Who is this guy? And what's his angle?

This post is about the difficulty in understanding personal identities, something I’m experiencing in a few areas of life right now, which is all part of the game when things change drastically. And as such, this post is dedicated with love to Tara.

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Who is this guy? And what's his angle? These are burning questions for me of myself. What am I doing here? What is about me being located at this longitude and latitude working with these certain people on these certain things that makes any more sense than me working back home with other certain people on other certain things? These questions are tough to answer, and I think anyone who goes overseas in the capacity that EWB OVS do, involving hyper-consciousness of your knowledge, skill, and attitude gaps, is going to have to ask them eventually. If you’re humble enough to realize you don’t know jack, it’s always at least going to cross your mind: what can I possible do here that’s of any value or of enough value that’s it worth coming here? Those of you from EWB have heard this one a million times from OVS. It comes with the territory I think.

At this point in my placement, it seems to me that when you think about it hard enough, you see that there is a good potential answer to that question about your value: you can’t know until you find yourself doing it. Sure you can’t: if you thought you knew up front what exact value you can add, that would assume you knew up front what exact value you had within you that your partner could actually use to help them help their country, which requires you understand three things that I think can’t really be understood before you show up:

1. What is this country?
2. What is your partner?
3. Who are you when you’re in this country working with your partner?

So, yes, these questions I'm asking myself, trying my hardest to find an identity that makes sense here. Just as I have been ever since I decided to come overseas, though the learning curve just got a whole lot steeper. But, I'm not the only one asking these questions. The people I'm working with are in precisely the same boat as me. They don't know who I am or what my angle is either.

As an aside, the content of this post partly concerns my partner, I am aware that they have internet access and may read this at some point. If someone from my partner happens to read this post, I encourage you to come ask me about it. I feel I have nothing to hide and feel comfortable sharing these types of thoughts, so please read on and call me out on anything you see. None of these things I have to say here are criticisms, but rather my perceptions of the challenges of crossing cultural bridges when working together. If you think I have missed the point or are seeing things from the wrong perspective, I would LOVE for you to tell me about it. Zikomo kwawbiri!

Two weeks ago, I arrived at my partner and was introduced to the people who run the show. I arrived with Megan, my OVS coach, and we both communicated right from the get go that I hope that we can learn from each other: Mike from Freshwater and Freshwater from Mike. I was told to be “free” by the Executive Director, to “assess” Freshwater and tell them where their gaps are. This is very much the role it seems that I am expected to play, as an appraiser and solution finder. It seems there is an expectation that I know what should be in place here at Freshwater and, if I see that it’s not, I should be able to know how to fix it. Many times already since I’ve been here, I have been asked, “So, what problems have you found with Freshwater so far?”

Further, upon my arrival, I was given the title of “Programs Manager” (second highest in the organization, apart from the Executive Director) and given the executive office (second sweetest office in the building apart from the Executive Director). I have never worked in water and sanitation before and have never worked in Malawi before. But there I was, being introduced to my new job as a Programs Manager for a Malawian Water and Sanitation organization.

This floored me. My role, as I had expected it to be, was as an employee who floated and added value where he could, learning lots at first and adding more and more value as time and learning wore on. Someone who builds trust with everyone at all levels and understands their challenges. I never expected to be the big boss; I’m not qualified. I am overseas with EWB not because of what I know but because of the ability I have to learn. That is a very big distinction in my mind, and to me the distinction makes perfect sense. But for decades, so much of the development machine has been built on an unstated but very real assumption that “we”, western development professionals, know what “they”, people from developing countries, need to do. This is an assumption that I am not bringing with me, but the very fact that this is how things have been done for so long has built a large barrier to sending this message: for the time being I am here to help and learn, not to direct and criticise. And, yes, I AM open to feedback!

So, I made my concerns clear to Freshwater. I asked that my role be changed to “Capacity Building Officer” and that I be removed from the hierarchy. In addition, I invited two people who had no offices to come share mine with me. To Freshwater’s immense credit, they were open to my feedback on this (I broached the topic on day 2, Oooooo…), and they were willing to listen to my concerns. In fact, I think the fact that I nipped this early was something that Freshwater appreciated. This is a good sign.

The change in title and office made a pretty big difference I think, but actions tend to speak louder than titles and offices anyway, so I think I’m working this out. And I have worked to say this is words: “I don’t know the answer. I have worked here for 5 days, I don’t know what to do in this situation. I’m learning”. But saying this in words doesn’t quite seem to do the trick. Although I have changed the title and am now sharing the big office, I am still trying to place what the perceptions of my role are to the people around me. I am used to having to prove myself, but I am not used to having to “disprove” myself: to make it clear that I’m wearing my humility on my sleeve, acknowledging my own ignorance, but still trying to be useful as I am learning for the first months of my placement.

Now, with these challenges of expectation-setting in mind, let’s come back to my original point. I am struggling to find a life and an identity here. At my EWB chapter, I was the President. I was a facilitator, a poser of questions, a holder of key information, a sharer of this information, and someone who helped others grow (at least that’s how I saw myself). As far as I know, that’s who I was and what people knew me to be. On my hockey team I was the goalie. I was the backstop who could contribute to giving my team a chance to win by keeping our opponent’s score as low as possible, preferably zero (it was zero a couple of times actually!). In my recently ended relationship, I was the boyfriend. I was someone who was there to comfort, support, and share great moments with the woman I love. And at my job back in Canada, I was the researcher. I generated ideas, explored them, and shared them. But here, who am I?

Now think about this: if I am not even sure of who I am here, how the hell can I expect anyone else around me to have a clue? Especially when they are used to seeing foreign people like myself playing a certain role. Is it even remotely reasonable to expect people not to paint me with the same brush as most of the other azungus (azungu being a Chichewa word approximately meaning “foreigner”)? No, of course not.

In trying to make sense of all of this, I tried to picture a situation in which the tables were turned. In order to do that, I tried to think of something that one might want to do in Canada for which we might be likely to have someone from Malawi come and try to positively impact. And, actually, I had a lot of trouble coming up with anything that truly fits the example. Does that mean I’m not thinking hard enough? Or does the reverse context really not exist? Even if it does exist, it’s certainly not very common unless I’m just ignorant or badly read (to quote Chambers for the second time this blog).

So, for lack of a better example, I'm going to go with maize farming. People in Malawi are awesome at farming maize (corn) in what could be considered non-ideal conditions: dusty soil, rains that might not come on time, no mechanization, high instances of waterborne disease and malaria reducing your productivity, etc. But people in Malawi make it happen somehow. Maize is the staple here, and for a great many people in this nation, it’s the unequivocal backbone of their livelihoods. (See questions at the bottom of the post if you have thoughts on this example)

Let’s imagine this situation: you and your colleagues, let’s call them partners in your maize co-operative, are trying to grow a maize farm in Vancouver. You know how to do it and have been doing it with moderate success for years, but have a lot of constraints and problems that you aren’t sure how to solve or don’t have the resources to address. You are about to receive a Malawian volunteer from Maize Without Borders, a Malawian NGO dedicated to the end of crappy maize crops in the developed world. You and your maize growing co-op partners in Vancouver greet him excitedly because he’s from Malawi, where people grow lots of really good maize, and he’s come all the way to Canada for a year to help you out. Now imagine you ask him to tell you what you’re doing wrong, and he says that he has no experience with maize growing co-operatives, so he can’t give you any direct advice. He just wants to smile, be your friend, know your problems*, understand your work, and see what ideas come up over the next year, but the process has to be driven by YOU. What would you say? Maybe something like, “Ooookaay, so what are you doing here then”? Now imagine that, for 50 years prior to this, co-ops like yours had seen Malawians pouring into Canada telling you that you’re doing things wrong and you should do it this way because this works in Malawi. Wouldn’t you then be even more confused by the situation?

*I borrowed a bit from Eric Dudley in this sentence.

One of my best friends in the world and the type of person who makes you consider being proud to be human, Troy Barrie, helped me to work this out. He reminded me that, even if someone does listen and acknowledge what I’m saying about not being the boss and is OK with it, there’s still the problem of figuring out who I am instead. In The Critical Villager (an excellent and highly recommended book for anyone interested in humanity, not just development), Eric Dudley talks about “Recognized Authorities”. Basically the idea is that everyone has some notion of what is done by whom, and that those ideas are not universal.

It goes something like this: in a village in Malawi, it may be obvious to the locals the identities of who carries water, who fixes the roof, who sells this type of crop but not that type, who sweeps, who does this and who doesn’t do that. But to someone like me, it’s all a total mystery, at least at first, just as it would a mystery if a Malawian cobbler came to live in a frat house in Canada. The issue here is that the international development workers have in many cases established themselves with an identity that I don’t want to share, and in other cases have done a poor job of establishing themselves with any kind identity that is at all understandable to local people. When a development worker comes in, people are forced to ask: who is this guy, and what’s his angle? This is where societal and cultural filters really start to make this messy, because in Canada the establishment of one’s identity might look like something like this:

“OK, I thought this guy was an X, but he’s acting more like a Y, so he must be a Y”

Whereas, in Malawi, since I am still struggling to define my identity and because my angle is not necessarily clear to everyone around me due to cross-cultural communication challenges, it might look more like this:

“OK, I thought he was X, but he’s acting more like a, ummm…. hmmm…. What is he acting like actually?“

What Dudley suggests as a way to handle the situation of unclear identities is to simply act, and with time, people will begin to give you an identity. I’ve said it in words, “I’m not the boss”, and I’ve changed my title and my office setup to be non boss-like, but I’ll have to walk the walk as well. What does walking the walk mean? It’s hard to say at this point, but for now, I’m just going to try to be helpful and valuable in everything I do and support by co-workers in any way they seem to need. In so doing, I hope to be able to learn what their challenges are and see Malawi’s reality from their perspective. And as I learn about that, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Questions for thought and comment:

-When explaining that one of the questions you need to answer is who you are in this country working for this partner, I made an assumption that people are actually different people in different contexts. I have a feeling this is true: everyone acts differently around their friends than they do around their parents, but they’d probably say they’re still “being themselves”. What do you think? Where does the line get drawn between simply being yourself and doing what feels natural and trying consciously to find an identity? What does this mean for me in Malawi? What does it mean for you in your life as it is static or in your life is it changing?

-When I tried to think of a reverse example for the overseas sending scenario, I came up with something pretty lame. Can you think of anything more realistic? If so, please share. If not, what do you make of that in terms of the way people see people in developing countries and the way people in developing countries see Canada? Does the fact that the ratio of Canada’s GDP to Malawi’s is about 50:1 make all the difference? Or does it run deeper than this? What can you think of that you do in your everyday life that you think a Malawian could do better?

-Have you ever been in a situation in which you were perceived as someone who you felt you weren’t? How did you go about understanding people’s perceptions of you, and what did you learn? How much do people’s preconceived notions about who you are affect how they will interact with you, and how do you change these perceptions?

Loaded questions. I really hope to get some feedback here. Can’t wait to hear your responses. As always, any other comments are more than welcome, too.

Thanks for reading! I miss you all.
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From Canada: Understanding livelihoods, finding some wheels, and getting some exercise.

This post was started about a month ago when I was still in pre-departure training. I just finished it now after being in Malawi for nearly 2 weeks. Hope you enjoy it.

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Hello my friends!

My experience during one of the weekends in Toronto was so interesting that I couldn’t resist putting together a post about it. For anyone wondering about what sorts of things we learn in EWB before heading overseas, this will hopefully grant you a bit of insight into the wondrous madness that is our pre-departure learning program.

This post is all about something incredibly interesting and challenging but seemingly very valuable called “Participatory Rural Appraisal”, or PRA. What is this crazy three letter acronym? PRA is basically an approach to getting information from the intended beneficiaries of a development program with the goal of making the program as successful as possible for them, and a method of facilitating the knowledge exchange and identification in a community so that they can draw their own conclusions about their situations. Throughout the history of development, projects that have been successful, by which I mean ultimately beneficial for the people for whom it was theoretically designed, have taken into consideration the needs and realities of said people. So, clearly, a method is needed to help people identify and articulate out what those needs and realities are, the process being driven by the beneficiaries and the the conclusions coming entirely from their mouths and minds.

Duh!

This seems like common sense to me: if you want to design a development intervention that works and fits into the lives of the people it’s meant to help, you need to have the participation of those people in the design so that the reality of their lives is understood. Common sense, sure, but you might be surprised how often this hasn’t really happened. So how does PRA make it work? Let’s take a look at a definition first and see if that yields any ideas:

“PRA is defined as a growing family of methods and approaches that enable local people to analyze, share, and enhance their knowledge of life and conditions, and to plan, prioritize, and monitor and evaluate.” – Robert Chambers (Google it)

So, as far as I can tell, PRA doesn’t do anything on its own. It’s a “family of methods” that range from semi-structured interviews to wealth ranking to role playing, plus whatever else you can think of. And if you dig deeper and really look at the members of that family, you find that their value is defined not by the methods themselves but rather by the values and attitudes of the people who use them.

Clearly, this isn’t easy. And as my colleagues and I have tried it here in Toronto as part of an assignment to understand and practice PRA, the art of asking the right questions is a delicate one.

Our task: use some of the methods of PRA to find out whether informal lending institutions (places like MoneyMart, Cash Store, etc) are more of gateway into or a ladder out of poverty for people in Canada. These companies give out advanced loans to people without credit checks at very high interest, orders of magnitude larger than the type of interest you get on cash advances with a credit care. There are many different ways of looking at this. Do people with bad or no credit who need money in a bind find real value and assistance in this type of service? Or does it suck people further into financial stress and put them in situations they can’t get out of? As always, the right answer is likely somewhere in the middle. We are to use PRA to find out where exactly that lands, which basically means we have to talk to people who use and provide the service to find out whether it puts them into poverty or pulls them out of it, if it does either. The goal was to get some experience from the methodology side of PRA, and while this task doesn’t totally fit with the above definition, it was still extremely valuable.

I talked to a number of people a few weeks ago as part of this, the most valuable conversation being with a guy who had an extremely engaging story. His name was Mike, and he was from Toronto originally. He had moved out to Vancouver to work with his family’s business, and according to him, despite his hard work, he wasn’t getting the financial return he deserved. So, he told them he wasn’t going to work for them anymore. It was at that time, at age 32, when he found out that he was adopted and had never been told about it. Obviously I didn’t get the whole story because a lot happens with a person before they turn 32, but you get the idea. Anyway, Mike was a manic-depressive, which made life difficult, especially when he ended up on the street after being disowned by his family and moving back to Toronto. He was on the street for about a year before he managed to get a job selling furniture, and now he manages a store. Mike is doing just fine, despite facing all manner of challenges.

So where does PRA fit into all of this? Well, I asked Mike what he thought of those informal lending institutions, and he told me they suck people dry; he’d never think about using it even when he was desperate. While Mike’s story is one of which I can see just one side, it is still quite remarkable what you can learn about a situation by approaching it the right way. I drank a beer with Mike and played pool with him in the bar. What better context can you find in Canada to find out what people think and feel about a certain issue?

I talked to plenty of other people that night with plenty of different results and different perspectives, the sum of which painted a less than spotless picture of the sector. The real blood and guts of the exercise, however, came a couple of days later when I decided to go out and do some more investigation. I wandered around like a lost puppy for a while, but eventually found myself in Regent Park, one of the lowest income areas in Toronto. As I was investigating a few concentrations of these informal lenders around the town, I was eventually approached by a guy asking me for some money for a burger from Harvey’s. I was busy and didn’t have any change, so I declined, but as I walked away I thought to myself, “Damn! I should have bought us both something to eat and had a conversation over a meal. Missed opportunity! What was I thinking?”

So I walked on, and was approached by a fellow riding a bike.

“Hey buddy, wanna buy a bike?” he asked in a somewhat sketchy way. “Buy that bike?” I replied.

“Yeah, 5 bucks.”

I took a look at the bike and at him, and with a listen to the tone of his voice and a ponder about the price, I formed my hypothesis.

“Did you pinch it?” I challenged him, not really thinking about it that hard.

“Ahh, (explicative)”, said he, as he rode off.

And as I continued down the street, it occurred to me: another missed opportunity! This man had offered to sell this clearly stolen bike and instead of just talking to him about it and buying it from him, I had stuck to what I was used to. Annoyed with myself, I decided to rectify my mistake, so I had to run up ahead a few blocks to intercept him as he parked his bike at the Beer Store.

“Hey man, I changed my mind, I’ll buy the bike.”

“Huh?”

“The bike, I’ll buy it off you for 5 dollars.”

Apparently there was a cop in the Beer Store, so the guy told me that we ought to move around the back of the store so that he couldn't see. I ventured a stab at getting into a conversation.

"So, I'll buy your bike, but I want to talk to you for a few minutes. Look, I'll even give you $10 for the bike" I said.

"Are you a cop?" he replied angrily, understandably so.

As we went around back of the store, in between thinking about where to go next and hoping that we didn't get busted by the guy inside the Beer Store, who was a cop, I asked myself what this person, to me a stranger for whom I felt some kind of compassion, and myself to him a potential adversary, must be thinking. Putting myself in his postition: why would some random, young, unshaven guy come running and offer to buy a stolen bike under the condition that we have a conversation? In his reality, the natural assumption would be that I was not his friend. To his mind, of course I wasn't. How could I be?

"No, man, I promise you I am not a cop." I said, trying my best to bring the genuineness that was in my heart to the forefront of what I was saying. I'm not sure it worked.

"You'd better not be a cop, or I'll (explicative) take you out." he replied.

I felt like he meant it.

"Man, I swear to god, look me in the eye, I am not a cop, and I don't want to (explicative) with you, I promise." I pleaded.

"I'm a big guy, I swear I will knock you out if you're lying to me." he reiterated with conviction.

He was indeed a big guy, and, as such, I wasn't scared because I was quite sure I could outrun him. The bike was too small for him so that would only slow him down. I was totally safe.

I told him that he could see my ID if he wanted to see if I was a cop. He wasn't totally sold on this idea because he said I could be hiding ID somewhere else. I showed him my UBC Student ID and explained who I was and what I was doing, and I reminded him that, if I was a cop and lied about it in that situation, it would be a wrongful arrest if I took him in, so I wouldn't risk doing that over a cheap little bike. That seemed to convince him.

So, we got to talking. The conversation was rushed because he just wanted to complete the transaction and get into the beer store before the cop saw what we were doing. I asked him my questions about informal lending, and his perspective was that people in his situation are totally screwed if they use the services to pay off other debts, but if they really need money for something urgent, they don't really have a choice.

With that, he refferred me to a loan shark on Egglington Street that would give out up to $100,000 at 20% interest. I politely thanked him for the referral, and as we went our separate ways, he did something that surprised me. He gave me a big hug. He reeked of whiskey, but the hug was worth it as it made me feel that he had really decided I was not a cop. I am still asking myself what else it meant. Was he astounded that I genuinely did not want to hurt him? Was he lonely and simply amazed that someone really wanted to talk to him without an alterior motive? Or am I totally off base? Was he just drunk?

I guess I'll never know, but at least I bought a decent bike for only $10.

Now that I was mobile, the city was my oyster. So, I decided to fly over into the area when I had seen another one of these places on the internet. This was one that was a bit sketchier as it was not part of any big chain. It was pretty far away, but since I had the bike I could make it no problem. As I got further into this low income area of Toronto, I made a startling discover that there was a whole nest of the places concentrated at Gerrard and Parlaiment. Why hadn't I seen this when I was searching on the internet? It seemed that these places were all smaller establishments, and none of them were members of the CPLA (Canadian Payday Loans Association). This was a Sunday, so they were closed, and I was left wondering what this meant. They were unregulated, independant establishments right smack bang in the middle of Regent Park, the lowest income part of Toronto. In addition, what does this mean in terms of the biases we get from our standard information sources? According to the source of all truth and knowledge, the internet, there was no concentration of informal lending at Gerrard and Parlaiment. But according to reality, there clearly was. Reality wins.

To make a long story even longer, the next phase of fun came when I tried to return the bike to the police. A lesson I learned from this: if you ever acquire stolen property and go out of your way to try to get it returned to its rightful owner while attempting to learn something about people's livelihoods at the same time, don't expect the police to see any value in your approach.

Here's how it happened. I called Toronto Police Service politely explaining the situation, and waited around the entire evening for a cruiser to show up at our townhouse. When they finally arrived, they grilled me. Understandably so, I suppose, given that I had purchased a stolen bike, but apperantly the fact that I had done for the reason that I had in the way that I had was not enough to prevent the police from acting confrontational (when I originally wrote this, 'confrontational' was definitely not the word I chose. This post has been edited for content). After finally convincing them that I hadn't done anything wrong, one of the officers made sure to mention twice that if they couldn't find a serial number then they weren't going to haul away my trash for me because it was my problem, not theirs.

I suppose I'm judging, which of course I shouldn't because they were just doing their jobs. I guess my contempt is not for the officers but more for the system that doesn't allow for people to act on their own values if they can justify them, and a system that unequivocally sees the best course of action in that situation as the reporting and arrest of the theif rather than the return of the property to the owner. It's not that I don't agree with that conclusion necessarily, I just don't like how it is made without questioning the big assumptions behind it.

Anyway, that's my story, which I suppose turned into a bit of a rant. Sorry about that. I hope you enjoyed it!

Questions for thought and comment:

-I did a quick values balancing calculation in my head when I bought the bike: Do I purchase it, learn something, and hopefully get it back to it's owner, or do I refrain from purchasing it so as not to encourage theft as a livelihood? I chose the former as being more in line with my values. What would you choose and why? In your opinion, did I do the right thing?

-This experience exposed for me some massive knowledge gaps about Canadian livelihoods that exist outside of the traditional employment framework. What is your understanding of the livelihoods of people who panhandle, live on the street, or are chronically on social assistance? What is your understanding of their stories and Canada from their perspective?

Thanks for reading!
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Attack of the ants.

Hello all,

Today, Thursday, November 13, was my 4th day in Malawi. Months ago, when I was preparing for this placement, I made a promise to myself and others that I would not neglect recording and sharing my experiences with the people in my life. I have unfortunately had to break that promise, but the fault is not really my own. Let me explain.

I had been working on a post about an extremely interesting experience I had during my training in Toronto involving talking to people around the city about certain aspects of the Canadian financial system. The goal was to get some practice and understand some challenges surrounding the solicitation of information from people conducting their everyday lives. Learning how to ask the right questions, get multiple perspectives to form hypothesis, and plenty of other skills were the main themes of that excercise.

I was getting quite near finishing that post and working on several others, all of which were meant to be shared in the near future, when a strange thing happened. I was been checking my email in my tent here at the Mabuya Camp, where we are temporarily staying in Lilongwe, when my computer totally froze up on me. I turned it off, and when I tried to restart it did not cooperate. Alarmed, I took a look a closer look at the machine to see if anything was up, and sure enough, there were hundreds of ants crawling inside it. They were everywhere: going into and out of the USB port, into the ethernet port, all over the printer port. Everywhere. Hundreds of them. I took the machine apart to take a look at the motherboard, and, yes, an army of ants had set up shop.

So, while I can't be totally certain, I am pretty sure the ants destroyed my computer. This is why I haven't been able to post much recently and why there hasn't been any email from me. The internet here, where available, is slow and expensive if you don't have your own laptop, so there you have it. I will try to be in contact as much as possible in the coming weeks, but I can't make any promises. If you'd like to give me a call, please feel free anytime:

My phone number here: 011 265 9034067

Bye!

¬Mike

Testing the waters and sharing the results.

Are these three different things?


Hi all,

Welcome to the first real post on my blog! For a little over three weeks now, I've been in Toronto training to go overseas with Engineers Without Borders Canada. This will be the biggest change of gears that I have ever experienced, but I am undertaking it for what is hopefully a more worthwhile reason than any I have had in the past.

This blog represents a significant step (and experiment) for me personally because I've never been one to keep any type of successful diary for myself, let alone having the discipline necessary to keep my other people informed as to my goings-on. Whether it was when I was in Germany or somewhere in Asia, I've always been so bad at keeping people informed as to what's going on with me: what I'm thinking about, what I'm doing, whom I'm with, what matters to me. I think the biggest reason for this is that I've never been able to truly fathom that anyone would be that interested in reading my musings about all of that stuff.

This time I'm taking a different approach: I'm just going to write, and I hope that there will be something interesting in here for you. For my family and friends, this will be a way for me to keep you abreast of what's happening with me, Mike. For those who are simply interested in an implementation-level perspective on international development, I'll be attempting to tell stories about people, systems, what's working, what's not, and what I believe we need to think about.

Notice that I put "people" first. Being involved with EWB for the last 3 year was a process that brought me from knowing nothing about development to where I am now: preparing to undertake a project aimed at the improvement of development implementation in Malawi. And if there's anything that I've come to believe in those 3 years, it's that any kind of human development, regardless of approach, scale, or vision, will only be truly valuable if the humanity of those it is meant to benefit is always at the forefront of one's mind.

Thanks for reading! I'll post again very soon regarding some of the things I have been thinking and learning about here in Toronto, as well as some more information about what I'll be doing once I get to Malawi.

Bye for now,
~Mike












Or the same thing from three different perspectives? (Different parts of the visible light spectrum as seen from different angles through a glass that's acting as a prism. Cool eh?)

First post with little to mention

This is my first post. It's mostly a test really. I've never had a blog before nor have I successfully ever had a written diary, soI guess it's time to learn. I'll be heading to Malawi in November 2008, then my thoughts will spew all over this blog!

Did you enjoy my first post?