Not A Good Night

"God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain." Revelation 21:4

When I walked up to the computer training center this morning, I saw many of the stores near the CCIT closed. When I entered the CCIT, the number of students was greatly reduced from the day before. Grace said that many of students were up all night so they would not be in class this morning. It turns out that the day before, not one but two busses on two different roads went over the edge of the cliff killing many and sending many more to the hospital. I can’t believe anyone survived going over the edge of these mountains, though I am very happy that some did.

By 9 am the road in front of the house of the family that lost a member the night before was lined with people . Grace informed me that the young people will come in the evening and sing for the next three nights. I am amazed at the response from this community during this terrible time. I have always believed that the true nature of a person, community, or leader often reveals itself during a time of crisis. It made me think of the number of times I didn’t go to a funeral because it conflicted with a class or a meeting. I have never closed my business for the day to sit on the front lawn of a family in grief. I don’t think I have even taken lasagna to someone in mourning.

My heart goes out the families and friends that suffered such a great loss yesterday. To quote a friend of mine: “We are different, and yet we are the same.” Loss is loss regardless of where we are in the world, but how we show our support for our neighbors differ. Maybe I will go and sing tonight. Or perhaps I will just hum along...

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

Sleep eludes me at the appropriate time but won’t leave me alone when it should. I woke up very early in the morning yesterday and lay there trying to will myself back to sleep. When that failed, I went out on my balcony and watched the sun rise over a mist-filled valley while eating fresh bananas--time to reflect on my current trip to India to review and evaluate progress on the projects A Better World is looking at in this region.

Yesterday, I visited the clinic construction site at Zowkathar. It is a 2-hour drive which seems like too much after the 7-hour drive of the day before. I am enjoying the road this time, though. I just pretend that I am in a road rally race, and the trip becomes an exciting adventure instead of a kidney jarring, butt numbing trip. I do marvel at the skill of the drivers on the road. They know exactly where the corners of their vehicles are.

Coming over the crest of the last hill going into Zowkathar, the clinic is very visible with its shiny new roof. I would take a picture, but the Sumo (like a Land Rover) is bucking so badly I know I will never get the shot. ( I cheated and had the driver stop on the way home for this picture.) The road into the clinic is closed while they construct a culvert over a stream; the goat trail we drove down was a challenge for the Sumo to, say the least, but we arrived in one piece.

The structural components of the building are all completed, the floor is poured, and even the roof is on. Interior walls are made of brick and then plastered over for a smooth finish. All the interior walls are started, and about 15 men were working on them when we arrived.

The workmanship is very good, and the materials are great, too! The process is very manual. Even sifting sand is done by hand. The foreman helped me measure the building and answered all my questions through a translator. His crew is working 7 days a week, but I guess there is not much else to do in Zowkathar. It reminds me of my jug hound days on Melville Island. Best of all, the contractor has no outstanding issues and the project is on budget! I love it when a plan comes together!

Once a Teacher, Always a Teacher

Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. It's not quite that simple; you still need some gear and a well-stocked body of water, but, without the teaching part, you end up watching the fish jump while you try to get the hook out of your finger.

As most of you know I am spending more than my usual amount of time working with A Better World during this year away from Olds College. This summer my work with them took me to northeast India on the Burma border. I visited the Champai Institute of Technology--9 computers on the second floor of a building that doubles as a house and store. Computer skills are in high demand in that part of the world, but schools are not in a position to provide computer training and there are very few individuals with a computer. Businesses are finding that they need computers for the same reasons our businesses need them. Their government is trying to promote computer training; they have written curriculum and sponsored tuition for training centers. I viewed the government created curriculum and was impressed at the realistic examples it gave and practical skills it develops.

Grace Lalrinhlui, a refugee from Burma and now principal of the Champai Computer Institute of Technology (CCIT), is trying to get training to the low income people of her community. She currently trains a few orphans in her spare time, no questions asked, but she would like to do more. The CCIT offers a 6-month course in office software. The course runs one hour a day, 5 days a week. Grace acts as a mentor for the students as they work through the self directed learning.

The advantage to this format is that students can pick an hour a day that works with their schedule. Some come in the morning after they get their children off to school while others come in the middle of the afternoon between the lunch rush and the supper rush. It makes for a long day for Grace, but she is happy to do it because she recognizes the need. And as far as the facilities are concerned, I was very impressed. Everything was clean and organized, and there was even a suggestion box--the only suggestion box I saw in all of India. Without question, there is the capacity for much greater use of the facilities than is now happening.

I am working with Grace to find sponsors to pay tuition for students from the low income group. To these people, an office job would be out of the question simply because of a lack of education. On the job training is not common. I guess when you have a billion people to choose from, you can be fussy. But a small investment in someone can radically change their life and the lives of their family. Grace knows this because it was a helping hand from a local person that made it possible for her to run the CCIT. She is highly motivated to make the business work because she is uses the proceeds to put her four brothers and sisters through school.

Education provides opportunity. Often family members will pool their resources to send one member to school in the hope that they will all benefit from the training. When families simply do not have even the resources to do that, the whole family is destined to remain in poverty. In the case of a refugee population, the chances are even worst. So, you ask, what would it take to give someone six months of computer training, and a chance a better life? I had to have Grace tell me twice, then write it down because I was sure the number was lost in translation: $150.00 Canadian dollars!

The teacher in me started to claw his way out! Would she be willing to incorporate monthly reporting by each sponsored student into the assignments? Yes! Could they set up a Gmail account and IM with me as an assignment? Yes! Could we track them after leaving the training to assess the effectiveness? Yes! I have been in contact regularly with Grace since the trip. That is the great thing about working with a computer teacher--communication is easy!

I have put a proposal forward to ABW to sponsor 20 students from low income families this year. I am going back to India early this winter to check on a clinic being constructed in that area, and I would love to have the funds to meet 20 new students while I am there.

I had the good fortune to hear the Dalai Lama speak not once but twice this week. His message of changing the world through compassion and nonviolence rings true to me, as does his message about the importance of education. I believe this project could, in a small way, lead to a better world! I don't like to solicit funds through this blog, but, if you are interested in getting involved, please contact me, and I will give you more details (This would be a great project for an IT department to get involved with). Geeks, unite! Your time is at hand!

Zadou - the Wild, Wild West

My first impression of Zadou two years ago is that I had been transported into the wild, wild west. I expected to see a gun slinger coming out of the tavern at any second. Zadou is still much like that, but it has grown, too. There are new buildings and cranes everywhere! We arrived late at night in a rain storm, so we were very glad when a passerby stopped to pick us up and deliver us to a hotel. The next morning I was greeted by the above view from my window.
Peng was great to travel with; I could not have made the trip without him! He found us breakfast and a cab for the day and even a cell phone charger. After a filling meal, we went out to the school run by the Rimpoche. Much was the same as when I left 2 years ago, the kids were still smiling, and the grass was still green. Some things have changed: there are more tents housing more foreigners than before, the buildings are all completed and wearing colorful paint, and the school building was decorated for the 5th aniversery celebration.

The well we completed two years ago is producing ample water, though I wish it was housed properly to prevent contamination. The green house is functioning, but the students need encouragement to eat green things which are not part of their diet normally. (What kid likes vegetables anyway?) There is now power to the complex, and this will relieve much of the difficulties for refrigeration and lighting. The basketball court is paved, not gravel, this year, and it appears to be very well used. Great to see!
The new hospital is about 90% done. It is very big! It was great to get a tour of it with the Rimpoche and everyone. From the road one would never know a building this big was being built! After the tour, we had a wonderful lunch at the Rimopche's house. Peng was very happy to meet him and to see all the great things he is doing for the people of the area. I was glad to see things moving forward and the town of Zadou moving from the wild, wild west into a more mainstream town.

Ringing True

Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. Prov. 24:14

My mothers words come rattling back to me at the oddest times. She would often say, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” and although I can’t say that this is always true in my experience, I figure that the least we can do is look for it. Rwanda was the blackest cloud I have ever experienced. I hate to keep mentioning the Rwanda trip in this blog, but, as you can guess by now, that trip was a very powerful experience for me. Although I won’t go in to the details now, I will just say that it took eight months of deep thinking, but I found the silver lining in that terribly black event.


Life is full of clouds in varying degrees of darkness. I just returned from the India/Burma border and the Tibetan high plateau, and God knows there are many clouds in the lives of the people living there. I am not suggesting that bad things happen to provide us with learning opportunities, but when bad things happen, the least we can do is try to learn something from them. Sometimes the best thing to come from a bad event is knowledge of what we can do to stop it from happening again.

So here is the jump (stay with me): I have never been one for jewelry. Many times jewelry is worn to improve our appearance, and, trust me, there is not a jeweller out there that could do much for me. Sometimes jewelry is worn as a sign of affluence; again, not something that interests me at all. Jewelry can also be worn as a sign, such as a wedding band or engagement ring. Not a bad idea, but there is another reason to wear jewelry, and that is as a reminder. I worked side by side for many years with an engineer who wore a small, discreet engineering ring made from the steel of a collapsed bridge. I learned that every engineer gets one as a reminder that no one is infallible. Although he taught for more than 30 years, he always wore that ring. I believe he wore it as a reminder.

In a little shop in Zadou, China there is a family who works forging silver into jewelry. In the middle of nowhere, this family make beautiful things to adorn the people of the valley. These people face clouds every day and keep on going. I promised myself that I would have them make me a simple silver ring as a reminder of what my mother said to me so long ago: "Every cloud has a silver lining." The older I get the more it rings true for me. In the face of adversity, I need to look at my ring, to look for the silver lining. I need to learn from the bad situation. I truly hope that the other members of the Rwanda trip who struggled so hard with what they saw can somehow find their silver lining.

Flashback to Guatemala

The bus trip in Guatemala was the scariest of my life. It involved a con man, a very seedy end of town and, scariest of all, the repeated gunfire as we drove by some of the poorer areas of town. Those of you who know the story will be worried at the title of this blog, but you should know at the outset that if I can write and publish this story, I’M OK!

My current bus trip should have been about 20 hrs--24 hours on the outside--but as I type this, we are pushing past the 28 hour mark with no end in sight. We are in the process of climbing the steepest part of the trip and will pass though 16,500 feet (if we make it up!)

It seems that much of what could go wrong has, but we are still moving, so there is still hope. On the upside, we may not have to find a hotel tonight; we may still be on the bus! We have had a bad tire hump from the start, and I think that has slowed us on the parts of the road where we could have made time. The police have stopped us more than once, because of some bigwigs on the road or something. This made me nervous as we are not in the most stable part of China right now, and I’ve found that the presence of bigwigs tends to increase political instability. There has been no bombing or violence that I know of, but, as I reminded myself, there is always a first.

It happened as we were stopped by the police just outside of Yushu. I was quietly reading a spy novel (thanks to a donation from Ray) when a blast went off! I might be getting slower physically, but I am amazed at what my mind could process in a fraction of a second.

Sidebar: I wish you could see the slope and switchback we have just come up--truly like nothing I have ever seen since the last time I climbed this hill. Unfortunately, it is too dark for a picture. I bet Gareth knows the view of which I speak. Oh, I bet you want me to get back to the story...

I heard the blast and the shrapnel hitting the bus at the same time which meant, I reasoned, that the explosion was very close. A fraction of a second later, there was the sound of glass shattering, but not our glass. There was no smoke on my side of the bus, and my window was open wide enough to dive out of if need be. I noted clouds of smoke fifty feet away on the other side of the bus. My mind flashed back to Guatemala: If this was a roadside bomb, would there be gunfire to follow? If I was a gunner aiming to kill, I would not want to be on the bomb side of the bus; I would be on the other side, the side people would be fleeing to. MY SIDE! I opted not to jump out the window.

The smoke cleared and no gunfire ensued. I learned that very large wheeled loader on the edge of the road had ruptured a rear tire on the side facing us. There was no bomb, just a very large tire. The shrapnel was rocks, and the breaking of glass was the rear window of a cab just ahead of us. I think I need to read a different type of book, Ray, or maybe…

Not All Seats Are Created Equal

I am, I think, on my sixth flight (on four different airlines) in three days, and I now feel qualified to assert that all airline seats are definitely not created equal! And I am not just talking about the dimensions of the seat, the construction of the headrest, or the entertainment system that may or may not be in the back of the seat ahead of you. There is so much more to consider when thinking of airplane comfort. There are the cabin layout/seat location/seat mate variables to include, too. Let's start with the physical seat itself. The seats on Kingfisher Air, even on the little prop plane on which we flew, were of supple leather and had ample lumbar support. There was no video entertainment, but the flight was only an hour and a half and the scenery was spectacular out the window, so who needs TV? Jet Airways also had great seats with ample support and a headrest that wrapped around and cradled your ears in soothing fashion. The in-seat entertainment worked flawlessly and contained many options from jazz radio to Hollywood movies. Air Canada, however, had seats too narrow for an anorexic headed to an intervention, the headrests forced your head to loll from side to side like a drunken sailor, the entertainment system wouldn’t run for more than twenty minutes, and the rows are so close together that my knees and chin are now void of hair from rubbing on each other.

The cabin layout is also important. On the widebodies you can have a 2-4-2 or a 3-3-3, or in the tail you may have the 2-3-2 layout. I have always tried for aisle seat, and on day flights I still prefer it, but I don’t pee often (so I am not climbing over seatmates) and I don’t get up and roam around much (they frown on that now), so on night flights I try for a window. I like the 2-3-2 option best, and try for the 2 part--either aisle or window.

Location in the cabin is also important. Near the front and you are the last on-first off--great if you have a short connection. You also breathe the freshest, but hottest!, air. I find I am always hot on a plane, even when I only wear my Speedo, (this gets me through security quickly) so I prefer the back. The air is cooler, especially if you are next to the bathroom, because every time someone flushes it suchs a huge amount of air out. The other big advantage to the back of the cabin seat choice is the gossip that the flight attendants tell each other as they stand in the galley not helping people. It has been my experience that in the areas of both quality and quantity of gossip, Air Casnada wins hands down. Part of the reason may be that they have the most experienced flight attendents in the industry; I recently overheard two of them discussing what great guys Orville and Wilbur were.


The seat mate/s you end up with are always the wildcard when traveling. I have to say I have had them all. Screaming baby, puking student (all the way to Beijing once), the sleeper, the talker, and when you travel with Ray, the snorer. On this trip to China, I was pleasantly surprised to have no seatmates at all! Even better, in the row just ahead of me sat a young doctor going to an agricultural finance conference in Beijing. She was from Poland, raised in Germany, and working at the university in San Fransisco. She spent the perfect amount of time turned around discussing the state of agriculture and the rest of the time letting me sleep. It was delightful to hear a young, naive, enthusiastic person's perspective for a change. I would tell you her name, but it was polish, and I couldn’t say it, let alone spell it!
...
Now I am in a whole different type of seat: a seat on a sleeper bus, my home for the next 24 hours. The “seat” is too flat to sit up and too slanted to lay down. But that is a whole other story yet to come. Keep me in your prayers!