More news from the middle of the Atlantic

Some of you, and by that i mean none, might remember one of my neighbors in Cachaco, Arlinda.  She is a cooker, baker, alcohol maker extrodinarre, and thankfully has the luck of having not only I, but another amazing Peace Corps volunteer living next door.  Below is the project the PCV is working on to make her place more official and welcoming to tourist and locals alike.  I can honestly say that while this project is focusing on one lady, the benefits will be felt by many.  She has and will need help, and that means she will have other women or girls helping her, which means they will make some money, have a small job and maybe be able to partner or go off on their own.  Studies show that helping women helps everybody.  

Cafe Business Startup

The summary below was provided by the Peace Corps Volunteer and the community administering this project.

Map of CAPE VERDE

The objective of this project is to provide the means necessary to enable a single local woman, to create and run a small home-style restaurant and catering business. In doing so, the ultimate goal is to create a much-needed source of sustainable monthly income for this woman and her three children. The village is a remote and impoverished rural community of about 400 people on an island of Cape Verde. The village is located at the entrance to a national park – “Parque Natural de Monte Gordo” (PNMG). It is the islands primary tourist attraction. Such opportunities are scarce in these small rural towns, where unemployment can run from 40-50% and the vast majority of the island population depends on subsistence agriculture and or foreign remittances from family members living and working abroad. Overcoming this challenge through creating sustainable opportunities, locally, is one of the primary goals of the government and people of Cape Verde.

More specifically, the goal is to increase the monthly personal income of the project beneficiaries by 75% after the first three months of business operation. In order to do this, the business will need to turn a minimum monthly operating profit of 11.250$00 CVE (approx. $137 USD) per month. Of this amount, a minimum of 25% (2.813$00 CVE/ $34 USD- approx./rounded) will be designated to be set aside into a personal savings account. The remaining money will be available for household/family expenses and or for reinvestment into the business. As a community leader and President of the local women’s association, she will serve as a powerful example for empowering other women to pursue similar entrepreneurial endeavors. The required resources will be obtained through a combination of the donated funds received, local funds and locally donated material and labor: • Construction of a bathroom with functioning toilet and sink (restaurant) • Structural improvements made to the outside patio “dining area” (restaurant) • Miscellaneous business supplies and marketing costs such as printing business cards and other relevant promotional materials targeted towards the tourist market

If you have questions about this or other projects, email our office

Go directly to the peace corps website to donate to this project: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=655-024

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What is the Totality?

It is the high residues of hazardous and potentially lethal chemicals inside your fat cells. It is you sitting inside and turning on the television or computer on a beautiful day. It is you shopping when you are depressed. It is the feeling you get that something is missing. It is your worries that a fire may destroy all of your possessions and your plans to try and take them with you. It is the thought that tells you to go on a diet. It is the excess fat on your body. It is the headache that won’t go away. It is the bleeding in your intestines from years of pain alleviating drug use. It is the birth defects of your children. It is your killer when you die from a car accident. It is your savior when it attempts to fill your void for you. It is your carpal tunnel syndrome. It is your tumor. It is your expensive coffin and burial clothing. It is the drugs you take when you need an escape. It is the bulldozer that destroyed the woods you might have known so well. It is the towering skyscraper that makes you feel forever tiny and powerless. It is your boss. It is minimum wage, it is maximum wage.

It is your prison, sometimes with bars, sometimes without. It is all your fears. It is what is keeping you up at night. It is the lock on your door. It is the bullet in your gun. It is your noose and your tie. It is that thing that you don’t want to do, but you feel that you have to. It is the turned cheek. It is the cold shoulder. It is the ad that tells you the internet will provide affection for you. It is the new appliance that you never knew existed, but you can’t live without. It is poverty. It is inequality. It is the sink or swim economy. It is the thing that has categorized you. It has stopped you from doing the things you want. It is what makes you jealous. It is your hate. It is your love. It is your purgatives that you feel might be somewhat strange. It is your clenched fist. It is your mace spray.

It is the police. It is the nightstick. It is the protestor and the media which tells you not to listen to them. It is the corporation which creates a new truth for you daily, one which provides you with the knowledge to buy what they make with confidence. It is the gold star you earned in kindergarten. It is the A you got in high school. It is your college degree. It is your paycheck. It is your therapist. It is your bill from the medicine you bought to ‘fix your brain’.
It is the ache in your back. It is your swollen knees. It is your worsening eyesight from the incandescent glow of our institutions. It is your hearing loss. It is the ‘white noise’ that drives you crazy. It is your adrenaline. It is the tears that pour down your face after a sad movie. It is your longing for a dramatic romance with a happy ending. It is your lust for sex. It is the objectified woman, and the powerless man. It is the rapist. It is the murderer. It is the thief. It is the profiteer. It is the worker. It is the dead union organizer.

It is the solider that is willing to kill and die for cheaper oil. It is the victims of a government enflamed over unwillingness to follow their way of life. It is the activist hung for saying they don’t want to be killed for profits. It is the rubber bullet. It is pepper spray.

It is the extinct species. It is the dying world. It is polluted air. It is tainted water. It is the accident at the nuclear power plant. It is the oil spill. It is the break in the pipeline. It is the brakes that failed. It is the dwindling biodiversity. It is the patented seed. It is the farmer killing her/himself with the pesticides that were going to make life better. It is the seat belt that mangled you, but didn’t kill you entirely. It is the blood dripping from the cut you got at work, but can’t afford to let it heal. It is the concrete beneath your feet. It is the stairs you fall down. It is the train that went off the tracks. It is the plane that blew up. It is the boat that sank. It is the drink you take to just forget it all. It is your misery. It is your world.

It is everything to you. It is civilized existence and the mindset which maintains it.

It is what makes devastation seem not so shocking. It takes you through the day. It dulls you out at night. It gives you nightmares, it gives you dreams. It is your feeling of not having of not having accomplished enough. It is your desire to have a child to complete yourself. It is the physical and mental barriers of civilized life. It is civilization and it has become you. It is a mindset. It is power. It is physically reinforced to block off the reality of it’s powerlessness by mediating human existence from the natural world. It is the feeling of superiority, which supplies the reason to destroy all else. It is unnatural. It will fall, but will you fall with it? It is personal and it is individual. It is defeatable and it’s defeat is needed for our liberation, as well as for that of all else that human kind has set out to conquer and overpower. Freedom is only a thought away. Liberate the mind and the body will follow.

We forget...

We’re all pretty much the same.
Packed tightly in our skintight skin is a bumpy clump of slippery organs and brittle bones. Yes, you’re a pile of bones, I’m a bucket of blood, you’re a slab of muscle, I’m a chunk of chub. And no matter what we got squeezing through our veins, zooming through our brains, and dripping out our drains, one big thing just always remains.
We’re all pretty much the same.
We’re all pretty much the same.
We’re all pretty much the same.
Baby brains buzz and little eardrums pop, baby lungs breathe deep and little eyelids flop, but as we grow up and grow older maybe we start letting differences be our guide, start choosing our own adventures, start carving paths and curving wide. We settle into ourselves, settle into our skin, settle into our lives, and find the comforts within…
We grow up, we grow older, some grow hotter, some grow colder. We focus on our tastes, on our preferences and our choices, we find our kinds of friends, we read our kinds of voices. We might cut deep paths, we may turn others away, we may deepen our divides, we may have nothing nice to say.
But way down deep in our stomachs, way down deep in our hearts, we can always remember that no matter which way we turn, which lessons we learn, which bridges we burn…
We’re all pretty much the same.
We’re all pretty much the same.
No matter what money we earn, what chances we churn, what choices we spurn…
We’re all pretty much the same.
We’re all pretty much the same.
Because we’ve all got cracks and chips, we’ve all got sores and scratches, we’ve all got doubts and dreams, we’ve all got hearts with patches. We laugh and cry, we soar and sink, we go up and down, we stop and think. Behind your favorite things, behind your bestest friends, behind your fears and doubts… we’re all waiting here again.
We’re all in this big show together.
We’re all singing the same song.
We’re all walking into the future.
As we all keep hanging on.
AWESOME!

http://1000awesomethings.com/

Hot off the Presses

Check out this amazing video of the Sao Nicolau Bike Race:


Race de Independência 2010 - São Nicolau, Cape Verde from Chase DuBois on Vimeo.

Trumped

It's not often, and in fact, you have to get up so early that you never even went to sleep, but it has happened.  I have been bested.  And i couldn't be happier.  On a small volcanic island, 500 miles off the mainland of the African continent, a bike race was held.  26km, over mountains, through valleys, blind turns, searing sun, chickens, and fierce competition all were in order for the second annual Sao Nicolau Island Bike Race.  This year, the race reversed the course, starting in Tarrafal meaning a beginning few kilometers of straight climbing.  The racers, while already equipped with helmets from last years race, were decked out from head to toe in amazingly flashy cycling apparel graciously donated by cycling teams from Seattle.  With a band, prizes actually handed out the day of the race, and a first place prize of a brand new Trek road bike donated by a wonderful Minnesotian, this race showed that once you light a spark, amazing things can happen.  Thanks to the great Peace Corps Volunteers who made this happen, Chase and Brendan, along with Floriano (Flor, aka Chocks:), only great things will come.

Check it out:  http://sonadei.com/catalog/CVBO.php

Tour da Daks

It began auspiciously.  The ferry boat captain, gauging the state of his vessel one moment, being pooped on by a bird the next.  I knew right away this tour would be unlike any I had ever done before.  Mostly this was because i was going into the Adirondacks where i had never been before, but besides the point that is.  The ferry took off and dropped me off on the ragged coastline of New York, at Port Kent.  And so i began at the foothills of the some of the most daunting mountains the world has ever seen, the slow and continuous climb into the belly of the beast, the Tour da Daks.

A quick 10 miles took me to Au sable forks, a quaint little town.  It was also the last quaint little town i would hit for another 60 miles, little did i know.  I left the main bicycle route to start immediately on a climb that many have called "insane", "death inducing" , and "really really hard".  These all fit the bill.  This was a straight, tough, sweaty climb.  And it was followed more or less by 60 more miles of rolling, steep climbs where the idea of switchback roads hasn't come into popularity just yet.  I also went on a water reduction plan as I had no idea when or where i would ever be able to fill my water tanks up again.  Finally, after passing rainbow lake, clear lake, lake lake, and several lesser known lakes and ponds, i hit the upper part of Saranac lake and was blessed with a gas station/ice cream place/general store/campground/bait shop/church/pool hall/bottle redemption center/NASA training facility/lakeside rest stop.  With my water bottles overflowing, i started checking out the going rate for a state park campground.  however, seeing that I never attended the school of common sense and yet rather operate on a more complex system of irrationality and thick headness, i knew i would never pay to camp and so shoved off to the lower Saranac Lake and ultimately Lake Placid, a 100 miles after starting.  I had it in my head to keep going all night, to finish the tour in blazing glory, of cycling the full 170 miles in a breath taking single day, returning home a hero, a celebrated discoverer back from the wilds. 

instead i sneakfully pitched my tent behind the Center for the Arts and conked out at 9pm.  The next day i woke fresh as a pickle at 5:30am and started off, only to stop at the coffee place in town that magically opens its doors at 5:55am.  Sweet.  With some coffee and a bowl of granola in me, i headed off what would be an amazing donwhill into the town of Keene, along some river that ran along the foot of the mountains.  However,  being at the bottom at Keene meant i had to go up and over a few more passes to get back to the coast of New York at Essex, at which point i hopped back on my trusted New York Bike Route #9 all the way back to Port Kent in time for the early afternoon ferry. 

As the ferry approached the Burlington docks, i noticed a lack of tinker tape parade, of Town Officials and media awaiting my return.  No worries, i do it all for you people.  not for cheers and the fame, glory, riches.  I do it for the trees, the rivers, the sweat, the hours of pedaling, the peaking of a hill climb and the momentary pause before gripping tight for the downhill, i do it because i love to do it.

Check out all the photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/nopluto/TourDaDaks#