted. Am I turning into the far removed, helping hand? For now? No, just a dreamer.