Good jelly

(if you like bikes, building stuff, or design for developing countries, click all the links!)

On this sunny day did five intrepid explorers ride from olde Cambridgeport to Carlisle to visit the honourable Gwyndaf Jones.

Not only is Gwyn one of my favourite people ever, he's also Welsh. Over lunch he recounted a story from a past visit to Wales. Apparently, there are so few Welsh names and so fewer surnames, that when our hero found himself standing in a cemetery, he had to look but two stones away to find the grave of one Gwyndaf Jones.

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Spang, Daf (another Welshman who makes my list of favourite people ever), Amelia (who rode across the USA last year!), Laura and I put some food, brews and ice into some panniers and rode up the lush green Minuteman trail and then into the woods to find Gwyn at his gorgeous little house.

Gwyn has an amazing story. He worked as a BMW motorcycle mechanic once, and started one of the first super-high-end titanium racing bicycle companies, Merlin Metalworks, just one town over in Somerville MA. Today, he's a mentor for D-lab design classes, and teaches his own cycle-focused class at D-lab. He collaborates with Guatemalan bicycle-machine inventors and builders, and Indian rickshaw businesses, to name a few.















Gwyn's house is beautiful and cosy, and his workshops and store rooms packed with the most exquisite hand tools and bicycle history: old bikes, one-off crazy experimental bike frames, and beautiful (and huge) hand saws, planes, and files. We brave mosquitoes the size of bees on a little jaunt into the woods by his house, where a tree hangs with a hundred rejected Merlin frames, the steel completely rusted but the titanium pristine and shiny.



Alas, all good things do end and Gwyn took us on a lovely ride on a track through the woods on our way back to Cambridge. I'm already planning my next ride out to Carlisle.

Mastershoes

Almost exactly a month after leaving Cambridge for Arusha, I find myself back in Cambridge again. It's funny how different life is in different parts of the world. In some places, people walk, in others the cycle or ride or drive. In Arusha, people smile and call out to you and jest about your haircut, and in Boston and Singapore, you move too fast or are too far away from people to have almost any interaction at all.

Today, I sit here on my bed and feel like I have all the things I'll ever need in my life around me, tucked away in the attic of a Cambridgeport house and built into a quiet little Cambridge life I'm really getting used to. But! Is it so? Let's examine this issue.

A good friend of mine Chris told me as we cut across Jamaica Plain on our bikes about some thinking that was solidifying in his head. This theory isn't universal, but rings eerily close to my experience.

So, imagine you had my parents, and think for a moment about what it's like to be home. Life has a sort of fundamental certainty to it. Your parents (might) have lived in the place for a long time, decades perhaps. Their social network is huge. With a roguish sort of economist grin, I'd pin a name on this that sounds something like "personable capital".

Life is easy when you're home and you can hop on this network, and use this capital built up over years. There is no uncertainty about who to look for if you need something, and there is great certainty that if you need something, you can find it. You have the same family doctor and dentist you've had for years, maybe generations, and a dozen different cousins and aunts and uncles, and then friends, who are accountants, travel agents, stock brokers and everything in between.

Chris describes it as being "failure proof", how options abound. Even if you were completely out of luck striking into the world on your own, you could always find something to fall back onto. The network is powerful. Indeed, we build networks of our own everyday, and Chris is absolutely sure (and I quite convinced) that the world doesn't work through the "normal channels" but rather through the tapping -nay, milking- of networks.

But networks today are different, just as people are. One might think, I haven't stayed in the same place for two years- sure, my parents have, but I haven't had time (and perhaps physical constraints in space and travel) to build the same things they had. Now moving is cheap, and people move around a lot. We keep in touch with cell phones and emails and spread networks across the world. Chances are, if I drop into some city tomorrow, I might find someone I know nearby in the same province or state. We still hang on to people, just in different ways. Eh?

safi sana

Back in Cambridge, it's all reverse culture shock again.

In Arusha, hot on the heels of 2010 (which we celebrated with a second goat)-

I think this will be a ramble...
Let me take a couple of seconds to recount history. We celebrated Christmas with a goat. Now, I very much believe in living lightly on the world, and as such I choose to consume next-to-no animals and animal derived products (I also cycle everywhere, althought I must say this is as much out of convenience as concern, and showering is another story entirely-) although I am not opposed to the consumption of animals on any kind of moral grounds. I would be super excited keep chickens for their eggs (it's a beautiful, if an essentially weird relationship if you ask me). They would eat worms and crap and kitchen scraps, and eating them would affirm the ancient adage that we are what we eat: at the end of the day, poop.

And the great Tom Waits did say, "most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete."

I would hunt animals for food, if I had to. If I was in the jungle and had to eat an animal to survive, I would, easy. So whilst I did not eat this goat, I did watch its slaughter and subsequent parting out into various cuts and edible bits with great interest. After all, in America, goats come in parts from the supermarket. This was a real goat, it had to die and be parted.

It was the most visceral experience of my life thus far, I must admit I felt a little strange watching blood run and hearing air hiss from lungs. I don't think death had ever been this close, apparent, or bloody to me before. Watching the goat be cut up was easier. It reminded me of a time in Boston before I attended a sustainability fair and watched an artisan butcher skilfully cut up a (happy?) organic free range hog.

This brings us now to the second goat (this one seemed to come conveniently already in parts -- the skin was nowhere in sight), roasted in a grill made out of an oil drum at Shaibu's swanky bachelor pad, where we celebrated the new year. Shaibu is a dude. He manages the bike programs at Tumaini, the workshop at Global Alliance for Africa's Vijana (youth) centre. Many people have overheard conversations about the centre (mostly in America) and thought we were talking about something else altogether.



















"Damn! The meat won't fit on the stove! Good thing we have this nifty oil barrel grill!"




Our stay in Arusha was punctuated by visits to the nearby village of Nadosoito to demonstrate and gather views and feedback about GCS products. The first ended up being mostly a long, scenic walk through the village, which is absolutely beautiful: mountains on the horizon, and filled with beautiful people working hard in fields. The second was accompanied by business and management guru Javier, who taught us so so many lessons about how to characterise a market (besides talking to people and finding out how much land they had and how their harvests were- which we did), how to find demands for a product and willingnesses to pay, and also neat tricks on finding information about customers. The trick is, quite unintuitively, to try lots and lots of different ways to sell your product to different people. And we sold one, and sat in the shade of a mud brick house drinking tea and talking to John the farmer about his harvests, his family. Bernard's father did mechanical work for John, and John knew Bernard since he was but a child. Small world.

















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We passed our following days building up documentation and fiddling with corn shellers (did you know the majority of maize eating people worldwide shell their maze by hand?), learning to build dynamo-cellphone chargers by hand on our daily trips to Mwamba's house.

We had two last adventures before we departed this magnificent city. The first of these was the Mama Afrika circus, with acrobats who jumped and twisted through the air, climbed poles upside down and swung from trapeze and silk (which was announced by the circusmaster as "aerial tissue"). There were young boys who could bend their bodies in half the wrong way, and squeeze through squash rackets. There were also three young men who:

-juggled clubs
-juggled little straw hats (their routine was amazing)
-rapped
-breakdanced

I was also unwittingly recruited by a clown to be part of his four piece rock band. I was lead vocal.

The second adventure was a leisurehike with the D-lab Tanzania team through the lush green foothills of Mount Meru to a waterfall. Rain mid-hike made the going treacherous and slow, and I began to get frustrated with what began as an fresh, exciting hike on a beautiful day. We walked our way down a winding stream in a jungle river valley, hopping over slippery rocks, and ducking under outcroppings of rock worn down by years of water. Finally, we arrived in a huge clearing I can't seem to find a good object to compare in size to. It was completely overgrown with lush green vines and gigantic ferns, a wispy stream of water rushing from some high place to crash down two hundred feet below. It felt like I was in the land of the dinosaurs.

Alas, great things must come to an end, and a few days later, I passed through Nairobi, got on a plane and went "home" to Singapore for a few days. It had been a long time, my parents had moved into a new house, and Singapore was as weird as ever. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant week spent at home.

Life goal: only own so much stuff that I can carry on my back. It's slow progress, but I've stopped checking bags on airplanes, and learning my goal one month at a time.

mchizi kama ndizi

Arusha is a neat place: a friendly little town sitting in the lush green shadow of Mt Meru, Tanzania's second tallest mountain.
I arrived in Arusha, Tanzania to cheers of "Bruce Lee! Bruce Lee!"

Alright, so it didn't quite happen that way. Bernard picked us up in his lovely sky blue beetle and whisked us off to begin three weeks of mystery and adventure, volunteering at GCS in Arusha.














Global Cycle Solutions is the brainchild of Jodie Wu and Lisa Tacoronte, MIT alum and student, both D-lab veterans and entrepreneurs. We soon settled into a comfortable routine of hopping onto dalla-dalla's (vans) each morning and riding out to Bernard's dad's house to document the tech development of a top secret! GCS product, doing some work in the afternoon on an instruction manual and cooking rice and beans for dinner.

The first night, we met Jodie's next-door neighbours - Mic and Mas, two members of Contagious (or was it Contagiouz?), a band of young men who:

- breakdance
- rollerskate
- don't drink
- don't smoke

On the second night, we watched them perform a show and throw down some serious moves at a local bar/club.

We seem to be surrounded by Arusha's most exceptional people. Bernard's father moved to Arusha from Moshi when he was young, starting small with just a simple provision store. Over the years, he began to buy cars from junk yards, fix them up and then sell them, earning enough money to buy tools, sewing machines, a flour mill, land.

Today, he's a local celebrity. Dalla-dalla's in Sinoni will know where you want to stop if you say "Mwamba's house". Bus drivers recognise Bernard by face as Mwamba's son. They live in a spacious three storey house with a yard always full of vehicles in line for repair work and the largest accumulation of Volkswagen spare parts in the country...maybe on the continent! Bernard and his brother Peter are both accomplished mechanics from growing up working on cars with dad.




















Bernard bought his lovely sky-blue beetle from a scrap yard where it was rusting away, for about four hundred dollars. He spent three months to fix every single part in it by hand, and then got it painted sky-blue. It's beautiful.


Their house is a really happy place; Bernard's sister Stella sewing clothes, his brother Peter fixing cars or radios, both of whom are always happy to talk to you if you walk by. They have a yard full of chickens and tons of Bernard's neat inventions, like homemade solar water heaters and a pedal-powered drill press(!!!) Bernard's two nieces are the sweetest children I've ever seen. Melinda sneaked up on me one day whilst I was eating lunch and poked me in the small of my back with a tiny finger. I jumped two feet into the air from my seat.



Oops, took a video instead of a picture

Newfound fangles

I like choral music. It's amazing that human voices can combine together in such brilliant ways.

I like tango music. It's amazing that different musical instruments can weave such exciting stories.

This is so fricking weird! These are two of the elitest things on the planet! But they make me so happy. Happier than I've been about them since singing choir some five years ago and dancing tango for some three. Sometimes I think about them more than I think about bicycles. How could I!?

I've been rehearsing with MIT's concert choir for a few months and it's a blast. We have a rockstar director who makes outlandish comments and does little tap shuffle dances to the music. And sings like an angel. And is five feet tall. He's perfect!
When we sing huge, harmonic choruses and quiet, sharp hymns (we sing a ton of Christian songs but-) it's so incredibly beautiful it makes my heard want to explode.

The unico, the ultimo Tango de los Muertos just passed through town, the best damned halloween tango festival on the face of the planet. I learned (amongst so many other things) to listen for, understand, and (try to) express the melodies, rhythms, accents and empty spaces that flow over each other from the various instruments in the tango orquesta tipica (which pretty much is a list of my favourite instruments). Now listening to a tango is like laying my eyes on a masterpainting.



Tango de los Muertos was a weekend of 5am mornings, biking home in the cold through empty streets, calves aching, tired. On the last day of the festival, I decided to stay til 4am and then bike school to camp out before my 9am class. After finding that being enrolled in an electrical engineering AND a computer science class didn't give me card access to the EE/CS building, I managed to find an open third floor window and climb a few roofs to make it in. After finding I didn't have card access to the lab, I slept on the lobby sofa until the sun came up and I crept into the lab to steal a few, much more discreet z's before class.

The future is mediocre

Are you dissatisfied with the progress of technology?

Well, it turns out that you're a minority.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

Wired magazine talks about how the need/want for convenience in the digital age has encouraged "just good enough" gadgets, information formats, you name it.

Ben Hescott, computer scientist extraordinaire (who I heard about this article from) says, with a snicker, that the RSA system that protects so much of our commercial and personal communication today is also "just good enough". It relies on an unproven assumption about the hardness of certain problems involving large prime numbers. This means that everytime you go on the internet, you are "just secure enough".


But there's more. This is the flip side of just-good-enough:

The last page of the article touches on Kaiser Permanente, an integrated healthcare organisation made up of for- and non- profit groups of entities, the largest of its kind in the country. I'm not really a fan of large corporations, and they have got some negative press in the past, but as of late August 2010, I have it on reliable account that they're trying to reinvent themselves not as the-cost-concerned-HMO but the-HMO-that-cares.

Here they are, at the cutting edge:

"In 2007, Flanagin and her colleagues wondered what would happen if, instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leased space in a strip mall, set up a high tech office, and hired two doctors to staff it. Thanks to the digitization of records, patients could go to this "microclinic" for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary...

What they found is that the system performed very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic could meet 80 percent of a typical patient's needs. With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members could even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist..."

This might have a developing world ring for some of you folks out there...

To me, What Kaiser is doing sounds great, especially in the world's-least-efficient healthcare system, where incredibly high costs, extreme bureaucracy, and poor incentives for doctors and healthcare providers trap people in inefficient and non-optimal plans and systems. Don't even get me started on the whole health insurance thing.

Fun has you

The problem (I'll admit I took some liberties in defining it):

People don't care enough about their communities, cities, environment, world.

The theory:

If you want people change their behaviour, to do something, make that thing fun:

watch:

How to make throwing rubbish away fun

visit:

http://www.rolighetsteorin.se/en/ -- This word means "funny safety theory" in Swedish. Google told me so.

From using the stairs to recycling, Volkswagen of all people are devising innovative solutions to make people act more positively, and have more fun, at the same time. I hope that in the future fun will be a reliable way to make people be better people.

I think the trick is finding lowest-common-denominators (or greatest? I don't quite know) of fun. For example, I enjoy riding my bike as my primary (only) means of transportation (which makes my carbon footprint smaller), but this is rare among people. The greatest successes will come from increasing the incentives to cultivate high value-to-action behaviours like recycling and using public transport.

"Cheaper" actions like recycling will of course be easier than taking the bus. I don't like buses or trains that much, they're all plastic, often dirty, never on time, people are cold, but imagine if each bus and train car were somehow unique and interesting.

The Fun Theory is a fascinating approach, and if it's been done before, I haven't seen it as well publicised, and compellingly presented as this.

Go Sweden!