Tulsa is A-Oklahoma

Hello again, gentle reader! It's been awhile.

I haven't been completely idle-- I recently built a couple of guitars! When I tell people this they usually say "oh wow, that's impressive!" or "oh wow, that must have been really hard!" But really, it wasn't so bad at all.

Now, I'd set out to do this with the explicit idea that I would document it for my (and yours as well, gentle reader) reading pleasure and future reference (since it's quite likely not my last guitar). I am after all still young and have a lot left to do in my life. At least that's what I keep telling myself. So. Here it is!


First things first.

-Solid body instruments are much easier than hollow, and need much less tooling to accomplish. This will be A Guide for Solid Body Guitars.

-You don't need to make a neck either, if that's intimidating, since this might be your first time too. Or maybe it's not. The neck is the hardest of any single part to build, and this project was as much about having an awesome end-product as it was about making stuff myself. Sometimes, to make something really awesome, you need help from people who really know how to do things. Warmoth makes excellent necks at great prices and is very good value.

-If you think you might make more than one guitar, do them in parallel. Going through all-the-steps-of-building-a-guitar right after you went through all-the-steps-of-building-a-guitar is probably a lot more pain than doing each step for twice as long. For me, anyway.

Look at that, we're getting into useful information already.


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Now on to the concrete things.

Stuff you'll need:

A plan

-The better you know the thing that you're going to build, the easier, more efficient and less painless you'll be

Think through all the details:
-exact-as-possible lengths, depth and breadths of every part of the body
-what dimensions and heights of surfaces are required to mount hardware? (what hardware exactly? what are the dimensions of that?)
-how will you finish edges and surfaces? Is flat or curved? In how many axes?
-what tools can work on ? Where can you get use of such tools?

I'll talk through my own plan as I detail my process. I'm deliberately holding out on showing you what I did until I talk through a bit of groundwork. After all, I don't want you to build a guitar like mine, I want my guitar build to benefit yours. Before you look at my first picture too hard, work through as much of this process on your own!


Okay, NOW concrete things:

Tools

I got lucky with tooling. Here's what I ended up using:

CNC milling machine // I have access to an open workshop in town where I can use some pretty beefy machines
Circular saw // "
Bandsaw // "
Jointer // "
Drill press (and bits) // "
Soldering iron // ditto up til here
Hand drill
Power sanders (band and orbital) // these can be surprisingly cheap on ebay

Pencil
Straight edge
Right angle

Chisel(s)
Gouge(s)
Block plane
Spoke shave(s) // these all belonged to my friend Andi
Screw drivers


Friends 

I am lucky. One of my best friends is a carpenter and did some difficult (and amazing gouge work for me). If you need intros to machines or think you'll need to use tools you don't yet have access to or the skills to use, knowing the right people can be extremely helpful.


Okay, now on to
Raw materials / Parts

Here's what I used and it's just about the slimmest set of ingredients you'll be able to get a working guitar out of:

Warmoth neck (+tuners)
Wood for the body (I used maple, walnut and mahogany I bought on ebay)
Bridge (Hipshot string through)
Pickups (Graph Tech ghost saddles + summing board)
Aluminium sheet (for self made jack plate)
Assorted hardware: mono jack, screws, strap buttons, etc.

Cloth
Shellac (and alcohol)
Gun oil (Birchwood Casey Tru Oil)
Copper shielding tape

Shellac and gun oil make a beautiful, but in my case very thin finish that doesn't provide much protection to the wood. This is a conscious decision on my part that my guitar will show its age. Use a polyester or nitrocellulose finish for something more durable.


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The moment we've all been waiting for! I built two guitars, and here they are:

yes, that's the bed I sleep on.

Cool, no? Yes, they are electric, and yes, there's a lot that's strange about them. All will be clear soon enough.

**DISCLAIMER** I'm not going to teach you how to use a CNC machine, or a spoke shave, or a soldering iron, or how to glue up, or even how to string a guitar! Because if I do, I'll probably be the worst guide on the internet. If you want to do these things but don't know to do them yet, read something a real expert wrote, or get one to help you. That's what I did **DISCLAIMER**

I'm going to try as much as possible to give you knowledge you won't find anywhere else.

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My steps:

0. Make a plan! Since I'm secretly in love with Annie Clark, I decided to base my guitars on her Music Man signature model.

0.5 My plan had lots of odd details, it makes more sense to read about them as part of each step of making the guitar.
I started with the idea of a piezo-only solidbody as the ultimate rough-playing easy-setup feedback-free guitar. As I dug around the internet for anything that might help me, I found it had been done already. I also like things to have twins/siblings-- but you already knew I was weird.

0.75 Right, so, make sure you scour the internet for everything anyone's ever done in the direction of what you're doing before you start.

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1. Buy a pair of necks from Warmoth. They're Pau Ferro on Purpleheart, chosen for colour and stability when unfinished, and quite standard otherwise.

1.5 Buy wood (I decided on the neck woods for visual contrast with the body woods, and the body woods for contrast with each other. The wood itself has much less impact on the sound than neck profile, scale length, pickups, fret material, etc). This was from the outset always to be a weird guitar, and I decided on a zebra pattern of light and dark woods: maple, heart+sap walnut, mahogany.

1.75 Buy bridges from Hipshot. It's good to have neck and bridges on hand before doing any cutting or drilling, so that you can measure them for exact fits.

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2. Make some drawings. Since I only had to worry about neck and bridge positions this wasn't too hard. I found some Stratocaster and Precision Bass plans on the internet to figure out an accurate technical diagram of the neck pockets. I used Hipshot documentation and some hand measuring for the bridge drilling and placed it on the same drawing as the neck pockets. I had to do a bit of guesswork about where the nut is in relation to the pocket, but I did my best to place the bridge drilling where scale length, measured from the nut, would be in the middle of the bridge's adjustment range.

): I momentarily deleted my cad software, but if you want a .dxf of what I used, just message me and I'll make it available to you!

2.25 Ready your wood! I used the heavy duty circular saw and thickness planer at the open workshop to take each block of wood down to the required size. This really depends on what format your guitar body is gonna be, but it's almost certainly easiest to start with rectangular blocks, glue them together, and then shape that as one piece. I left a bit of extra wood on (0.5-1mm) because these were not final surfaces, and would get taken down again during other steps in the process.

2.5 Cut some wood! I built some gcode off my drawings, fed that into the CNC machine and had it cut the neck pocket and bridge drilling for me without moving the wood block. This ensures that there is minimal misalignment of bridge with neck. If you don't have access to a CNC machine, Stewart-Macdonald sells templates for routing neck pockets with a hand router, and some good ol' hand measurment for bridge drilling can work out just fine (I didn't trust myself at that point)

it's always good to do a test piece.

and it's a fit!

now let's go for it

2.75 Cut some more wood. This is a very optional step and perhaps one of the oddest things about these guitars: I didn't want a front or a back side pickguard or cavity access in order to have as much uncovered wood on the guitar as possible. I cut the cavity into the sides of each wood block before they were glued together. They would line up when the wood was joined, and the access hole would be revealed when the top of the guitar was sloped down. I had to do a bunch of fancy geometry to figure this out. If this is your route, draw it out on paper. It really helps!

2.875 If this is your first time doing something like this, you're gonna make a few mistakes for sure. Sometimes it's a drawing error, sometimes it's a machine code error because you forgot to set the tool size, sometimes it's very careless and simply not stopping a cut before the collet touches the workpiece. Don't be discouraged. Some of these are reversible, and some of these aren't so bad in the end.

oops!

oooops!! fortunately this is mostly hidden by the fretboard

the only reversible one of these three mistakes. even the correctly placed holes were too big, so I had to glue dowels in and then drill smaller holes again.

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3. Glue the body blocks together. I used simple white glue: most carpentry is done with this kind of glue: it dries stronger than the wood it will join. I made sure the blocks were the same height and the surfaces to be glued were flat and parallel, all using a jointer. This will take a fraction of a millimetre of each surface with each pass, but this is why we left extra wood on. This can be done with a hand plane if you don't have access to a jointer, but it's more work and less accurate.

3.25 Draw your body outline. I drew directly on the top of the body blank with pencil, using measurements I'd derived from pictures of the St Vincent guitar. I measured a printed drawing for that. Otherwise, templates are a good way to go. Pencil marks are quite inoffensive to wood and will get easily planed out during final finishing.  If you're gonna be making a few pieces of your own unique body shape, you can even make your own template by following the steps in this section (3.xx) but on some kind of hard particle board, acrylic, or whatever makes a good template (I don't know!)

the bass needed a bit of tweaking from the original body contour, but resulted in some very cool shapes!

3.5 Cut it out! Depending on the shape of your body, a bandsaw will suffice (as here), though with more complicated curves, you may have to use a router or CNC.I cut slightly outside the line (~1mm) and would bring the surface in with a tool that has a better finish than the band saw.

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We're getting there! Now, the laborious handwork starts. This took far more time and energy than the big cuts and machine routes.

4. I removed as much material as possible with power sanders, and basically got right down to the body outline. Maybe still just a shade outside.

4.25 I also started to cut the contours. In this case, painter's tape is really useful for marking don't-go-beyond lines, since we're removing wood on a plane that is tilted from the top of the guitar, and it's hard to keep track of this simply by eye. This didn't stop me from making a few mistakes so BE CAREFUL! (especially with the belt sander)

sorry, painter's tape not pictured. basically, you stick it on the side of a straight line that you don't want to remove material from.

4.5 Final fine-finishing work on the contours was done entirely with hand tools:
- narrow gouge for the tummy cut
- block planes for sides that didn't curve or merge with another side at acute angles
- flat and curved spoke shaves for the sides and edges: I decided on a simple 45° beveled edge both for simplicity and for a little bit of a, more angular, modern style. I like a planed surface much more than a filed or sanded one. The result is surprisingly comfortable, but doesn't compare to a rounded edge.
- various size of chisels and gouges for the two sloped sides: it was impossible to simple plane these flat as they are compound curves. This also allowed us to get a little extra definition to the boundary between the surfaces by gouging a slight hollow into the sloping side along the edge where it meets the flat top.
- surfacing plane for the flat top. Plane until you can't feel anything but complete smoothness! Don't worry-- each pass only takes of hundredths of millimetres of material. I didn't want the grain to fill up so I didn't use sandpaper. This is purely preference

Andi's workbench! you can start to see the cavity access holes emerge as the top comes down through the cavity's volume. this was all planned and fortunatel worked out great!

Andi's amazing chisel work to get shape the flat of the top around the bass bridge. you can also see a mistake I made with the belt sander just behind it.

a little extra relief at the boundary of the flat / sloped top

Andi's superfine gouge work

spoke-shaved bevel

end-on view of the bass. to note: edge and corner bevels, chisel-cut platform on the flat top, and you can also see the compound plane of the sloping top

I really like the contrast between the flat-planed and gouge-worked surfaces on this: both are delightful to the touch. The tummy cut has quite pronounced gouges, while the sloped sections have a shallower texture using a much wider radius gouge.

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5. 17 coats of shellac. I did this in a very non traditional style that's closest to Krenov-school woodworking. No stone dust, no polishing, just brush on and dry. I used a "wash" cut that was a little on the lighter side, and put on very light coats. The drying time for such an application is very fast-- just about a minute. The result is a little smoother, a little richer in colour, and retains most of the original texture of the wood. This does not protect the wood like a lacquer, french polish, or polyester finish like on most guitars-- it's just as soft as it was before. However, I intend for this guitar to show it's age and history, so I did this 100% intentionally.

mmmmmm...just look at that curl in the walnut!

5.5 8 coats of Birchwood Casey Tru Oil. Normally intended for the butt of your shotgun, this is great on guitars too. I put 8 light coats on both the body and neck (oil over shellac applied this way works just fine, as long as the shellac is dewaxed). I experimented with a bunch of different ways to apply (the internet has SO much to say about this) and in the end I found that the way that works best for me (once again a very simple application) is to have one cloth to wipe oil onto the body (this one gets quite soaked) and one cloth to wipe oil off (this one won't get so oily). Don't put on too much oil, and wipe ALL the excess off, get into corners and crevices, get it all out! The thinnest coat will also be the flattest.
The best cloth I found is old bedsheet: anything more absorbent will be hard to control and will leave application marks (my guitars have a few of those, but it's part of what I learned so you don't have to!). Oil coats take a long time to dry so be patient and don't rush through things before they are dry. Give a side ample time to dry before flipping it over and doing the other side, since oil is very good at remembered what touched it while it was wet.
Oil protects a little better than shellec, but still doesn't have much thickness or hardness to it.

5.75 I also gave the necks 8 light coats of Tru Oil each. They feel super nice.

my home oiling station

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Now it's time to put it all together!

6. Measure the hole to the cavity and make a little jack plate on the CNC machine. Once again, this is also doable with hand tools. I beveled the edges the same way I did on the body.

6.25 Mount stuff! The neck is pretty straightforward. You're looking for a tight fit. Mine was almost a little too tight, I should have put a few more fractional-mm tolerances into the pockets that I cut, but the necks went in, and tighter is obviously better than loose. The wiring had to go through the cavity before the bridge was mounted and the the saddles could only go on after the bridge was mounted, so the order of operations was pretty important.

6.375 Speaking of order of operations (and planning). I realised later while I was doing a little shakedown for this guitar, that the cavity has to be shielded, lest I pick up a mains hum. It was actually so bad that I couldn't tune the guitar-- the hum produced a constant G# on the line and the tuner wouldn't respond to anything else. I should have copper-taped the cavity before gluing the body blocks together, and/or made it a little roomier so that I wouldn't be stumbling over my own fingers trying to do it afterwards. I succeeded in copper taping the finished body after much more effort than should have been necessary, and the hum disappeared.

6.5 Finish your electronics (solder the right things together based on your plan, and make sure you connect the cavity shielding to ground). I had a simple time because I don't even have a volume pot. Use heat shrink tubing to keep connections isolated from everything else (hint: you have to put these on the wires before you solder things together, and then slip them over the joints after that). Use tape or string to keep wires neatly bundled, where applicable.

6.75 String up, set up (take as long as you need to do intonation right because this is one thing that will make your guitar sound not terrible!). It's very important to have a good tuner, and I use a Mooer Baby Tuner line-tuner to make sure I'm working with exactly what's going out of the jack.

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7. Enjoy your guitar! This one is particularly snappy and responsive. It's got a 1" thick soft-V neck (one of my preferred profiles to hold in the hand and coincidentally one of the stiffer ones), a very tight neck fit, and almost no air space in the body, all of which I think contribute to this. I don't miss having a volume control. Piezo pickups have crazy dynamic response: it's a challenge to keep a constant volume, but that's what compressors are for.

Huge (our blue friend over here, long-serving house guitarist, and yes, he is smiling) runs the guitar through a Sansamp Paradriver straight to the amp / console. On "plain" preamp it could pass for a jazz box (can't make it sound hollow enough to imitate a flat top, but this was never intended), and with the impedance matching and gain that the pedal provide, it can push an amp like any magnetic pickup-equipped guitar.

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Thanks to:

HEI -- for machine access
Christian Schürmann -- taught me to CNC. I continue to resist learning good documentation.
Andi Pfister -- for fine wood work
Ed Ricco -- for some early inspiration and a LOT of questions answered along the way. PS, this dude is also an exquisite musician.
Graph Tech -- was also very helpful and responsive with my questions

Everything is made of cheese

Life! How does it work??

Since you last heard from me, I aged eleven months, got dengue fever, got robbed, my wife done left me, and she took the kids too.


I live in Accra now, in a distinctly different situation from last year's. I work in an office in support of a small vegetable marketing project paid for by Swedes, I also contribute some to our main program as well. As sad as I am to have left wonderful Bolga for much less savoury Accra, living here affords me some priceless good things which, all in all, make it a better than fair trade.

In few words, whilst I was lonely in Bolga, I feel like I have a family now.

In conversation with a friend the other day, I mentioned a trip I will take soon to Cambridge and Vancouver to (as I said it) "see my family, and then see my biological family". Perhaps I've disobeyed the dictionary definition of the word, but my usage reflects simply how I feel about people. Y'all are functionally my family, that's why I'm coming to see you. 13th October, ya-hoo!!

Same here in Accra. I really really like the folks I've got to know and who I spend my time with. They are great people, and I'm getting super attached to them. I feel like they're becoming my family, small small. I don't want it to sound like my biological family ain't my functional family too. They are, and I adore them. I just like having a big family, and lots of it. Okay, enough mushing.



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The nature of my work and life these days means that I have much fewer photographs of it to share. I get out to field sites less, and spend more time at a desk or on the phone. Even when I visit my project, I'm more of a supervisor or asset to the program staff rather than a worker or an implementer.

Well, it is what it is.

I'll share with you a few shots I took on a site selection trip I took a while back:


Lots of cabbages!


Goats! How do they do it?


Visiting some vegetable plots at the end of the airfield when this jet flew overhead, coming in to land


A good old fashioned Ghanaian shit truck



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Living in Accra also grants me access to a bunch of other fun things to do:


Photo: James R

I had the great honour and privilege to learn to sail from the beautiful and talented Sondy Springmann, who was in town for a brief 7-week stay.

Sailing is hard (also, fun!). Teaching sailing is harder. I definitely remember an instance where I was swerving the boat all over the place because I didn't yet have the coordination to handle the sail and rudder at the same time. Sondy was guiding me while I fought the rudder in a hard turn, when her instructions stopped abruptly. I turned around to see her flying sideways out of the boat. Moments later, I was hurled out myself as the boat rolled sharply the other way and showed its keel to the sky. Thanks, Sondy, for your immense kindness and patience.

This was one of the most perfectest days I've had in recent memory. Remember the old Nor Easter times? Same joy. There I was sailing on the Volta estuary: perfect temperature, leaning out of a speeding sailboat over flat water, with nice breeze, sunshine through the clouds, surrounded by palm trees and in the company of some of the nicest and warmest people I know or have met at the absolutely brilliant one-and-only Ghana Sailing Club. Throw in some cold beers and a hot barbeque, and you got yourself a recipe for paradise right there.

I'll omit the part where James and I capsized and half-sank an old, leaking Hobie cat and needed a rescue tow.


Photo: Sondy S

I've also been climbing a lot. In this picture, the right honourable James Regulinski, the lovely Danielle Knueppel and good ol' yours truly crushing on the Bat Cave, T-Rex, and Kelly's Corner/the Grand Deception respectively, from left to right. Okay, everyone crushes their routes except me. Kelly's Corner sounds like a cute little bakery and cafe where the pastries are sweet and the coffee is strong, but it's more like a medieval torture device or an extended camping trip with the in-laws. And that, my friends, is the grand deception.

Getting a couple of hours out of the city every weekend to a green green place with great views and even better company, climbing rocks and making jokes, does wonders for my sanity and general well-being. A nice side benefit is that I'm getting in some shape from pulling on rocks all the time. I don't think I've ever before in my life developed so much excess strength or ability, and moved with so much...confidence? Not quite the word, but something like it.



--- this next section is rambly, skip to the end if you'd like



I've been thinking a lot, recently, about money. Everything costs money. Well, lots of stuff does. Money helps you do things, it "gets you to where you wanna go". Money's good to have handy, but it also ain't no good if you don't spend it.

I've started to keep a loose track of my net worth with spread sheets and graphs, to see what the trends are. Nothing too obsessive, just a sample of each of my accounts once every two weeks. Fortunately, I find I'm net saving money since I got here. Unfortunately, I've been spending beyond my means for the last month or so.

I'm pretty sure I know the major offender in this case: a few thousand miles on aeroplanes. Of course, I ain't complaining. This is money I'm gladly spending. It's also money that's made me reflect on, understand and get a better idea what's important to me. The big picture. I've recently gained some wisdom about how money can buy happiness and I have some thoughts of my own to add. I've learned a ton of stuff from the rest of this blog, I highly recommend it.



Each day that passes, I realise more and more that I'm a(n extremely) social animal (an animal, certainly). Those who know me probably don't think I'm particularly extroverted or outgoing, and they'd be right, I ain't. But I'm definitely social, and I'll define it thus: "I want and need to spend lots of time with people, especially excellent people, especially people I like and care about. How I feel, what I think about and what I do, and the basis for the decisions I make all depend very strongly on the people around me and who matter the most to me." Community, family, so on.



So I've started to evaluate my expenditure based on whether and how it will improve my happiness, with the perspective gained from this key knowledge (how my money goes towards increasing the amount and/or quality of time I can spend with people and so on).



Sample evaluation of spending:

-Motorcycle (yes, I now ride a motorcycle): helps me see folks more frequently and easily: meet them places, call on them. Therefore, this is a good purchase. Admittedly, I quite like things that go fast on two wheels...and this motorcycle sure does go fast. The other great thing about motor vehicles in Ghana is that it's pretty easy to re-sell, and they hold their value well.

-Climbing gear: helps me not bum climbing gear off my friends, or helps me bring friends climbing, also adds infrastructure and enables us to climb more and different things. Therefore, this is a good purchase. Admittedly, it's nice to have toys again! I don't own that much stuff in any case, and it's a durable good, so not a constant expenditure.

-Going to restaurants nicer than I would usually: a chance to spend more time with dear friends. If I really have to put up with nice food for that, then I guess I have to live with that (: It's probably not all that much money in the grand scheme of things.

-A few thousand miles on aeroplanes: helps get me to where my peeps are, helps me and folks get to somewhere where we are going to have an extremely opportune, well justified and legitimately bad ass awesome time this November (you'll know who you are and where we're going when you read this)




You get the picture. It seems pretty straightforward (to me at least), but I didn't always think this way. Now that I do, it's doing wonders for my conscience and peace of mind. I'm instinctively a very financially conservative person, so it was a real leap to take to start spending more than I make. I almost need a list of things-I-won't-say-no-to.

Certainly, I won't (can't) spend more than I earn in the long run. All things considered, I'm quite risk averse with money and do save most --literally (and much) more than half!-- of what precious little I make here. I'll come out on top. And in any case, I still have significant savings, and I do have a few safety nets. I own a wee bit of stock...



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That's all for now, folks. You might see more out of me, you might not. Writing takes time and energy and free space, but sometimes I also feel like I just have something I want to write down: to get it out and help me think it through, for posterity, you know, all that.

They're two opposing pressures, the cost and the benefit, the can and the want, and every time one of them overcomes the other, you'll see something go up here. And sometimes, it just comes: I basically wrote this in one take, where I usually do a few re-drafts and lots of editing.

Until next time, gentle reader...lost of love, yours truly, Jungle Boy, Sushi Roll, or whatever else you might know me as.

Notorious BRB

There's been a small drought of blog posts out of me lately. I know I promised a blog about work but it's surprisingly hard, after long days in the hot sun followed by reports about what happened on long days in the hot sun, to write blogs about long days in the hot sun. Even though I'm enjoying this job more everyday.

It's hard to take photos that would go well on blogs when I'm focused on taking detail photos of pumps and trying to fit whole gardens into my viewscreen, like in this exciting little number!

I'll try to sneak in some photos of farmers gardening or kids playing or something.

Anyway, more extra exciting things are happening at work and I'm so excited that I just might write about them. So don't worry about the title of this post, it's not that I'm taking a hiatus from writing this, all will come in its own time. Meanwhile, here's a short list of things on my radar:

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In no particular order:

1. Lee Kuan Yew is "officially" out. I think this is a very good public step, albeit after firmly establishing the Lee Dynasty in Singapore government, and it's uncertain what he will do "despite" being out of office.

2. On a related note, Singapore just had its "most upsetting" election recently. I say "bout damn time". Everyone on "both sides of the government" is talking about how the political climate in Singapore is changing and that's a good thing. Singapore has a very uncommon but also quite nuanced political situation, and it's hard to recommend a good source that will describe the whole picture.

I found quite a few neat places to get very sharp, objective opinions and information about it, a couple of articles I really liked are here at molly meek and here at the online citizen. They might be a bit dense if you don't already know some about Singapore politics, but they get my super snobby stamp of approval.

Unfortunately, most Singaporeans would prefer to read utter drivel from Xia Xue (who I only just found out about before the elections). I wrote in a very polite comment to clarify five thousand factual mistakes she made but she predictably wouldn't let it go up, so maybe when it rolls around to "that time of the month" I'll write a heartfelt blog about why Xia Xue is the worst blogger in the entire sphere.

3. Since this has been so many words (and so much about politics!) and I have resolved to give more pictures and fewer words, I'll only add...huh, well maybe that was it. Well, this isn't news, I found out that the King of Thailand is a super amazing awesome jazz musician poet writer olympic sailor and apparently a really great guy to boot. And there's a huge controversy about the death of his brother (originally chosen to be king), and that Thai politics are quite brutal and sad but also very interesting and occasionally inspiring.

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4. I'm also getting pretty decent at the guitar, learning about keys and intervals and chord structures as I learn how to play un-tabbed songs by ear and transpose them around. I think that this extra music knowledge might help me learn the piano again.

Africa is a country

Now here's a sensitive and controversial subject, also the name of a blog I enjoy reading, you might have noticed from my google reader shared feed.

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Here's the issue:

A lot of people (most markedly, in my experience, outspoken white development workers) get upset if you say "Africa" carelessly, as if you were referring to a country ("have you been to Africa?" / "I'm going to Africa") rather than a continent. It's such a geographically and culturally diverse place, and actually has 53 countries (note that there would be MANY many more if Africans had drawn the lines on cultural and ethnic boundaries, rather than colonists on geographic ones).

Note2: saying "Asia" is just as bad --probably worse-- by the same logic, but people are much less bothered by that (I think it's because people 'think "Africa" is poor but "Asia" is not', which is also completely false)

I understand some where the frustration of outspoken white development workers (OWDW) comes from {probably ignorant whitefolk -- I use this carelessly. Here in Ghana, if you ain't black, you white. A fairer-skinned African-American is considered white(!!)}.

(As for OWDWs, perhaps I fit the bill, although I don't consider myself a development worker, don't like the word "development", do not believe in development aid and agencies and most NGOs, and usually outspeak about non-"development" things)

But, consider this:

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There are some powerful trends and similarities across the whole (sub-saharan part, anyway) continent, and on top of that, in my experience black Africans are intensely patriotic about their mother land / continent, and their black skin, and the brother/sister hood they feel it gives them. Black Africans: Ghanaians, Tanzanians, Kenyans in my experience will say "Africa" and "Africans" carelessly, without blinking twice. Perhaps there is an "Africa". Imagine a OWDW trying to lecture them that there isn't.

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Anyway, I usually (and uncharacteristically wimpily) choose an uncommitted and neutral approach to this and always use country names. By following that rule, I can forget about the whole big hoo-hah and focus on more immediately pressing things, like my job.

I wrote about this to a good friend of mine, and here's what she said in reply (which I found fascinating and enlightening, and which made me smile to read):

"...I also learned that almost all Africans (Neil Turok...SA...Cameroonian...Nigerian) *always* talk about Africa. Thinking about regions not in terms of artificially established (colonial) borders is very empowering for the people in my opinion -- the whole radical socialist movement in Latin America always talks about "our fatherland America". Splintering is almost always a means to suppression..."

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So I'll leave you with just that. There's no conclusion to this one.

MX missile proof

Anyone catch the Andrew Bird reference?

I chipped a tooth today, took a whole corner off, in fact. Unlike in the song, I didn't fall upon the ground, but rather bit upon a rock in my rice.

I've been eating the local red rice despite the rocks because it's not possible to find unpolished imported rice, so I guess I had it coming.

Despite the whole "local vs import" hoohah I wrote about some while back, seeking local is still instinctive for me, and I wonder if I would not have eaten local rice if I knew this would happen.

I wonder how many Ghanaians chip their teeth every year. I wonder where/if/how they get them fixed.

hot hot heat

I'd forgot what it feels like to have a hangover, thanks to years of uncharacteristically responsible drinking...

...that is, until I got here. Everytime I go out, I come home feeling like a beef jerky with a splitting headache. Even thought I drink (like) ten litres of water a day. I guess I'm pretty good at sweating it all out. Today's high: 45 (113) degrees

Oh yeah. And yesterday we had a surprise hail storm.

A courtesy picture of the countryside. I think this place is described as a "mid desert" or something like that. Much drier than the tropical south, but more vegetation (and water, when there is water) than a true desert.

Quite a pleasant place, really. Some of the biggest trees here are mango trees. I never associated mango trees with big-ness, but there they are, huge lush thick green trees surrounded by sand and dust and dead grass.

A musing

A few things I'm thinking about:

1. The forecasts for tomorrow get as high as 49 (120 for the uncivilised) depending on the station. That's really hot. I think my beets are dying.

2. Having no water is much worse than having no electricity. It's the classic water-and-diamonds economics lesson, except that electricity is a much more water-like good than diamonds. Thank god the electricity is back and we've still got a few drops of water in the tank (the supply has stopped).

3. I seem to find myself in very news-isolated places. I found out about the Jogjakarta volcano eruption via an email and the Sendai earthquake via a gchat.

4. That said, I think we're missing the point about the recent disaster. Read (also in my reader feed). In contrast, the 2010 Haiti quake was 2 magnitudes (1000x) smaller, but killed 300,000++

5. I've been making (and enjoying) my own kimchi / sauerkraut. It's quick and easy: about the same amount of time to make fried cabbage. Also, every statistically long-living people eats some kind of lacto-fermented food.

Stand by for a blog (soon, with pictures) about life, work and happenings.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not

Most people who found out I was heading to Ghana asked me if I was going there for humanitarian or even missionary work. This was especially true with Singaporeans. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's certainly a little disappointing, and demonstrates a very narrow world view. Of course, it's not the faults of the people who hold them.

Singaporeans grow up quite sheltered, and most of them probably still think Africa is a land of starving children and that the only thing to do there is to preach the word of God or hand out sacks of rice and build houses.

This is quite the contrary to what I'm actually doing here!

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I've had to explain my job to a lot of people, and it comes out different every time. It's actually a bit difficult and tricky to explain. Here's one attempt, for your benefit. But first, allow me to apologise. I'm trying really hard for most of my posts to be more pictures than words. This one is a big offender, but I had to write it, as much for posterity as for a convenient link to send to people if they ask what I do and I don't want to come up with an explanation.

I promise it will never happen again.

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I work at IDE in Ghana

IDE's tag line is "creating income opportunities for the rural poor". I think that's a pretty good description, but the devil (details) is still under the hood. How exactly does it do this?

IDE does a special kind of business and industry development, focused on products and services that will give people who use them better options and opportunities to increase their income. To this end, it acts as some mixture of a coach and consultant to all the parties involved along the way: manufacturers, dealers, service providers, and farmers.

A key difference between IDE and other "do-good" institutions is the principle that the work of local businesses and industry will achieve poverty reduction. IDE doesn't actually do anything to stop poverty, but it helps train people and build systems to be good at it.

Furthermore, IDE operates in the "real world". While IDE is itself a donor-funded non-profit, everything they help build or create in a country is self-supporting, so as to persist long after IDE leaves the picture and to flourish and grow beyond that. Another key difference is simply that IDE ever leaves the picture at all: the businesses it works with are cultivated to become independent and self sufficient, in start contrast to the work of most "development" agencies.

I think they have the right idea. It's hardly romantic (like education or health or peace programs tend to be), especially not in the details, but I think it's an equally worthwhile cause with very achievable goals.*

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So, this description is all still very theoretical, and what do I do, anyway?

Here's what IDE has done so far in Ghana (there are many more examples of what IDE does in a book called Out of Poverty, by its founder Paul Polak):

IDE found that there are a lot of (poor, small land area) farmers in Ghana who grow vegetables irrigated by hand. They carry water in buckets from rivers, or lift it from wells. By IDE's assessment, if they had more efficient means to use or obtain water, they could grow much more vegetables (the demand is huge in Ghana) and make a lot more money, especially during the dry season where water is scarce and vegetables are expensive.

IDE tested some foot-powered pumps for lifting water out of wells and found farmers' responses favourable. They worked with manufacturers who were willing to produce them and connect them to dealers who were willing to sell them, as well as a credit organisation who was willing to help farmers finance them.

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I work on a few things. One of them is a system for monitoring the impact or result of this new product on the lives of the people who use them. Another related thing is a set of protocols for testing and getting data on new products for Ghana, such as drip irrigation kits that are on their way here right now. The last thing is improvements to different parts of the system where pumps get made and make their way to a farmers' fields where they are installed. It's quite a mixed bag of things.

So this is my curious and somewhat bizarre first job. So far, it's going well. In the coming weeks, you'll see (I plan to put up) loads of pictures of and very few words about all the goings on over here in Ghana.

*An aside: I think that every initiative that will get anywhere in saving the world** is rooted in business. Profitable ventures are the only things that reliably grow and multiply. A ton of successful health and social ventures in "developing" countries rely on innovative business models to deliver much needed products and services to the people who have the poorest access to them. This is a shining example.

**Not that I'm trying to save the world or think it's something to strive for at all***. "Save the world" is such a vague idea anyway!

***That said, I do have some principles. I'd much rather help poor people get richer than rich people get richer, for example, and I'd rather repair the environment rather than damage it.

small joys

-eating a mango so ripe it was like drinking mango juice

-washing my face afterwards

Hunky dory

It's hot here. Easily 40 degrees at noon, usually even higher. For those of you who use uncivilised units, that's 104 degrees.

I'm getting used to life in Bolga, slowly feeling out all the different bits of living.

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This means taking trips out to Navrongo and Paga where IDE's work happens, taking everything in, trying to understand it all and fit into the spheres of work I've been assigned to (in a blog, coming soon!).

It was great to finally see the countryside and put faces to the farmers that IDE's work in Ghana (so far) revolves around. Every time I go to "the field", I get a headache. I wonder if it's the heat, or sun, or dehydration. I try to drink as much water as I can, but I can get never my pee to turn clear no matter how hard I try....

the road to Burkina

a desert oasis, complete with ornamental Baobab

a wild crocodile!

this old man is an amazing farmer (and a total sweetheart)

just check out his farm!

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My humble abode is really coming together. This weekend, I went wild and bought a complete kitchen including a fifteen kilo LPG bottle, which definitely weighed more than fifteen kilos full as I carried it home on the back of a motorbike.

Next week: cupboards, beds and furniture.

My nutrition is probably twice as good now that I can cook for myself and no longer need to eat out. I can finally eat all the beans I want to, and loads of tomatoes and cabbages and vegetables that aren't cooked by boiling them in oil for an hour. I almost took photos of myself cooking but couldn't bring myself to (sorry).

Next time. Pinkie promise.

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Another thing I'm getting terribly excited about is revising the water systems in my house. Right now, the kitchen sink, shower and bathroom sink all empty to different drains and patches of dirt around the house, which is a pretty sad and inefficient system for a desert.

By my reckoning, I could build a vegetable bed for every water outlet of the house with just a little bit of water routing PVC magic. I hear that most plants appreciate the extra nitrogen, potassium, and other goodies in mildly soapy water.

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I'm also getting familiar with the neighbourhood, walking to corner stores and vegetable stands for groceries. I met by pure chance a gentleman on the street who'd just started a NGO doing water and sanitation infrastructure and education around the area. He was a neat guy. We sat and had soft drinks (since he's muslim) and talked about our lives and our work.

People here are amazingly friendly and good natured. The other day, a child stopped me on the street to tell me I'd dropped a few cedis (dollars), and nobody I meet here or who talks to me tries to sell me anything or gets in my face like people do in Accra and Kumasi.


Life here is nice.

Really nice. I tried to capture it in this blog but can't do it justice.

sama sama di mana mana

I've finally made it to Accra (after some delays),

and I'm strangely comfortable again. This has happened too frequently over the past two weeks. I left comfort in Oecusse to settle into Dili and feel at home for a day, before a brief stay with similar feelings in Bali, an excellent week in Singapore, a few days in Abu Dhabi and now, Accra.

Accra is big, and my neighbourhood is new to me, but I feel at home already: walking around the dusty streets and buying vegetables from the nice women who own a produce stand down the road.

However, I'm not going to be around here for much longer. I'm discussing my work arrangements with my (super amazing) boss and it looks like I will be sent to the hot, dry and windy Upper East region, where most of the action is right now. It sounds really really exciting. Much more exciting than I make it sound and much more than IDE lets on here.

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This evening, as I wandered around the dusty neighbourhood, I watched huge flocks of bats fly across the sky. I think there could have easily been a few million bats. Looking up, there were thousands of bats in the sky at one go, and they never stopped coming.

I was completely speechless. Then I reached for my camera, and found that like an idiot, I'd left it in my room. I'll have my camera on me next time, and future posts will be full of Ghanaian wonder.

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I need a compass. I'm really surprised I haven't bought one yet. I always navigate using the cardinal directions, and I usually get my bearings from the sun.

It's easiest in the morning and evenings (by finding east and west) but gets really confusing around noon, especially here at the equator. It's hard to tell north and south when the sun is directly overhead, even more so since at noon, shadows don't always point north or south because of the Earth's seasonal tilts.

Therefore, I need a compass. I don't know why I don't own one yet.

Terminal man

Okay, I've officially been in this airport for twenty four hours. I think that's long enough to say I've lived here.

Flight cancellations (riots in Cairo), new tickets, last minute surprises and calls to Ghana to get proof of employment, I've done it all.

Eating, reading, sleeping, exercise, music, movies, I could live in here...if I really had to. Of course, it's better than farting around outside in Dubai.

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When I woke up this morning, I couldn't find my little clarinet in its little briefcase. When I finally went to the airport police's lost and found office, they told me someone probably took it thinking it had money in it.

Good day to you, sir.

Just like gazpacho

The Singapore education system is weird. Silly, even. All through primary school (which the colonies call elementary school) we had these big exams twice a year. The English ones always ended in an essay. Some questions asked us to discuss a topic or idea, others gave us a title or a sentence to start.

I hated these page long exercises in making up bullshit to satisfy teachers.

When I was in secondary one (which the colonies call the seventh grade) I had a friend named Geoffrey. Geoffrey was (and still is, I think) a very uncommon person. He (we) played a bunch of video games, and he introduced me to an Ender's Game-like (similarly high quality) series of science fiction books and other neat stuff. He is also extremely christian. I wonder how he is now.

For one of the big exams that year (either mid-year or year final), we had a particularly prickly list of questions. I'm going to tell you the story of the question Geoffrey chose and his answer, because it is pure, distilled genius.

It's brilliant because of its sheer ironic and comedic genius in the face of the stodgiest education system in the world, and brilliant because of the unlikely person who wrote it.

I remember it like it was only yesterday.

Keep in mind that the person who wrote this was twelve years old. Notice how he displays all the marks of an excellent author. The central conflict is simple, but despite the leanness of detail and characters, each is substantial and important. Geoffrey details and times his tale carefully, spiking it with irony and humour that is both innocent and self-aware. He demonstrates patience and instinct for writing and storytelling far beyond his age. You'll see.

I used some, but not many liberties in reproducing this text. I wonder if the original still exists.

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PS: it's even more entertaining to have a friend read this to you

Question 1:

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"

Answer:

Revenge is a dish best served cold, just like gazpacho.

Pierre was an excellent gazpacho chef. In fact, he was the world's best gazpacho chef, having won the World Gazpacho Federation's Best Gazpacho Chef title five years running. This year, he prepared to take the title for a sixth time. Pierre traveled all over France, selecting the freshest tomatoes, the crispiest onions and the most fragrant herbs to make the perfect gazpacho yet again.

However, Pierre was not the only chef with his eyes on the trophy. His nemesis Edouardo, with whom he had a long and bitter rivalry, also had designs to win Best Gazpacho Chef. Edouardo owned a restaurant just down the street from Pierre's, and it did not help their relationship that Pierre consistently had better business, and that Edouardo had come in second to Pierre in the Best Gazpacho Chef competition for five years running.

Under the lights at the stadium, hundreds of chefs were hard at work, slicing tomatoes and crushing garlic. The whirr of blenders filled the air. As the clock counted down, Pierre put the finishing touches on his world famous gazpacho, and put a couple of cold packets into the bright red soup. A family secret passed down through generations, the cold packets chilled the gazpacho to the perfect temperature.

Unfortunately for Pierre, his cold packets were not the last thing to go into his gazpacho. Not willing to leave the contest up to the judges, Edouardo had discovered Pierre's secret and slipped a pair of hot packets into his gazpacho while he was unaware.

To add insult to treachery, he stole two of Pierre's cold packets and put them into his own soup. With Pierre out of the way, and his own soup perfectly chilled, Edouardo won the contest by a fair margin. Pierre was the laughing stock of the World Gazpacho Federation for serving warm gazpacho.

Pierre was dejected, and vowed that he would take back the title that was rightfully his. He spent most of the next year in seclusion, honing his skills and perfecting his recipes. His wife and daughter were very supportive of him, in spite of his very public embarrassment believed that he had been sabotaged.

The next year, Pierre returned to the World Gazpacho Federation against all expectations, and was received with laughter and sneers. As contest was about to begin, Edouardo and Pierre glared at each other across the stadium, knives drawn.

Once again, the stadium was alive with chefs mincing onions and chopping peppers. The air was full with the sound of buzzing blenders. As time drew near, Pierre put the finishing touches on his gazpacho and dropped a pair of cold packets into the soup.

Edouardo planned to ruin Pierre and take the title for the second time, and once again whilst his attention was diverted, slipped two hot packets into Pierre's soup, and took two cold packets for his own.

Little did Edouardo know that they were not merely cold packets that he had stolen, but new extra-cold packets that Pierre had developed over the last year. The extra-cold packets were much too cold and quickly turned his gazpacho into ice. Pierre's gazpacho, with two hot and two extra-cold packets in it, came to the perfect temperature.

Pierre reclaimed his title to cheers and applause, and Edouardo was expelled from the World Gazpacho Federation for unsporting conduct. Pierre went on to expand his restaurant and write a number of highly acclaimed cookbooks, while Edouardo suffered a nervous breakdown and is now in a mental institution.

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Okay, I took a few too many liberties with the last paragraph. The moral of the story is, don't f--- with the French.

Mystère et boule de gomme

Timor is one of a surprising number of countries that use the US dollar as their currency. I've always found this idea fascinating, and puzzled over the idea quite a bit.

Where do they get their US dollars from? (They obviously don't print it, but they don't get bills by simply pulling paper money out of the US economy either: that would affect the US monetary system, actually causing disinflation)

How does the US feel about this?

Is it safe for (someone like you or me) to use a currency not guaranteed by the government of the country we are in?

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I did some homework on this, and it turns out that it's much less wild and crazy than I thought.

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First of all, the US actually encourages other countries to use its dollar. It helps supply their paper currency. This actually helps stabilise volatile emerging economies by fixing their interest rates and inflation to the (presumably) more stable and conservative US economy and monetary policy.*

*(although it's also criticised for contributing to the attitudes and sentiments that brought about the last economic crisis)

Having other people use their dollars is actually in the US's interest: it makes countries like Ecuador and Panama much more reliable trading partners.

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You don't have to read on:

If you haven't already figured out, I'm a pretty nerdy guy. Secretly, I read four or five different economics blogs. On one of them, I found an interesting bit of theory and speculation:

Gregory Mankiw, a high-profile and extremely influential US economics advisor (whose book on macroeconomics I used in college) famously wants to abolish the penny.

What does this spell for a country like El Salvador, which uses US currency, and which also has such a low price index that many common transactions happen in cents, and where people often need to break dollar bills to get change?

Could a country like that cope with adhering to US policy or would transaction volumes become impractical? What if they kept the penny legal tender and all the pennies from the US flowed there? How much would that be? (Billions?) (Is the size of their economy such that) it would cause catastrophic hyperinflation?

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I find currencies with "outrageous" units endearing, like Indonesian Rupiah, where it's about 10000 to the dollar, and 1 rupiah is meaningless. Ghana used to have a similar currency but they have since issued new currency with 1/10000 of the value.

I know, isn't it a shame?

Some charm remains: people in Ghana still talk in old currency even though they use new paper: they say "thousand" to mean ten cents" and "ten thousand" or sometimes "ten" to mean a dollar.