I’ve just donated some money, so I can vouch for the fact that the service works, and offers several options for payment, including credit cards and PayPal. And what’s even nicer is that a band of Kenyan bloggers will be directly involved in the purchase and distribution of the supplies. According to Juliana, “on Thursday the 17th of January the bloggers in Nairobi will meet at the mamamikes office, assist in purchasing all the items and delivering them to the Red Cross.”
Over at Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, David Sasaki has just announced the latest round of Rising Voices grant recipients. Among them is the Rising Voices project’s first Caribbean grantee: “Diary of an Inmate”, a Jamaica-based project which will attempt to counter the veneration of badboys and gang leaders by training prison inmates to blog and podcast. The project’s founder, Kevin Wallen, who has been doing exemplary work among inmates in Jamaica’s penal institutions through an organisation called (Students Expressing Truth), outlined the project as follows:
Through blogging, inmates will be able to tell their stories. They will be able to paint a realistic picture of life behind bars and the consequences of crime. Currently, Jamaica’s music and media idolize the ‘badman’ or ’shotta’ and portray as role models those who have been incarcerated. Many of our youths now think that prison is a ‘cool’ place to be, until they themselves are faced with the harsh truth. The Diary of an Inmate blog will allow all Jamaicans to learn about the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system with the hope that this will counteract the false ideas implanted by the media.
Congrats to Kevin and the “Diary of an Inmate” project. I look forward to seeing the results of this interesting experiment. And to the rest of you potential Caribbean applicants: what are you waiting on?
(9:52pm Barcelona time) Pictured above, my cabin in the Yotel at Gatwick airport, and also the reason I still feel vaguely human after having spent most of last night on a plane and been shaken out of REM sleep at the equivalent of 2am Trinidad time to disembark.
I knew nothing of the Yotel’s existence until, having been told by EasyJet that I couldn’t check in for my flight to Barcelona six hours ahead of time, I was wandering around that odd zone in Gatwick that accommodates both arrivals and departures looking for somewhere to park myself and my bags and came upon a poster advertising short-term accommodation starting at £25 for four hours. This sounded way too reasonable by London standards (a pre-packaged Coronation Chicken sandwich in Boots runs you about £25 these days), but as I still had five hours and 55 minutes to kill I figured I’d at least take a look at this Yotel thing.
Within minutes of arriving in the Yotel’s vestibule, which, bathed in a soft purplish glow, reminded me of cross between a space ship and an ultra-modern medical dispensary, Julien, the pleasant young front desk clerk who turned out be from Martinique, had checked me in and dispatched a member of the cleaning staff to prepare my cabin. While I was waiting, Julien told me that Yotels are being planned for Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol.
The Yotel’s cabins are a study in the judicious use of space–if you’re carrying extra-large suitcases you’d be better of leaving them with the left luggage service. A narrow passage separates a padded cubicle containing an elevated bed from a glass-walled stall with shower, sink and toilet. Should you require a work desk, a pull-down table and folding stool are provided, as is both wired and wifi internet access. The bed linen was impeccable and the mattress struck the perfect balance between firmness and give. Once I’d changed into sleepwear, pulled down the blinds in the cabin door window and turned off the lights, it took me no time to fall into a coma-grade sleep.
A few hours later my PDA alarm told me it was time to get up and deal with EasyJet. My body didn’t want to co-operate, but I promised it that if it did, it would be rewarded with a warm Yotel shower.
I’m willing to bet that this will be the best £25 I spend this entire trip.
- That American Airlines (AA) does not suck on every, single level. After delaying my flight out of JFK on Monday (fuel leaking into the a/c of the original aircraft, (unionised?) crew claiming illness as a result) and causing me to miss my connection out of Miami, I received an e-mail this morning from AA customer service apologising abjectly for the screw-up and offering me 5,000 bonus miles. This doesn’t quite make up for the fact that the meal vouchers they gave me could only be used at the hotel where they put me up, and where US$15 covers the cost of a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee, but it’s better than nothing. Now that I have enough miles for a reward ticket, I guess I’ll be forced to break my vow of never flying AA again.
- That there’s another pilgrimage to Mecca besides the Hajj. (Thanks to Amira for this one, or rather to Amira’s mother, who’s Umrah-ing in Mecca as we speak).
Those who check in on my Flickr page would have noticed (some of with great relief, I’m sure) that I’d sort of burned out on the bird photography. Thing is, there are just so many ways to shoot a Blue Gray Tanager.
Here in Tobago, however, I’ve become obsessed with the several varieties of hummingbird that frequent my uncle’s bird feeder. Capturing good photos of these hyperactive creatures poses an entirely new set of challenges, some of which — patience? — I’m pleasantly surprised at my willingness to embrace. I’ve also noticed that they have really short legs.
Pictured above is one of two (or three, if you count the orange shawl someone handed to me, just like that, in a restaurant last night) delightful gifts I received yesterday.
José Gregorio joins Babe the Blue Ox and others in one of my own personal pantheons — that comprising lovely and unusual gifts given to me by close friends.
I’ve been getting a real kick lately out of photographing birds in my garden. Almost every morning I position myself behind the breeze blocks in the laundry room to see who shows up for his/her share of the fruit on the makeshift bird-feeder next to the water tank.
One of the folks at the breakfast table this morning was this Bare-Eyed Thrush (Turdus nudigenis). My growing collection of bird photos is here.
Doing the laundry this morning, a flash of yellow caught my eye through the breeze blocks. It was the subject of this photo, alighting on the fence. I ran for my camera, hoping he would stay put for a few minutes, and, miraculously, he did.
I don’t know much about birds. The fact that I even recognise this one as a yellow oriole is largely because of that Nestlé promotion the bookmann wrote about back in January. But being able to look out of my laundry room and see one of these is one of the many small reasons I remain in this place.
In an e-mail I had from him recently, Marvin — who became a Stanford Digital Vision Fellow last year — tells me he’s been working on a project called Robotics Stimul-I, which will use LEGO robotics workshops to motivate children in Jamaica’s inner city communities to increase their literacy and numeracy. This coming July he’ll be launching a six-month pilot in Kingston, which will also offer workshops in filmmaking, photography and music. He’ll also be preparing a team to compete in the 2007 World Robotics Olympiad in Taipei, Taiwan in November.
Marvin’s work excites me not only because the teaching of science and math are two seriously deficient areas in the Caribbean education system, and because I feel that educators in this region are routinely failing to connect with the ways that children in the 21st century learn. It excites me as well for the very basic reason outlined here by Ethan:
Marvin sees a very stark choice for the youth he’s working with - they exercise their minds through robotics or other forms of creative expression, or there’s a good chance they’ll end up trapped in the violence that surrounds them.
So take a look at Marvin’s video. And a side note to Machel, just in case he and his crew decide to get copyright-happy on me for running a video that uses one of his tracks: “We Not Givin’ Up” is the perfect soundtrack for this programme. You should be proud they used it.
