*Note: I'm not currently accepting freelance gigs--building Purpose Portfolio has me pretty much at capacity :) Thanks for your interest, and feel free to drop me a line if I can help find the right designer for your project. `sj
All in Social Change
I remember learning as a girl, perhaps significantly while building a fire, that fire needs 2 things to burn: fuel and oxygen.
I live in the Chaco. It’s a bone-rattling, deathly boring 12-hour bus ride from the middle of nowhere, but I’ve never felt more isolated by a mere 25-mile stretch of relatively well-maintained highway. Coming to the city is a bit disorienting for me.
I was there. Yesterday, Paraguay inaugurated its first democratically-elected president in more than 60 years.
Thank goodness for corporate types with money to throw around! The PWC folks are helping me make a first [slightly less complicated] attempt at freeing the puppets. [not cutting the strings per se, just giving them a chance to move themselves a little]
I was all excited until I started looking around and realized that fully two thirds of them COULDN’T READ IT! Aigh! Even the ones who could read it couldn’t understand the university-level research language it was written in. I think it’s fair to say I was bitterly disappointed.
I met up a Ulysses Team [it’s a leadership development program] from Price Waterhouse Cooper who have been sent here to work on the replication model for self-sustaining education. Que bendicione, no?!
I got a migraine last night. Hadn’t had a truly horrible one since I’ve been here [was actually rejoicing over that the other day] and they must have been storing up because this one was pretty awful.
Whenever you find someone who’s doing something that’s actually working, particularly with indigenous communities, it’s not a program you can adapt. It’s not a model you can implement. It’s not a system you can standardize and package for international distribution. It’s never a system.
I am living for three months at the Escuela Agricola de San Francisco de Assis near the town of Cerrito in the Chaco of Paraguay.
I leave for Paraguay in less than 72 hours. I had planned to set up a blog under my own domain, and to be fair, it's there...I just can't figure out how to make it do anything.
It seems unreasonable to me to leave an audience cheering, and crying, on its feet and then expect them to somehow dig up, search out, or invent the means to make a difference. It seems unfair to generate that kind of energy without providing an actionable channel for it.
