My tweets
- @JoeyMcAllister Something bigger indeed. *WINK WINK* in reply to JoeyMcAllister 2 hrs ago
- Really dude? I saw you stare at the cart corral before you left your cart in the lot. It was only another 40 feet. Really? 4 hrs ago
- Took the Droid X to Verizon to gery checked out. We wiped it to be sure. Still waiting for backup assistant. Ugh. 5 hrs ago
- @megatronzinski Hey. Thanks. America. in reply to megatronzinski 19 hrs ago
- More updates...
Blog Archives
Blogroll
kenya Archive
-
Poorism
Posted on January 4, 2010 | View Comments
Ode Magazine, which I once subscribed to, ran a story this past April called “Slum tours: Traveling off the beaten path” detailing the rise of what some have dubbed “poorism”, or traipsing through the slums of this planet for an alternative travel experience. Coming from Ode, I figured that this would be a hit piece – I was wrong. The author actually did some “pooring” in the favelas of Rio. According to the article: -
Playing with the big dogs, on Twitter and otherwise
Posted on December 18, 2009 | View Comments
- Mark and I kicking it in Kibera with some friends
There is no end to blog posts from experts declaring the need to “separate noise from signal” and “engage your community” while getting out there in social web promotion. As nonprofits, we understand this. No joke. We get it.
I spent 13 months with The 1010 Project in Denver, coordinating fundraising and our social web life. In July of 2009, I left The 1010 Project for a job with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. I now do a bit of consulting for The 1010 Project along with the former Director of Communication Mark Mann (now heading up Denvelopers), who handled all the coding and web design and SEO stuff. Since leaving, and with the benefit of distance (physical and otherwise), I have realized what we were really aiming for and accomplishing with our forays into the social web. Three milestones (we’ll use that word for now) have enabled me to take a look back and understand how we made things happen.
Read more on Playing with the big dogs, on Twitter and otherwise…
-
My thanks to The 1010 Project
Posted on July 25, 2009 | View CommentsDisclaimer: This post is selfish. It’s about the work I did with The 1010 Project from June 2008 to July 2009. More than that, it’s about the people that made that work beautiful. If you don’t want to hear about them, head to the next post. They are an inspiring bunch. This is something that I have to do.
-
Kenya Series – The Myth of Western Superiority
Posted on July 15, 2009 | View CommentsI’ve been with The 1010 Project for a little over a year. At the same time, I was working my way through graduate school at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. At the office, I learned about humanitarian work by doing, and through discussions with those who had been with the organization for some time. At school, I learned about international development by reading and listening to others who had been in the field for years. Some of my teachers in both settings were from America, some from Africa, and some from other parts of the world.
Read more on Kenya Series – The Myth of Western Superiority…
-
Kenya Series – Water
Posted on July 15, 2009 | View Comments
2300 liters of awesome
Water is life. I’ve known this for some time. I’ve also been nursing a water addiction for about a decade. I love the stuff like a fish loves…water. I need it, I crave it at almost all times, and I drink many, many liters each day. I knew that traveling in Kenya would be difficult for my water intake. We’d be at the same altitude as Denver, so I would have to keep my levels high, but the groundwater was considered off-limits due to unfamiliar flora and bacteria. To avoid becoming a macho-man and still getting sick, I decided to bring along some iodine tablets. While other team members were scrounging for half-full bottles from the previous day’s adventure, I would calmly fill my Kleen Kanteen from the tap and drop in my tabs. I did share them, by the way.
-
Giardiasis
Posted on July 14, 2009 | View Comments
My guts are full of these little monsters.
So I’ve been feeling a little fluxy in the stomach since returning from Kenya. I finally got the gumption to go see a doctor about it yesterday. They gave me dicyclomine for my stomach-ache and took blood and other stuff. The lab just called me and said that I tested positive for giardia, the little parasites that cause the aptly-named giardiasis.
-
Kenya Series – Mt. Longonot
Posted on July 6, 2009 | View CommentsA fantastic slide show, complete with funny captions, follows this post.
Our team from The 1010 Project spent a few days visiting with a partner in Western Province, then headed to Lake Naivasha in the Central Highlands of Kenya. Naivasha is big and beautiful – it’s in the bottom of the Great Rift Valley – and the entire area is covered by flower farms. Apparently Kenyan roses have a huge market in Europe. The lake has hippos and monkeys and storks and whatnot, but I wasn’t all that interested in such beasts. My goal was to climb Mt. Longonot, an extinct volcano about 20 kilometers from the lake.
I recruited The 1010 Project’s Development Coordinator Emily Ruppel and we planned the trip. Before long, word had spread that we were going to be awesome. Our team grew. Our buddy Josh came along, as did two people from Northside Christian Church in Houston, Texas. The Houston team was traveling with us for part of the journey, visiting our partners in Nairobi and Vihiga. Aldo and Pastor Dave would be joining us on the climb.We started a bit late on Friday morning because we had some difficulty finding cheap transportation. By about 9:45 am, we were ready to start what by all estimates was a four-hour climb. It’s actually only 630 meters (2000+ feet) from the base to the top of the crater, so we weren’t entirely certain what to expect; I had (unlike most other outdoor things) done scant research on our climb. As it turns out, that 630 meters is fairly strenuous because it’s NEARLY ENTIRELY VERTICAL. There is only one path up the side of this monster volcano, and it is S-T-E-E-P, let me tell you. Further complicating our climb was the omnipresent dust. It’s all super-old volcanic ash and such, so the minute you put your fit in it, you sink two inches. It was like climbing in sand – my legs were getting beaten up.Pastor Dave, a young man in our minds, was still about a decade and a half older than the oldest of us, and as we climbed, he grew increasingly short of breath. After one particularly grueling section, we took a break and he mused that he would likely not be able to reach the summit with us. At that point, we were close enough to where the rim of the crater was within another two or three strong drives. We told Dave that he could definitely make it, and that we weren’t that far from the top. It was like a motivational speech or something.Well, Dave cowboyed up and as we crested the top and stared down into the crater of a MASSIVE EXTINCT VOLCANO IN THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY IN KENYA, Dave collapsed to his knees and let out an “Oh my…” The view was amazing – on the one side we were looking back over the Rift Valley and its endless expansiveness. On the other side, we were looking into a giant crater full of forest. It was amazing. The photos following this post cannot do it justice. Dave thanked us for inspiring him to go those last few hundred feet and we walked around the rim for an hour before heading down. If the climb was tough, the descent was pure awesome. We ran down large sections, kicking up massive dustclouds as we went. In fact, the powder was so fine that we were even able to “dirt ski,” as it were: -
Kenya Series – Amsterdam (to be updated with videos later)
Posted on July 1, 2009 | View CommentsSo I’m midway through an eight hour layover in Amsterdam. Holland is a nice place. I rode a bike through this very old city and felt quite Dutch. The only things missing were clogs, tulips, and giant windmills.
The people here are very nice and I wish that I could bottle up Dutch accent and sell it. Old buildings and new buildings – typically European. I came out onto the city at about 6:30 am. For two hours I saw about ZERO people. The city was a dead zone.
I wanted a nice coffee drink, which I eventually got, but I had to wait a number of hours to find a shop that was open! They like to start late, I think.
Expect videos to back up this post later. I’ve been using the dickens out of my Flipcam, so Youtube will be my next endeavour. Until then, friends.
Read more on Kenya Series – Amsterdam (to be updated with videos later)…
-
Kenya Series – 2
Posted on June 19, 2009 | View CommentsI climbed a mountain in the Great Rift Valley today, but I don’t want to blog it until I can upload the pictures, i.e. when I return to the States.
In the meantime, we’re heading back to Nairobi tonight. Next week will be very busy, as we meet with partners, make great plans, and work on implementing our recent grant.
I’m in great health, sleeping wonderfully, and I miss everyone and most things. I’ll be in touch.
-
JAMBO – Kenya Living
Posted on June 17, 2009 | View CommentsHello all. I feel strange for not being able to blog this excursion up, but my connections have been a bit slow. Oh well. It’s nice to be able to touch base here.
I’m sure I’ll tweet this when we hit the road again, but if I had two words to describe the Kenyan countryside, they would be: “carelessly verdant.” Seriously, everything is either a strange mass of strange trees or a field of plants. Lots of farmers around here. We drove out to Western Kenya last week, almost to Lake Victoria, and slept under bed nets in an orphanage where one of our partners works.
In case you don’t know, I’m here with The 1010 Project, a Denver-based humanitarian organization that partners with social entrepreneurs in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty. Aside from two organizations that are based in the rural west, we have a number scattered across the slums of Nairobi. I’ll be heading to Korogocho and Kibera and Kayole and Matopeni in the coming days.
It’s amazing here, it really is, and I’m super-glad to be with The 1010 Project. I’m our Fundraising Coordinator, and part of our trip involves me implementing a grant that I wrote a few months back. Our partners are VERY happy to work with us on some specific income-generating projects.
Some highlights: Helped a 4 year old Luhya girl carry a 20-liter jerrycan of water through a cornfield to her home. She smiled. I addressed a crowd of what looked to be 40,000 street children in Matopeni, singing songs and dancing and telling stories. I thanked a baboon for laying the groundwork for the internet and Twitter. Got bit by a mosquito, which means a LOT more here than it does in America (check out previous posts, which I can’t link to now, about my work with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation).
I’m likely to spend the first week of July writing a bunch of impassioned posts about these and other things and putting them up, but for now, I just wanted to check in and thank you all for following along with my work. You folks are a big part of the work I do – I see it in the congratulatory tweets as much as I see it in the smiling faces of orphans and entrepreneurs that we work with in Kenya. See you all soon.