Soccer, logic and lion's head

So as I have activated internet on my blackberry, which was thankfully sold to me unlocked by Sprint when I bought it a few years ago, I am able to email blog posts in on a more regular basis. I will probably need to format these posts once I get to a computer, but it'll do for now.

On Monday started with a trip back to Khayelitsha to have our first workshop with their youth leaders. After referring, and then assistant referring, two soccer games between the SEC interns and the youth leaders, we went inside to get down to business. Our group, Opportunity, is responsible for helping to create a "career wall" in the CTC-10 field office. This first meeting was to workshop ideas, from which careers to feature, to how the wall will look. It went surprisingly well and I'm looking forward to going back to build on our work Friday.

Yesterday, Tuesday, began with a meeting of the Bo Kaap Heritage Gateway (BKHG), a volunteer group seeking to find funding to make BKHG reach its full potential. The ideas are promising, and from my experience in these 10 odd days living in the community, I firmly believe the money would be used to achieve their goals...but perhaps I am now biased. Yesterday ended with a tour of the District 6 museum. District 6 was a primarily colored (as in not African or White) area known for its multicultural flavor. It was designated a whites only area but due to community protest, the area was razed in the early 70s. I truly felt for the story of the area, but the tour guide who spoke to us needed a lesson in political correctness. She railed on everyone from Mandela, to the Brits, to African Americans for thinking ourselves better than her people of colored origin. She also made ridiculous claims about the visible marks of slavery in American cities in the north...basically she had a lot of opinions that colored (pun intended) her facts. The museum itself was cool, a repurposed Methodist church, which itself had been a repurposed winery.

Today, Wednesday, we learned the Logic Model of evaluating business strategy. Basically you start with an outcome and then build a strategy around it so as to stay as true as possible to the original goal. However, the best part of the day was finally being able to hike up Lions Head, the little cousin of Table Mountain. What a hike it was! It started off easy on a inclined dirt road for about 15 minutes but then became a rocky path, which led to legit rock scaling, using ladders, hand holds and chains. It took the bulk of the group around 50 minutes to reach the top. A friend took a few pictures of me up there, one of which will become my new facebook profile picture soon. Coming down was scarier than coming up at first, but we all made it without incident. The night finished with dinner, some UEFA soccer (damnit Portugal) and now an early sleep. We're supposed to be on the road by 8am tomorrow morning so I need my sleep.

Ok, with that I bid you good night from Bo Kaap, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, Africa, Earth. As always, thanks for reading!

-Diggs
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On the road

So we're on I-95 South currently about an hour away from Dulles. We already had a traffic snag an hour ago and I can't wait to see what happens when we get closer to DC. I am so glad that our van departure time changed to 11am from 1pm...that would have been cutting it too close. Okay I'm going to end this brief update here...I'll try to bang out a longer post after we check in.

Thanks for reading!
-Diggs

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The Creator will be among us...

...apologies to the religious minded but I am not talking about God, although I suspect some people in rural villages in Guatemala, Ecuador or South Africa might say he is. I am talking about Greg Van Kirk, the man who created SEC and whose 2 minute video on microconsignment I posted last week. Mr. Van Kirk is coming to class today for the 9:30am-Noon portion.

What will he talk about?

What is he expecting of us?

What should we ask him?

Should we ask him anything?

Should we kiss the ground he walks on?

Of course that last one was a joke, but Professor Dicklitch swears he will win a Nobel Peace Prize one day...so I may not have been joking as much as I intended to.

On another note, SWOT analysis was finally broken down for us yesterday by BOS (Business, Organizations and Society) Professor, and newly endowed chair, Trex Proffitt. Essentially it stands for Stengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and it is the tool that we are to use to evaluate the work being done on the ground in South Africa...as well as out own Lancaster based business plans that we will have to complete upon our return. (I'll go into more detail about the Lancaster based business plan in a later post.) Finally though, I feel that I am theoretically fully prepared to attempt the task that SEC and F&M have laid out for us. No, I do not think that I am an experr by any stretch of the imagination...but I feel that I am better able to futz my way through this now.

Ok, I need to finishing up a reading for class, but as always, thanks for reading!

-Diggs

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A week to go

This time next week, the group going to South Africa should be an hour and half into the drive to DC's Dulles Airport for KLM flight...umm...I don't remember the number off hand, but suffice it to say it is a KLM flight to Amsterdam where we will board another KLM flight to Cape Town. Total time in the air is supposed to be around 18 hours.

Flight info aside, it is donning on me that while we have discussed the work we will be doing with SEC in South Africa, we haven't actually learned the processes that will enable us to do our work. This is not a criticism of the program, I can't imagine the work that was done in terms of setting up these 2 weeks of instruction state side, but it is hard to conceptualize the concepts with the knowledge needed to understand them. We keep hearing about SWOC and SWOT analyses and how they are integral to our work, and while they've been explained cursory, we haven't gone through training in how to prepare them yet. (I'll define the acronyms next week.)

The basic affect (or is it effect) is that I am feeling nervous...although perhaps anxious might be a better word. I know there is much for us to learn, but I am starting to realize that the work we will be doing can affect lives for better or worse. No, I am not developing a God complex, but it would be nieve to pretend that the work we will be doing won't have any consequences. 

The woman who spoke to us this woman, Maria Jamirillo (I think), reminded us that we aren't going to save anyone, we are just guiding them towards a venture that might benefit them financially. Either way, the stakes are high...and I'm starting to feel that.

Thanks for reading.

-Diggs

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And then The Fridge kept me from working...

I came to the The Fridge, a Lancaster, PA establishment with 8 fridges stocked with craft beer and microbrews and a chef who can make some good artisan pizza, with the intention of getting some readings for tomorrow’s South Africa prep class done. I loaded the readings onto my computer while on campus because I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to access the school’s file sharing network (edisk) from here. Little did I know that Adobe had only loaded a portion of the image of the pdf file, and of course I can’t load the rest of it because I am off campus.

So my solution was to blog about the day instead. I go to posterous.com but instead of their log in screen, I get a log in box requesting a guest password. Granted, up until this time, I had been receiving tweets from tweetdeck, checked my Facebook and sent off two emails...so I thought I was connected. I went and checked with the lady at the counter and she said that “as long as I was on the guest network, I wouldn’t need a password.” So I return to my laptop, and sure enough I check my settings and I am connected to the guest network. I see a tweet up from tweetdeck for further proof of my connectedness. However, whenever I try to get to posterous, it won’t let me. I try a few other websites, some it allowed through, others it didn’t. I guess this is what an internet censor feels like...

However, I digress...although I’m not sure what my point was in the first place. I will take my leave at this point, as you have learned nothing here today other than that I shouldn’t try to do work at The Fridge.

By the way, I wrote this on google docs.

Thanks for reading!

-Diggs

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What is the Micro-Consignment Model (MCM)?

As I mentioned in my post last night, the students that will be going to South Africa will be working with an organization called SEC. SEC's founder Greg Van Kirk pioneered what is now known as the micro-consignment model (mcm). Here is a short video from Mr. Van Kirk about exactly what that is:

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South Africa is Right Around the Corner...

Another international trip means it's time to dust off ye olde blog again. On this excursion I, as well as 7 other F&M (my college) students, will be joined by 8 people from other institutions of the higher education variety to work with the Social Entrepreneur Corps. (SEC) in and around Cape Town, South Africa for 6 weeks. The F&M contingent leaves June 1st, the other people leave May 30th...or so I have pieced together from the Facebook group that was started for all of us.

So what are we doing now? Why am I writing about this trip now from my temporary accomadations in F&M's Dietz Hall (quite possibly the oldest residence facility on campus)? Well, our classes begin tomorrow at 9am and in preparation we were asked to read this essay from Granta titled How to Write About Africa. For full disclosure, I had never heard about Granta before getting this assignment, but I gather it is a literary magazine of some sort...for more detailed information, I invite you to explore the site and leave a comment or two on this post for my benefit :).

Anyway, the essay was a tongue and cheek (or is it tongue in cheek???) look at how to correctly exploit Africa for the purposes of a book about the continent:  

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize...If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

The dead pan humor aside, the article was scarily true to form in its description of almost every book about Africa that I've seen produced, with a few exceptions. I reference the article to assure you, assuming you aren't a bot that will waste my time with a completely irrelevant comment about the bath tiling in the picture that I didn't post, that I have no intention of writing about South Africa in any sort of Western supremacy voice. Hopefully I will be able to capture what I experience on a personal level and avoid pictures of Masai or Zulus, unless they'll let me pose with them...just kidding.

Well I think that is enough for now, especially since there really isn't anything to report. Of course, I must add that I do not edit my posts beyond correcting errors that I catch when I read it over after publishing. I find that editing a blog post of this nature takes away from the natural feel of thing, and I want this to be as natural as possible...I hope that doesn't offend anyone. With that I will take my leave.

Thanks for reading!

-Diggs

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