Vietnam

Vietnam. A cacophony of the senses. Old Town Hanoi, our first stop, is a maze of alleys all filled with food vendors, tiny $10 hotels, knock-off stores, and motorbikes, motorbikes, motorbikes. Gas powered two-wheeled vehicles moving every which way, everyone in a peripheral vision flow state, somehow avoiding the inevitable crash (most of the time) due to everyone using their horns all the time. It makes one wonder what it was like when it was only bicycles. It must have been very quiet.

From Hanoi, we visited the World Heritage Site of Halong Bay. Thousands of limestone cliff faced islands off the northern coast. Like everywhere we went in Vietnam - in fact all of asia - a clear day is one filled with a fog-like haze. The sun and stars are nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, our overnight ride on a Junk Boat entertains: kayaking, cave walking, and odd boat mates, all make this a worthy venture.

Then we meet our friends Melany and Duncan Berry and head to Thich Nhat Han's Root Temple (aka a nunnery and monastery) near Hue in the central part of the country. For 5 days we are their guests. Dharma talks, singing, meditating, silent meals, helping build a rickety robe rack, walking meditation fill our days. The nuns want to keep Skye - she is their size; taught a great english class (the highlight being a rousing round of 'twinkle twinkle little star'); and impressed them with her badminton skills. The mutual adoration between Skye and the nuns is heartwarming. Skye is very clear that as of today she's not becoming a buddhist nun. Just in case you were wondering. They sleep on desk tops, wake up at 4:30am for morning meditation and eat all vegetarian meals in silence.

Now we're in Bhutan after a week in Mysore, India. Tomorrow we head to the far east of this small country.

TEDIndia Conference

We're in Mysore, India. Just finished the TEDindia conference where I had the privilege to speak on day 2 (yesterday).

Entering the TED world felt like landing on the moon after Africa and 2 weeks in Vietnam where we spent the majority of our time in and around a Buddhist Root Temple in Hue.

Photos and more coming soon.

Out of Africa

We have arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam after a wonderful and enlightening road trip up the West Coast of South Africa, into Namibia; followed by a small plane flight into the Okovango Swamps, Botswana; onward to Victoria Falls and then to a remote village in Malawai; before time on the beach in Plettenberg Bay and a couple of days in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia en route to Asia...

along the way we've seen amazing wild animals, met with inspirational people, experienced inspirational examples of positive deviance, and reconnected with Africa the place where Marci and I met 24 years ago.

Its beauty, tragedy and uniqueness is astounding.

No Internet in the Bush

Sorry to be out of touch.

We've been traveling extensively in the bush - as they say here - with no internet access. Now we're in Johannesburg, South Africa, but only briefly as we leave in 2 hours to fly to Blantyre, Malawi where we will spend the day with leaders from Millennium Promise and UNEP visiting one of their Millennium Village Clusters exploring how to create market-based economic inputs that will sustain the progress they have made in eradicating extreme poverty.

We just spent the last few days in Zimbabwe and Zambia on either side of The Smoke That Thunders, Victoria Falls. We stayed in Vic Falls with friends from 24 years ago. Zimbabwe is just emerging from a complete economic collapse - their currency, just after printing 10 Quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) Dollar bank notes, totally collapsed and now they use only US Dollars. Meanwhile, the funky, isolated Zambia of 1985 - where you couldn't enter the country if you had a South African stamp in your passport - has become one of the new economic darlings of the region, with a 5 star hotel sitting directly on top of the grass roofed huts where us Sobek guides lived at the Rainbow Lodge. We had the pleasure of hooking up with two Zambians with whom I worked - Rachel and Dominic - who took us on the grand tour of Livingstone to see Nanda's Mini Market, Dombwa street Market, the Boat Club and Nakatindi the ghetto where all the Africans who worked with Sobek lived. After dinner we crossed the border from Zambia to Zimbabwe the other night at immigration the lights were out (black out that had started the morning we left) so we entered the ramshackle immigration building in total darkness saying ‘hello? Hello?’ and then all of a sudden a cell phone LCD light come on and a polite voice says, ‘yes, can I help you?’ as if nothing was unusual… It was surreal, but classic - everyone was relating to that as if nothing was unusual in any way... those LCD lights in the cell phones are very popular in Zimbabwe.

There is so much more: lions, leopards, elephants and hundreds of other species in Namibia and Botswana; road trips through the coastal desert mountains where we didn't see another car for 5 hours; hiking to the top of the world's tallest dune and then skiing down the face skye burning the bottom of her bare feet; meeting with the leader of a most practical and innovative approach to land/biodiversity conservation in Africa; feeding running orphaned cheetah's 2 kg slabs of donkey meat from the back of a careening truck... After we return from Malawi I will put together a proper travel log and share it. I also, will encourage Marci and Skye to begin to post.

Now off to meet the executives from South Africa's largest retailer before getting on an Air Malawi flight to Blantyre.

POSITVE DEVIANCE I

Patenoster, South Africa

August 28, 2009

It was in the market in Patenoster, South Africa that Skye called out, ‘hey, papa come look at this cool thing!’ Fully expecting a troll, trinket, or other tacky tourist item to maneuver my 11 year old away from, I was surprised to find colorful boxes made out of the bottoms of 1 liter coke bottles. Instead of recycling, or throwing them away, this woman had masterfully cut the the bottles in such a way that they would close. In order to make them pretty, she had taken napkins and glued them on in such a way as to make them sturdy and translucent so the light could shine through. And at 12 Rand – approximately $1.50 USD – they weren’t expensive.

She did a brisk business, so we were lucky to get one. She’ll make more tonight and be back tomorrow at 11am next to the dried fish, shell mobiles and other brickabrack.

Holding this thing, which I don’t know exactly what we’ll do with as we continue our road trip north into places wild and unknown, I started to think about principles. What are the common elements of projects that might make up an instance of positive deviance?

• Sustainable Value – it adds demonstrable value to multiple stakeholders – including the shareholder – and importantly, doesn’t take away value from other people, communities and nature. In simple terms, an instance of positive deviance should do no harm and bring value to many. In the case of the little box, she was making decent money on a ubiquitous item that was heading to a landfill, incinerator or energy intensive recycling plant.
• Cost Effective – the economics must make sense at scale within the communities in which they operate. In other words, it could work at scale and isn’t simply for the wealthy or extreme niche. If ‘sustainable’ cotton (or pick your commodity) can’t compete with ‘conventionally’ grown cotton, it won’t make a difference. At 12 Rand, these sturdy boxes were accessible even to the local fishermen, and were an absolute bargain to tourists. I could easily imagine thousands of these being made all over the world.
• Beauty – the direct outcomes and unintended impacts of the product or service should somehow enhance the richness and diversity of nature and society. If things add economic value and do no harm, but they detract systematically from diversity or beauty, then in the long run they won’t make the cut. My market entrepreneur didn’t need to add the napkins to the coke bottle boxes. They would work have worked without them just fine. But it was that extra move to thoughtfully bring beauty along with the practical innovation that make it appealing, and led to its being snapped up like hot cakes.

These may not be right, but it’s a good northstar to start.

WILD ECONOMY

September 9, 2009
Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park
Ten lions, a dominant male, two females, five cubs and two young males nearby, rest in the afternoon heat. The male Kalahari Desert lions are known for their flowing, dark, beautiful manes, which grow fuller than most due to the lack of vegetation and underbrush. It’s hot, dry and primal out here in this bright African afternoon. The cubs rough-house, chew on sticks and nurse; the dominant male lazily sits up to survey his domain; the mamas nap only moving to stay in the shade; and the young males shift restlessly to survey the main pride to which they hope to have access someday. Mostly they all sleep.
They pay us no mind even though we’re but 20 feet away for two hours in the 35 degree heat. A few german tourists in self-drive 4x4’s toting massive cameras and lenses come and go. Still we sit, sweating yet mesmerized by the spectacle of wild lions in this wild place.
Like the Germans, we are on a self-safari in this remote game park on the border between Namibia and South Africa. We are in a rented Kia Sportage bound from Cape Town to the Angola/Namibia border and have our own small array of electronic recording devices (not too much: remember our carry-on provision), and are in the process of surveying two dry river valleys where the game collect from Twee Riverien to Nossob and over to Mata-Mata searching. Watching the King of Beasts playfully swat an frisky cub, it occurs to me that our ‘market economy’ means nothing to these wild creatures. They are affected by markets surely; but they know and care nothing of them. For them life just is.
In contrast, I live, observe lions in Africa, and am able to write this by virtue of my active participation in market economies. What’s especially interesting about Africa is that there are fair numbers of people who, like the Kalahari lions, are influenced by market forces, but as a practical matter they know and care little about them. For a good portion of humanity life is still pretty basic – living moment by moment hunt for food, shelter, sex, and harmonized social relations. And this is an economy of sorts – a wild economy. It’s older, more raw and as I gaze at the lions, realize isn’t going away anytime soon. Market economies are a structure of human interpretation with agreed to rules and norms; wild economies are somehow different.
In New York I met with folks from Millennium Promise, an NGO committed to eradicating extreme poverty consistent with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. In early October Marci, Skye and I will visit one of their projects in Malawi to explore how to develop markets for agricultural goods in communities with no infrastructure and no investment capital. Theirs is a problem of transitioning people from a wild economy to a market economy. According to Millennium Promise there are one billion people living in extreme poverty world-wide. That’s a lot of people living close to wild economics. I’ve grown up in market economics – I know nothing else – and the last 5 years have looked deeply into the unintended impacts – good and bad – of markets. What I’ve learned is there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Participation in the global economy has clear benefits, but also its costs. And because it works on human-created rules, one has to choose to participate in order to make it work. Thus I suspect that this is why most ‘aid’ fails and why the WTO will continue to have challenges. Ultimately, people must choose to participate in markets; to let go of the wild, ancient and raw – with all its benefits and costs – and embrace the new.
And as I sit, sweat and commune with the Kalahari lions I can almost see a kind of picture into that wild human economy. But not quite.

We are on our way to the Kalahari and then into Namibia. More posts coming soon when we get reconnected. Its a long road.