Here we have a funny post from a special guest. A friend of mine, Don is a writer, teacher and former journalist who used to work at Planet Aid too. In my next post I will discuss my training to go to Africa, the other managers in training I met hailing from all over the country, and the weirdness of inhabiting a Teacher’s Group school up in the Berkshires. Enjoy this entry.

                                                Planet Aid NJ

                                                By Donald M. Kelly

   The Planet Aid New Jersey distribution center was set far back from River Road, where the municipal border of Clifton touches Route 21. The location was a good one for a distribution center with the task of collecting, bundling and shipping recycled clothing. Route 21 not only connected to most major highways in Northern New Jersey, but linked the two former industrial centers, Paterson and Newark.

Seventy years ago, the River Road area was still rural and the outlines of agriculture could still be made out in the terrain. Grass and weeds persistently broke through the randomly maintained sidewalks and parking areas. Nature manifested herself in strange ways such as the massive, elegant spiral orb spider’s web I passed every day that hung resiliently between a stop sign and the grounding cable of a telephone pole. I often wondered, observing the islands of green amid the crushed curbs and pot holed roads, if the vegetation was planning to rise up and consume the office parks and warehouses in one vengeful stroke.

My interview was with the Planet Aid regional director Jostein.  The position required me to convince municipalities and private business owners to accept new donation bins on their property.

Like Planet Aid itself, Jostein originated in Norway, a fact he told me during our interview. I was glad he did. I was having trouble placing (and understanding) his accent. And like many Americans, the facts I knew about Norwegians amounted to:

1.)    Norwegians are Scandinavians.

2.)    Henrik Ibsen was a famous Norwegian (playwright and father of realism).

3.)    All Norwegians sound like the Swedish Chef on “The Muppet Show.” Herdy-verdy, chickie-wickie... 

The sincerity of purpose in Planet Aid’s mission was at a level I was unused to in the American business world. The profit motive is everything in our country. Ten years as a journalist had taught me that anyone claiming another consideration besides personal gain, in any endeavor, was either naïve or a criminal. I accepted the job anyway, being painfully under employed in an economy preparing to hurtle itself off a cliff and into the 2008 recession.

     

The open space you crossed to get to the Planet Aid office, called “a parking lot,” had been paved and repaved alternately with cement and asphalt. At the start of the 21^st century, it looked like it had taken heavy mortar fire. The tiny, dusty, rectangular office I shared not only with Jostein and my friend Phil Perry, but also the administrative staff, was squeezed painfully into one corner to give the delivery and storage as much room as possible. The operations manager was a black haired woman named Alma. Not an unattractive woman, Alma was skulking bitterly through her late forties, fawning up to her superiors and tyrannizing the other employees. Tact and diplomacy had eluded her management style was she was referred to as “The Warden” even by outside truckers who did once a week pick ups from the center.

People liked our secretary, Isabel, is direct proportion to their dislike for Alma. When not mocking Alma behind her back, the truck drivers and warehouse workers hit on Isabel at every opportunity. You could tell she loved male attention, but juggling single motherhood and a complex love life caused her to deflect the passes that came her way.

Needless to say, it was pleasant to be around Isabel. Often, she would have lunch with Phil and me. If I hadn’t, at the time, been seeing a woman I felt strongly about, I would have joined my co-workers flinging daily compliments Isabel’s way.

Planet Aid subcontracted pick ups and deliveries to five independent truck owners. Of all of them Kevin, resident of nearby Kearny, city of my parental ancestors, remains vivid in my memory, because he was always angry. Peevishness consumed him like a permanent, low grade fever. Subjects of his grumbling ranged from the crazed homeless people who lived in the donation bins he had to empty to incompetent fellow workers to his disintegrating marriage. And it was his domestic life that caused one of his more memorable headaches at Planet Aid.

Early on a Tuesday morning, Kevin departed to collect a large donation of clothes and books near the Jersey-Pennsylvania border. Alone in the office five hours later, I made the error of taking an incoming call. “Get me the hell out of here!” an enraged Kevin said.

I quickly learned that during a routine traffic stop for a defective back up light, a check of Kevin’s license revealed an outstanding warrant for a year old moving violation. Despite loud professions of ignorance in the matter, Kevin was transported to the local jail and his vehicle impounded. Quickly, I alerted Jostein, who leapt into the company’s delivery van and raced to bail out Kevin. Three hours later, a second, even angrier call came from Kevin. In a tone described by Isabel, who answered that time, described as “urgent,” Kevin wanted to know where Jostein was with the bail. The office cell phone was handed from person to person, all of us reluctant to deal with the outraged truck driver. Eventually Isabel told Kevin the truth: we had heard nothing from Jostein since he departed in the delivery van.

“He drove that piece of crap!” exploded from the ear piece, loud fragments of Kevin’s voice ricocheting off the plywood walls. “Now I am screwed!”

And so Kevin was. On the rural outskirts of Lake Hopatcong, the van overheated with no warning. A cloud of black smoke and steam erupted from the engine, blotting out Jostein’s vision of the road ahead. This encumbrance, paired with the loss of the breaks, caused the van to collide with a roadside tomato stand.  One eye witness, the stand operator, stated the singed man who emerged from the ruined van ranted loudly in a strange language that reminded him the Amish.

“I don’t know what he was saying,” he added, according to police reports. “But I know he was using words my mother always told us not to use around nice people.”

Of course, Kevin spent the night behind bars and was freed the next afternoon. The original ticket had been issued to Kevin’s wife, who had driven on a sidewalk in an effort to park as close as possible to her manicurist in Belleville. She neglected to tell her husband about the ticket

Crazy People Get Paid Too

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”

                                                                                                        -Hunter S. Thompson

I went to the interview. It was in a warehouse on River Road in Clifton, New Jersey a block from the infamous “Rutt’s Hutt” a hot dog and hamburger joint that hasn’t changed in decades, nor should it and who’s grinders, or deep fried hot dogs, smeared with a mysterious mustard-like condiment filled many a happy lunch hour for me and my compatriots. The parking lot of the warehouse was littered with giant potholes which were often flooded with rainwater and motor oil. It was like driving on the back roads in some developing nation. There were two big bay doors, usually open. I parked and walked inside.

The clothes from the donation bins came in here off of tracker trailers, collected by independent contractors who picked up the clothes from the donation bins each from his particular route. My boss often wondered if these contractors were stealing clothes from the bins and selling them privately. Much investigation time was put in by him, both during and off hours. But my boss was no gumshoe. He caught only one guy but he fired him, and felt a brief satisfaction in it. The clothes were sorted, compressed and sold in bundles to unsavory looking brokers who hauled them out in their own trucks. I must have spoken to one of the guys in our warehouse once I arrived for my interview, probably either Mario or Walter.

Mario was a tall, skinny, shaven headed El Salvadorian. He loved to talk about Carnivale in his home country, how it lasted for days drinking, dancing, eating and carousing.  I never tired of his explaining it. Another favorite topic was how many Coronas he ingested the weekend before. Walter was the other warehouse worker that sticks out in my mind. He was a dim but kindhearted, older, southern black gentleman with a fu manchu. He always wore a baseball cap. He was sweet and had an easy smile. Once on a trip together to collect clothes in one of our trucks, I had offered to buy him a frozen yogurt at a rest stop. It was hot. There was no AC. I wanted something to cool me down. He looked at me dubiously. But when he tried it, he couldn’t stop saying, “Man! That’s good! MAN that’s good!”

After searching for where the interview was to be held, I must have been pointed to the office, a rectangular outgrowth on the far left of the warehouse. It had two rooms, the manager’s private office in back and a secretarial and reception area in front. It was in the reception area that I was met by Alma, a whiny, energetic, obsessive, obsequious middle-aged Puerto Rican woman with curly dark hair and thick glasses. She had family drama that she would bemoan out loud and ask everyone’s opinion on one at a time—a son in and out of prison, seething arguments with her son’s girlfriend who was also her grandchildren’s mother. It was also rumored that our regional manager was or did have an affair with her, which may be why she had some sort of leverage over the warehouse workers.

The guys in the warehouse hated her. Every day she’d go in there and boss them around. They’d tell her to go to hell. Our manager would then have to go out there and yell at them. They’d go back to work. But when she went out there to frantically lecture or order or command, they’d insult her again. It’s a wonder they got anything done at all. 

She treated the warehouse workers with absolute contempt, though I have to admit that, just like a nagging mother, sometimes, not often but sometimes she was right and the workers did occasionally run into trouble because of this. As callously as she ordered the men, Alma lavished Jostein and me with accolades. She ran to get his coffee. She complimented both of us all the time, to the point where it embarrassed me. It was sick and utterly transparent. I usually quickly thanked and then ignored her.

Once in the office, waiting for the interview to begin, I was asked to sit and wait, making small talk with Alma. Finally, she led me through the reception area into the manager’s office to meet Jostein Pedersen himself. His first name is pronounced Yostein. He is a small, bespectacled, older gentleman now in his early seventies, with a white beard and a shy smile. He was a runner and has a runner’s physique. He loved running marathons and won many metals, especially in his age group, until his leg gave him trouble. Poor guy had to quit. He seemed lost for a while. It was a big part of his life. It made me wonder what I may have to give up someday when I too get old.

One of the reasons I sort of believe the cult label of the Teacher’s Group is that Jostein had the wide, unblinking stare of the true believer. Doesn’t matter the ideology, I’ve seen street preachers on wooden boxes in Boston Common, who called me a sinner and said I’d be going straight to hell, with the same exact stare. Jostein shuddered every morning while Democracy Now!’s “War and Peace Report” with Amy Goodman blasted out of his office radio, filling him with a righteous indignation he both savored and despised.

He was grandfatherly, but a little cold at times. Whenever he introduced himself in meetings he would say, “My name is Yostein. I’m a Norwegian.” He’d smile, squint and shake firmly, two awkward pumps as if he’d seen this ritual in an informational video but never experienced it in real life. Jostein was a good boss overall. He cared. And he was a nice guy. I invited him to Easter one time. He came. 

He didn’t really know anyone in New Jersey. The Teacher’s Group just sent him to work here. His Danish girlfriend Jane, an enigmatic, attractive older woman visited from time to time. She was living in Slovakia and working in the used clothes business, gathering them and selling them in a store there. He is there working with her now. At Easter at my mom’s he seemed jolly, carried upon the wave of good feelings. He thought we served way too much food however. And as Italian-Americans, we do.

Jostein had an innovative concept which he brought up at my interview, trying to sell to towns the idea of curbside collection. Donation bins are unsightly. People dump all kinds of things in front of them. They are vandalized sometimes covered in graffiti. We had reports of them on fire. One of our drivers even found a homeless man living in one. He swears it was locked when he came up to it. If you’ve ever seen how small the shoot is in one of these things, you’d agree it isn’t an easy feet for someone to get in there.

Jostein wanted to move away from donation bins altogether. Great idea. He had already done this in Somerset County. But the quality of the textiles collected wasn’t good. Once I was hired, I wrote a proposal and looked up the names of all the recycling coordinators in all of the towns in New Jersey. I sent them informational packets with promotional materials that were just lying around. No one was doing anything with them. I told them, “Reduce your solid waste disposal fees, and advertise to your town that you are doing textile recycling.” I got us a lot of meetings.

It was very successful until clients started seeing the anti-Tvind and Humana websites. Then they wouldn’t call us back. Any town or group that didn’t look into it or didn’t care was very happy with the program. I told Jostein that unless you answer these claims to defend yourself, people are automatically going to think you’re guilty. Because why wouldn’t you defend yourself against those spreading vicious lies? But they didn’t want to go in that direction, which makes me think that TG has something to hide.

This was an exciting job and I was very successful. I started doing expos and speaking engagements. I met Ted Danson, Ed Begley Jr., and Senator Robert Menendez at the Global Green Expo. I got published twice. I did a five part series called, “Into Africa” on www.nj.com/helpinghands, and I got an article in WasteAge, now Waste360 a recycling trade magazine. I met my wife the love of my life. I got to go to Africa. And I got this tremendous business idea. So I do owe Planet Aid a lot. But as I learned more about the organization and what was going on, things got weirder. In my next post I’ll talk about my training to go to Africa, the Tvind school I went to on top of a mountain in the Berkshires and the other managers in training I met, from other parts of the country.  

A Bizarre Shadow

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

             -Mark Twain

In 2007, after taking off a year to finish a novel, I started looking for work again. I came across a job on Craig’s List. It was a manager in training program for a company called Planet Aid, Inc. Planet Aid uses donation bins to collect clothes, shoes, toys and books. They sell these items and the profits fund development projects in the poorest countries around the world. As part of their manager in training program, the trainee got to go to Africa for three months and work at one of their projects, in order to see firsthand the good Planet Aid does. What I experienced was far more complicated than just that. Planet Aid has since cancelled this program. I think my team was the pilot. I’m sure it wasn’t cost effective. And of our group of seven or so, only one stayed on.  

As for me, at the time I didn’t really have a fascination with Africa per se. But I was intrigued that a job would offer such a unique opportunity. I couldn’t get my head around what that experience might be like. But I didn’t want to miss a life changing opportunity, to go to Africa for free! I had been lucky with Israel, so why not try again. I sent them my CV and cover letter and got a call.

I didn’t do my due diligence, didn’t do any real research past the company’s website. Over time, I came to find that Planet Aid was the American wing of another organization, Humana People to People. And this organization is run by members of a controversial organization called The Teacher’s Group (TG), sometimes known as Tvind. TG has been called a cult. They’ve also been accused of embezzlement, fraud and tax evasion by the Danish High Court. But who are they really? And are these allegations true?  

According to my wife—a former DNS member, the Teacher’s Group was started by a group of Danish hippies in the early 1970’s as a reaction against Denmark’s consideration of nuclear energy as part of their energy policy. The Danish government was going to hold a referendum on whether the country should embrace nuclear power. The Danish are a proud and independent people, big on referendums. They even voted down the Euro. They are still on the Danish Krone, and proud to be.

So a group of Danish hippies came together against nuclear energy, and built what they claim is the world’s first modern energy generating windmill.

They even claim to have invented specific design innovations such as the shape of the blades, the motor that turns in the direction of the wind, and others. My wife said she has seen pictures of people digging with spoons the hole that would become the windmill’s foundation. That windmill still powers their first school to this day. And nuclear power, according to The Teacher’s Group, was voted down in Denmark due to their efforts. They believe this is why Denmark is one of the leading countries in renewable energy today.

Energized from this great victory, they decided they wanted to do something more. This next part I learned from my old boss. They wanted to help people in the developing world. And they knew that what was shown on TV wasn’t real life. They wanted to go out and experience real life in other places, and see how they could help the poor of the world. So they got a bus and drove from Denmark to India, stopping many places along the way.

My former boss Jostein said that driving through Iran was the scariest part. The Iranian border guards asked if they had any liquor, pornography or anything morally irreprehensible. Since they didn’t, they were allowed to pass through. Next, they wound through tight mountain passes and tiny roads in the mountains of Afghanistan. They drove in shifts. Jostein drove the bus at times and remembers getting caught in a few places where the passes were too small to fit their big bus. They had to wiggle in and out to get through. Somewhere along the way they tore a hole in the oil pan. A local mechanic used “magic” some sort of liquid that formed a patch as it cooled. They continued their journey and made it to India.

They met many people, had amazing experiences and saw for themselves the way people were living in each place and region. They eventually traveled throughout Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. They started development projects to help people in need. And they began forming traveling folk schools, a new twist on a Danish tradition.

By law in Denmark, any group can start a school. All you need is to get your paperwork in order. No regulations exist. And the state funds these schools. The Teacher’s Group believed in John Dewey’s learning by doing, and created a radical program based on this. They started “Det Nᴓdvendige Seminarium” (DNS) in English, “The Necessary Teacher Training College.” They bought a piece of rural land in Denmark and named it Tvind for the twisty brook that runs through the property. They are sometimes known by this name. TG now has schools all over including one in the Caribbean, one in the Berkshires, one in Michigan, several in California, one in England and many, many other places. All of their schools and many of their projects look alike, almost as if they were the exact same building.

Radicals in their late teens and 20s, the lost, the perpetually strange and those way out-in-left-field come from all over Europe and farther afield, gathering at Tvind to join DNS. They now gather at the other schools too. They pay thousands to join. Then they take classes, do chores, projects, sell postcards on the street, or beg for donations which pushy TG’ers call “fundraising,” and travel to projects in different countries to learn and volunteer.

Mostly, those who come want to travel to Asia or Africa, or they need a place to get away from their parents or their old lives, or they just need some time and distance to sort things out. Most are from the hippie persuasion, or some similar counterculture lifestyle. But the school isn’t accredited. So graduating from DNS doesn’t mean anything outside of TG. But it means a lot inside the Teacher’s Group. Once you successfully go through the DNS program and graduate, you have the option of joining TG.

The Teacher’s Group formed an ideology based on absolute collectivism, utilizing the phrase, “Common time, common economy and common life.” No DNS or TG members are allowed to use alcohol or drugs as it messes up the individual and so the collective. And one of their core beliefs that in the modern world, people trade their time for money. They work at something they don’t like in order to make money, and do what they want on the weekend. Tvind members believe that they have eliminated this dichotomy. That what they want to do and their job is one. But what ends up happening is, they just work all the time, with little or no free time, and they expect anyone related to their enterprises to do the same.

The Teacher’s Group is supposed to be a horizontal collectivism. Everyone in the Teacher’s Group gets a vote. Everything is discussed and decided on collectively. But I’ve heard that in truth there is an inner circle that vote on everything, decide everything. Once you join TG you are supposed to give all of your financial assets then and henceforth to the collective pot. They give you healthcare and a place to live. But TG tells you where to live, where you will work, what you will do and so on. Some members get married and/or have children, but this is frowned upon.

Above them all may be a leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen—a charismatic speaker who has been in hiding for over twenty years. Last we heard he left a luxury apartment in Miami worth over a million dollars. 

When I asked a fellow coworker about this when I found out about it, she said it wasn’t his penthouse, and that they just wanted a nice place to meet. There are rumors of Tvind supporting Mugabe in order to get good business deals in Zimbabwe, supporting Pol Pot and Gaddafi and others. Amdi Petersen was arrested in 2002 in L.A., shipped back to Denmark and put on trial with seven other members, but none were convicted or saw jail time.

Though found not guilty, in Denmark the public prosecutor plans to bring them to trial again. As of May, Amdi and his inner circle will be tried once again in the Danish High Court for embezzlement and tax evasion.  When I finally found out about websites like Humana Watch and Tvind Watch and read about the trials, I asked my boss about it. He said that they do not have a leader, though Amdi is a part of the Teacher’s Group. Jostein said that TG votes on everything, and that the trial was a malicious plot by the Danish government to discredit them.

As The Teacher’s Group grew, it diversified. Its projects include fighting HIV/AIDS, preschools, farmer’s clubs, teacher training colleges and other charitable projects in sub-Saharan Africa, China, India and other locales. It has schools for special education students in Denmark, students who have gone through all the regular programs and have nowhere else to go. It has a plantation in Brazil and other holdings in South and Central America. It deals in the lucrative used clothing business all over the world. It was under the dark and puzzling shadow of the Teacher's Group that my job at Planet Aid and my time in Africa occurred.

My friend Don, who worked with us for a short time, has an Irish Catholic background. He said they were Protestants without an ethos. TG had kept the Protestant work ethic, but jettisoned all else, the deeper philosophy and faith that tied it all together. In the end, what occurred to me was that a group who got together to be more humane and care for the world ended up being just as callous and bloated with avarice as those they claimed to be against. 

The Nightmare of History

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

    -James Joyce, Ulysses.

I used to like to study Greek mythology. To me they were ancient comic books, filled with gods, superheroes and monsters.  But as a good little American who believed wholeheartedly in individual will and self-determination, one thing I couldn't stand was how heroes, like Oedipus, were chained to their destiny, never to escape it no matter how strong they were, or how ingenious their plans. What’s more, those that followed were damned by the sins of their forebearers.

Now however the older I get, the more I see that the social and historical forces at play in one’s life often determine one’s outcome. The Greeks merely recognized this and encapsulated it into their myths. There are aspects of this what socio-economic situation you are born into, your race, how you are raised, your community, your country, and your culture which cannot be changed. And the virtues and sins of these are passed down to you, en mass, whether you like it or not. It is if and how you escape, or who helps you escape, that matters. At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Darnay a.k.a. Charles Evremonde faces execution for the sins of his uncle and father, escapes by being replaced by lookalike Sidney Carton.

Carton sacrifices himself, clearing away all of his personal sins and breaking the cycle of tragedy to be recompensed upon the Evremonde’s, Charles and through his suffering and death, his wife and child's. We must awaken and break away from the inherited cycles of inequity, despair, ignorance, hatred and violence that are passed down from the echoing void and seize us still. Only to understand history, our personal and collective, can we break the chains our progenitors have cast upon us, and live enlightened, safe, happy and free. Let us hope that more humane sacrifices are in order than that endured by poor Sidney Carton.  

I graduated college in 2001. I returned from my cross country trip resplendent, and ready to embark on what was expected, a prosperous career. A few days after my return September 11^th happened. The whole world went quiet. All was shock and despair.  My cousin was killed in one of the towers, a victim of history. I didn’t know him very well. I knew his father, who was my reading teacher in middle school. My family and I attended that tearful funeral. A charitable fund was started in his honor. This event seemed to have set the tone for a decade to come. A dark cloud hung over everything. In my personal life, I had a hard time finding a job. I had grown my hair long, for seven years. It was halfway down my back. I finally cut it in a pang of anxiety, that this was the thing keeping me from gainful employment and joining the legions of successful, adult, career-oriented people whom I was expected to become.  

I finally got a job as a client relations manager at Value Line, Inc. a stock investment periodical. This was a dressed up customer service department. I spent my days being yelled at by “clients” for things I had no control over: late shipments, misprints, accounts being accidentally closed. We got a stack of papers called Donnelly Reports every morning. It reminds me now of "Office Space" and those damned TPS reports. Donnelly Reports were documents generated by customer calls, one page per caller. We were to call back and resolve their issues. Most of the time, we were screamed at, oftentimes insulted or even cursed at, then we were to calm the customer down, resolve the issue and make the next call on the report. This process was a grind wheel presented eagerly to my soft, putty-like brain. I wouldn't last.    

The other thing that weakened my resolve was I started finding out more about the company. It was owned by a tough as nails lady, an 85% owner. She was suing her own brother at the time for his measly 15%. All he wanted to do was sit on the beach and collect his share. I met her once. She was terse, cold, her nose perpetually at 180 degrees. This company was built by their savvy father, and when he was alive it was a great company that took care of its customers. But his progeny only cared about money. Soon, my spirit was broken. I began sneaking out pages from my reports. I put them in my desk, or threw them away. Everyone in my department had the same stack, the same calls to return. This meant they were stuck with the bad calls, while I only handled the good ones.

I needed to reevaluate my life. What was I doing here? What did I really want to do? Where did my talents lie? I found that what really made me happy was helping people. I went back to school to become a teacher and got a job as a teacher’s assistant at Lipman Hall in Newark. This was a residential treatment center for incarcerated youth. I had the high performing, low violence students: arsonists, child molesters, a student who brought a bomb to school among others. And yet, this environment seemed better than the corporate one. At least I was educating people, being a positive role model, making a difference. I wasn’t making evil rich people richer at the expense of others.

Most of these students were victims of history, family and personal history. There is an old French proverb, “To know all is to forgive all.” I wouldn’t go that far. But the message rings true. Most of these students grew up in dysfunctional families, often neglected or worse. I went back to school to become a social studies teacher.

After earning my certificate, with no social studies positions open, I took a job as a math teacher at a conservative Jewish school. I am not of the faith. I was raised a two-time-a-year Roman Catholic, Christmas and Easter. The church wouldn’t give my mom an annulment after she divorced my father because, even though he cheated on her, she didn’t have the money to pay for the procedure at that time. After learning this, I turned my back on the Catholic Church. But there was that cultural/historical expectation. “After all, you want to get married in a church, don’t you?” Ultimately, I wasn’t. But I was forced to attend CCD and only able to leave after my confirmation. Today, I consider myself spiritual, not religious. I don’t give myself a label. I find it too confining. And as Alan Watts said, faith is pure openness. I seek to be open.

On the job, even though everyone knew I was a goy, I had to wear a keepah or yamaka as all the students and staff were required to. I was forced to attend shul or worship, though I was not invited to take part. Most of our students came from reform families, and chafed at all of this. These students too, were mild victims of a history they did not internalize or share. In any event, I worked hard to teach math there. But I was a terrible math teacher. It was my worst subject. I wasn’t invited back for the following year. However, since I was so popular with the students and staff, I got the chance to chaperone the 8^th grade trip to Israel.

I had many wonderful experiences there. We went hiking in the Golan Heights. It was so green and lush. I saw Syria from up high. We followed serpentine paths to a waterfall and a gorge below. We were told not to venture off the hiking trail for fear of stepping on a landmine or unexploded ordinance. Also, scorpions were to be avoided. We experienced many wonderful things. We endured the drunken shouts of playful Hassidim in Zefat yelling, “Happy Purim!” We explored the ruins of a Roman aqueduct spread out across a beach on the Mediterranean. We toured a crusader citadel. We climbed Masada. Two complaining girls irritated us so much that halfway up I told them there was a Starbucks at the top. They were reinvigorated and scrambled up only to find that I had tricked them. Their indignity was swallowed up however from a healthy razzing from their peers. “You really thought there was a Starbucks?!” During some free time, I was able to wander the winding dolomite maze of old Jerusalem, walking stones two thousand years old, see the Tower of David, witness walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent, feast on shwarma and ice cream, and haggle with street peddlers over souvenirs.

We went swimming in the Dead Sea. Try as you might, you were forced to float. Your feet would not stay at the bottom. The buoyancy was unbelievable. It smelled of sulfur. And when you rubbed your belly underwater, it felt oily. From there we camped overnight at a Bedouin camp. They sang to us, and performed their coffee ritual. The next day the Bedouin gave us camel rides in the desert. One student asked if they rode these camels home. A dark, stout, jolly man replied, “I have an SUV kid.” The Bedouin are disappearing. They were given houses by the Israeli government. The older generation pitches their tents on the front lawns. It is the younger generation who are living in them.

I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where it is said that Jesus was crucified; his body prepared, and where he was resurrected. I heard the call to prayer at the Dome of the Rock from the Wailing Wall, while observing our students daven. Here were two groups of people, related linguistically, genetically and biblically (the story of Isaac and Ishmael) taken hostage by history and zealots on both sides.

The whole time we were guarded by young people in their twenties who had just gotten out of the Israeli army. They were carrying M-1 rifles, new in World War II. I talked with them. They were mostly atheists. They didn’t care about the conflict. Most believed in the two state solution. They feared the rocket launches and kidnappings. But felt a general malaise about the entire thing. What could you do? I didn’t get to talk to too many Arabs there. The one’s I spoke to felt a great sense of outrage and pity for the plight of the Palestinians. Other than that, they felt the same way. These too were victims of history, who had not found a way out. No Sidney Carton was available. Perhaps with the Sunni/Shia conflict taking precedence, and Israel in a much more volatile Middle East, the peace talks will make some progress. But again, the Sunni’s and Shia’s are victims of history themselves.

My point here is that most conflicts, most poverty, most of the places on earth where there is suffering, despair, turmoil; these are symptoms of a greater disease, these are the victims of that plague called human inequity, human history. The poor in Malawi are the victims of history, mostly through colonization. The poor in America are victims of history: racism, slavery, genocide, war, lack of access to a proper education, healthcare and a way to make a living. We need to find a way to break this cycle without bloodshed, purging, sacrifice. We need to cut the Gordian Knot. We have to do it in a positive way, a way that doesn’t colonize the mind of the victim. I will explain what I mean. I remember talking to a professor from Easter Island back at MSU. He said that aid workers from the West always came there with the attitude of, “You poor bastard.” And this colonized the minds of the people, made them feel inferior and unable to do things themselves. So I have found a way to fill those who need help with pride, a can-do attitude, with lightheartedness, fun, and with hope for the future. 

“Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.”                                                                                                          -Rumi

Know thyself is a famous quote attributed to Socrates by way of Plato. But how do we know who we really are? Are we whatever we prove ourselves to be, or declare ourselves to be? A quintessence of stardust? A cerebral pattern of electro-chemical reactions? Are we ancient spiritual beings suffering severe amnesia, encapsulated in flesh and skin? In Buddhism we are considered an amalgam, a collection of five aggregates giving the illusion of one unified ego. Could this be true? Or are we the sum of our genes organized in a specific pattern stretching back to our birth, and beyond. To stop and think about what really makes us who we are becomes much more complicated than it first appears.  

As Jung pointed out, we wear many masks depending on context. But I believe that there is a core self that stays ultimately the same. Some people subscribe to a strict set of traits that make up their identity, hardly venturing outside of their comfort zone. Others are more flexible, willing to venture past their perceived boundaries for the chance to cultivate themselves and hastened their development. I believe that we are here in this life to learn something, and to make a difference, to make our world better place and through this make ourselves better. We progress and take what we have learned to the next realm.

It is in this state of testing ourselves that we get to know who we are in a deep and profound way, a metamorphic process ripping apart our previous boundaries and transforming us into more self-realized beings, able to do and perceive far more than before.  In truth, we are the sum total of our experiences, what we do makes us who we are. Bruce Lee said to be like water. As it changes to fit any container, we should adapt to fit any situation. Those like Mr. Lee who can escape all personal tethers can shape themselves into something truly remarkable.

Let’s back up for some context. I was a history major in college. My parents gave me a choice after high school, either get a job or go to college. Being a completely aloof late teen, my path was clear. I had intellectual curiosity, but couldn’t decide on a major. I picked history because I had great social studies teachers in high school. They really made the subject come alive. I also loved stories of how my family came through Ellis Island, or my grandfather’s stories of being a sailor on the U.S.S. North Carolina in World War II. After finishing college, I decided to take a trip out West. “Go West young man” is a haunting echo from our collective past. I felt it like a magnet’s pull on my heart. I had read all about my country but had only seen a little of it, the East Coast. I had to see for myself what things were really like.  It was a transformative experience. I never felt so alive, so in control of my own life, so much wonder, power and freedom.

It was me, my girlfriend at the time—Lisa, a couple of backpacks and the rails. We zigzagged across the country for about a month in August of 2001. I saw Chicago, the Denver area of Colorado, the Flagstaff area of Arizona including the magnificent Grand Canyon, Walnut Canyon and the Painted Desert, San Francisco, parts of northern Oregon and Seattle. We came straight back afterward, three days with no shower, only a seat, a big window and our memories.  

Big memories like that feeling you get when you first see the Rockies and your heart sinks into your stomach, or when we traveled for hours through the Painted Desert in a lightning storm. We went to the ruins of an ancient Pueblo atop a high Mesa. The Hopi consider it a sacred place inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors. My hair was standing on end as I looked out for 90 miles in every direction intermittently witnessing huge, blue bolts crashing against the desert floor. Another memory, somewhere between Bakersfield and San Francisco I was shaken awake by a blonde, bearded undercover drug agent who shushed me and asked if I packed my own bags or if someone packed them for me. Later on, in San Fran I was privy to the Morrison Hotel, a small shack in the back of Lisa’s cousin’s house on Alameda Island. Jim Morrison crashed there after high school for a while, or so they say.

I remember jolly, toothless Native grandmothers at a stand outside the train station in Albuquerque who served me the best burrito I ever had. It had potatoes in it. I climbed Multnomah Falls—the second highest waterfall in the U.S. where legend says a native princess plunged to her doom. I saw the crater of Mt. Saint Helens and its aftermath in the surrounding land, a gray and barren place like the surface of the moon, but here and there new plants were springing up from the ashes. We crushed oyster shells underfoot outside a long house on a small island outside of Seattle. And I’ll never forget Carl the taxi driver poet who encouraged me to write a book, even a bad one, because it would make me look deep and profound, and then women would want to sleep with me. Carl told us all about Skin Walkers and how he had heard one on the roof of his Navajo girlfriend’s house one night years before.

It was in the depths of this country that I really began to find myself, learned to trust my instincts and not second guess myself all the time, be open though careful, eternally ready, and always flexible. “Reeds bend so they do not break.” I got a taste of real independence, deep personal growth and once that Pandora’s Box was laid bare, I craved more. I wanted to broaden my horizons beyond the borders of my own country. I would have what I asked for and more, but in return a new and strange feeling, one of our vast human interconnectedness--implying a deep personal responsibility, enveloped me, pricking at me in the most poignant yet unassuming way.

But what does this has to do with burning for change? I want to explain how it is that I came to my great realization, how travel and ultimately Africa herself changed my life, helped me find my center, cleared my perception, helped me test and explore more of the world and through that experience, explore more of myself, and in the end helped me to relax and not worry so much about matters that up close look important, but in reality are insignificant when compared to the bigger picture. 

Imagination Beats Poverty

"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination." 

                                                                            -Alan Watts 

At first, the idea of starting a company, selling a line of gourmet African hot sauces, and using the profits as an engine for fun, change and development was something I'd been toying with on and off for over four years. The idea popped into my mind occasionally, peering out here and there like a mischievous elf whenever my mind wandered, which was often due to a mild case of A.D.D. The idea originally came to me in 2008 after leaving Malawi, and my wife-to-be, whom I thought I may never see again. I flew back to America with bottles of the hot sauce in my luggage. Everyone loved it! I searched online. No one was selling it here. And there were a bunch of former aid workers online asking where to buy it.

But I wasn’t ready then. I had a rendezvous with my lady love. I made the arrangements and told everyone, laboriously, one-by-one or in small groups that yes I was leaving...again, to meet up with a Belgian girl I had known for only three months, to fly off and live with her in South Korea, and teach English there for at least a year. It turned out to be two. More on all that later…

So if I found this great product no one is selling here and I have an in, why not keep all the profits for myself? Why the charitable angle? It’s personal. But since you came all the way to my blog, I’ll share with you. Just you. We struggled when I was small. My parents divorced when I was six. My younger sister was three-and-a-half. Before my mom remarried, she had a hard time finding a job. She worked at a day care center, and sold towels and other items at flea markets. We wore secondhand clothes and sometimes, as she told me later, she went to bed hungry so that we wouldn't have to. 

I remember as a child learning in school about how smoking was bad. When I came home that day, I went to where my mom hid her cigarettes. I knew where they were. I tore them all up and threw them in the garbage. When she found out, she screamed so fiercely at me, but later on hugged me, apologized and cried. It must have been the pressure and the anxiety. My family’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the years. But I never wanted for clothes, though I never had those Air Jordans. But I never wanted them. I just didn’t care about those things. We always ate well. I never saw the signs of our struggles. Just heard about them, like hearing about a war being fought far off in another country.   

I saw poverty growing up, more overt and less hidden. I had friends from the “ghetto.” I saw them and their families mistakes, their triumphs and struggles. I learned that you have fewer options when you’re poor. You have to work harder and have a lot less time. It puts untold pressure on families. Children see few options for escape. They don’t believe in themselves. The parents struggle and their kids don’t feel like they can do better. They make the same mistakes as their predecessors thinking that this is their life--becoming a parent too young, dropping out of school--that they can’t escape. And mistakes that people in much better financial circumstances shrug off like the loss of a job, the dying of a car or a substance abuse problem, end up devastating the poverty stricken in America, who don’t often recover.

But poor people in America, by and large, have TVs. Some have cars. They have access to food, shelter, transportation, education and medical care, albeit substandard in many cases. But I never saw poverty like I saw in Malawi. 90% of the people are subsistence farmers. They eat enzima. This is a wet corn meal, kind of like grits or cream of wheat, rolled into balls and eaten with “relish” maybe some beans or little bits of meat or vegetables. They eat this for two, or if they are fortunate, three meals a day, every day for their entire lives with little deviation. Maybe if they are lucky they get a little chicken for Christmas. Enzima is just empty calories. It has little nutritional value.

Most poor people in America have rooms, furniture and possessions. Most families in Malawi live in one room huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs, with little furniture or possessions. Many times the houses are made by their occupants by hand, from bricks baked in the sun. In rainy season, often families have to rebuild as the bricks get eaten away by torrential rain. No TV or internet, most people have a radio and now more and more, cell phones. No car but maybe a bicycle. I've seen kids play soccer barefoot, or two sharing a pair of sneakers, each wearing a shoe on their dominant foot. 

Little or no transportation out of the village. They live their entire lives within its boundaries and the surrounding countryside. Forget medical care. Education is available but limited. Often it’s too burdensome for children to walk the mile or two to school, and for many on an empty stomach. Schools have few resources. I visited a school in a rural village with no desks or chairs! 50 to 100 students sat on the floor at a time. They had a chalk board. Other than that, the room was empty. And due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the country is flooded with orphans who are most times taken in by relatives that can hardly support their own kids. These children often have to drop out of elementary school and work to help support the family.  

After Africa, I spent two years in Asia. Then my wife and I spent a month in Europe visiting my in-laws. Finally, I returned to America. I taught G.E.D. English and social studies for Passaic YouthBuild for one year. I saw the grim face of American poverty there, in students who signed up to get their G.E.D.s, in their struggles, in how they felt about themselves, their futures, their communities, in the depression, fear, anxiety, angst and hopelessness.

I saw poverty creep like a specter into all the decisions folks shouldn’t make so young, and in the lack of someone there for them to care for them or guide them. I saw teens, regular people wear faces of strength like masks to hide homelessness, to hide ambiguity about gang affiliation, to hide the fear and trauma of being beaten or stabbed or shot. I saw them follow the lines written for them, if they wanted to play or not, in the need for revenge that sparks a cycle of hideousness with no end, and I witnessed the push and pull struggles of living between loyalty to their homies and the need to build a better future for themselves. So I care about the face of poverty in America, and not just in the inner city though that is where my experience lies.

The people in Malawi affected me most. Not only because of the severity of their poverty but in the enormity of their spirit. They were carefree, lively and filled with a childlike joy. They sang, danced, waved and smiled all the time. Malawians live day-to-day and don't seem to have a care in the world, without any of our modern conveniences, with poverty and death hanging over them like a storm cloud, with little support system save friends, family and community, they seemed to be the happiest people on earth.

Back home where we have every modern convenience, ample support systems, the latest technology, people grumble through their lives. It doesn't make sense. So I think we need a cultural exchange. America needs to refocus, reconnect, stop being so pointlessly busy, build a new sense of community, do something important besides self-aggrandizement, and in the end, find our center.

If we could somehow exchange our strengths, America’s and Malawi’s, reinvigorate each society with the positive aspects of the other, we could see each society grow and prosper in new and unimaginable ways. I still believe, as our enlightened predecessors did, that all the problems of the human condition can be ameliorated with new ideas, new approaches, steadfast wills, brilliant minds and goodwill in our hearts. There are enough resources to feed, clothe, educate and take care of every human being on this planet. Ours is a distribution problem. And it is ours, all of ours. Yours and mine. We all belong to that one family, the human race. 

I think fun, adventure, curiosity, altruism, and a can-do attitude can light a fire of change to ignite the world, one planet and one unified movement. More to come…  

What Burning for Change Means

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

-Robert Kennedy

I never thought I’d be in business. Never thought I’d be cut out for it. Aren’t businessmen smooth operators? I picture a sear-sucker suit, smooth haircut stiff with product, dark sunglasses, gleaming smile and a tongue dripping with quicksilver. I've always dressed a little sloppy, usually with weird of funny t-shirts. I’m often messy haired, well-spoken and funny but a little too honest to be a real shark. Once, when I was young, my older sister Kristin, younger sister Ariana and I woke up early on a weekend. After a short and frenzied deliberation, we ate most of my mom's Pop Tarts. We weren't supposed to. Weren’t allowed. All mom said was, "Did you guys eat my pop tarts?" And I blurted, "You said she wouldn't know!" to my older sibling, who shot me the dirtiest of looks. Hilarity ensued.

Despite my not fitting this or in my opinion any other mold, I find myself the founder and president of a start-up company. I have to learn to speak business-ease, a cryptic and perplexing tongue. The words feel awkward in my mouth. They have an unfamiliar texture, like trying some strange new food. I’ve often thought of business as Darwinian, and iniquitous—a process of fighting with nice words, of backstabbing with smiles, and as with the multinationals, of acquiring wealth for a tiny few, while social ills for the many pile up like industrial waste. De Balzac one said that behind every great fortune lay a great crime. I’m sure not every one. But looking behind the curtain doesn’t always reveal a strange little man, but instead something more sinister.

But now I see the concept of business more clearly, as many others in the social enterprise and green tech movements do. A business is just a social mechanism, machinery that can be a force for good, or for ill. Just as nuclear technology brings energy, chemotherapy or thermonuclear destruction. Knives cut food or foes. It’s all depends on method and intent. For sure, business apparatuses can and have become vehicles for positive social change. Still, I’ve been finding it hard to pivot to this new outlook and vocation. But it's occurring. I feel the shift inside myself at every new meeting, marketing event, handshake or exchange of elevator pitches.

I've formed a company. We plan to sell a gourmet African hot sauce and give the profits to charity. Ergo my clever title: Burning for Change! I want the rich, deliciousness and the burn that follows to scorch away the inequities of the old order, and to clear a path for this new paradigm. Imagine enjoying the most delicious hot sauces, something you were going to purchase anyway, but one that is more rich and flavorful than you’ve ever tasted. Then imagine that same item causes development in one of the poorest countries in the world, and helps the poverty stricken in America too.

This is my dream. This is the new capitalism. This is how we change the world from one of scarcity, competition and ruthlessness to one of bounty, cooperation and good. Don't believe the world is so bad off. Globalissues.org states on their website that 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, and half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day. These numbers are mind boggling. But I think when we hear them, and without seeing what that really looks like, we sigh, and return to our lives without really digesting what that means. But how can we take things like human rights seriously, something almost everyone subscribes to, when we never live up to the goals we set, encapsulated for all to see in parchment and ink. Those who are this poor never get proper healthcare, proper education or a chance to become financially independent. These swarming masses all over the world, the majority of humans on this earth are allocated to a life of mere dogged living with no hope for escape.  

I believe that we have the means to transform our world and give each human being a chance for prosperity, good health and peace. For the very first time, due to the exponential growth of technology, ordinary citizens can see for themselves that the peoples of the world have all the same basic human needs and desires. It is only their cultures that make them express these differently. In all my travels, I have always found that people are basically the same, and that most people are basically good.  

But how come all this changing the world stuff is often made out to sound naïve, cliché, or the stuff of mere fantasy? Build Up! then should be the herald’s horn inviting celebration, marking a paradigm shift towards fun, lightheartedness, compassion, engagement and a more positive outlook for the future. This whole new millennium, though justifiably so, has been a real downer. We’ve rusted, atrophied, fallen from grace. Why does everything have to be so serious? All we encounter are fear, viciousness and polarization. All over the world, the news seems to be one group furious with another without end. All the world’s poor gets poorer, and cascading down everyone gets poorer, and all those in power do is fight amongst themselves, never solving anything.

Development work has also devolved from wanting to help the poor to cries for help so loud and pitiful, the same way over and over, that we all suffer from compassion fatigue. In Malawi for instance, where I was, the poorest country, with 15 million living in less than a dollar a day, with so many lost to HIV/AIDS, not to mention all the orphans left behind. In a preschool project near the teacher education college where I worked, we heard reports of six children dying of Malaria, a curable disease. Treatment was free. But there was no transportation available to get them to the clinic, and if there was, the poor, rural villagers had no money to pay for such transport.

But we don’t have compassion fatigue for these things, the real face of abject poverty, because we don’t know about them. Maybe even, because we'd feel compelled to do something about these cases. We don’t hear of real cases, especially in the West where we only view Africa as a place stocked with skeletal toddlers with swollen bellies whose detached faces swarm with flies. If these toddlers exist, I haven’t seen them.

Of course these toddlers probably do exist. But Africa is so much more. It has an enormous portion of the world’s young people and will be a powerhouse in decades to come. Africa is rising. But even now, with so much suffering, it is much, much more. During my three month stay in Malawi, I found so many warm and friendly people, witnessed unimaginable vistas and experienced exhilarating adventures.

So instead of the deadly serious, I will try a new tactic, one of irreverence, curiosity, lightheartedness, with a bend toward suspense, the need for exploration, the desire to eat delicious food and to have fun with total abandon. These are the core of the human spirit, the things that have made us survive for millennia. They never get old.

Let enjoyment, wonder and possibility be our motivating factors, the sparks that ignite social change and develop our world. Why can’t we see real people, real sites, the sparkles in the eyes of the barefoot children as they shout “Azungu” when you drive through the villages? Why don’t we gaze upon the stately boababs the natives say God planted upside down to keep it from running away, hear the calls of peddlers selling candy, sodas, snacks at minibus stops, follow up the long necks of the giraffes in Nyala Game Reserve, the gorgeous sands and the bright blue waters of Lake Malawi from Livingstonia Beach--right on the rift valley, while we sway to the techno and reggae beats at the Lake of Stars festival?

Usually, in the developing world things are extracted to the betterment of others, and an economic desert, a dead zone is all that's left behind. Why can’t a unique product improve the lives of the people from whence it came and fill them with pride, and also be the engine of change needed to develop their and our country? It could build a bridge of wonder and understanding between America and Malawi. Help could flow one way, and the other. It could be a cultural exchange, and development in Malawi will help America. Doing well will give them buying power, and American exports with increase. 

Cooperation. Development. Worldwide love through universal language, delicious things to eat. So I came up with a mission, to: Have fun. Sell hot sauce. Save the world. This is the battle cry for the new millennium. More background, more on my idea, and other stuff to come…