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Posts Tagged ‘indonesia’

Moth Radio Hour and the Fish Bank

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2015| 2 Comments »

At Moth Radio Hour, people who can tell stories well are recorded telling theirs before an audience, without notes or prompts. I was driving home one day when I heard a story by Jensi Sartin, who showed fishermen in Bali how to save their livelihoods by “banking” some fish.

A bit of background on Sartin comes from the Aspen Ideas blog: “Jensi Sartin is the director of the Reef Check Foundation Indonesia in Bali, where he devises community-based strategies to protect the coral reefs in Indonesia. [In] his story ‘The Fish Bank,’ [he talks] about how he tried to bring the fish back to Bali.

‘This is not just about 75 percent of the world’s coral reef going extinct, it’s not just about the fish that will just disappear. This is about people, because there are lots of people that depend on this coral reef. There are a lot of people that depend on the fish and this healthy coral to feed their family.’

“Sartin says that his experience growing up in the rainforests of Borneo – where deforestation was already under way – prepared him for his professional career as an advocate for the world’s oceans. ‘All of these things are connected,’says Sartin. … ‘Protected areas are not about managing resources, they are about managing people.’

“Sartin says community-based conservation forms a crucial part of sustainable development, especially in regions of the world that are environmentally stressed.” Here is the Aspen link.

If you missed my review of the climate-change movie Revolution, which shows how coral reefs are sending us a warning, check it out here.

And you can listen to Sartin’s inspiring storytelling at Moth.

Photo: Caroline Lacey
On the Moth Radio Hour, Jensi Sartin talks about creating a fish bank.

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Traveling Spoon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2014| 3 Comments »

Here’s an interesting start-up by a couple of entrepreneurs who love to eat. The two women decided to build a business around helping travelers find truly authentic cooking.

According to Aashi Vel and Steph Lawrence’s website, “Traveling Spoon believes in creating meaningful travel. We are passionate about food, and believe that by connecting people with authentic food experiences in people’s homes around the world we can help facilitate meaningful travel experiences for travelers and hosts worldwide.

“To help you experience local cuisine while traveling, Traveling Spoon offers in-home meals with our hosts. In addition, we also offer in-home cooking classes as well as market tours as an extra add-on to many of the meal experiences. All of our hosts have been vetted to ensure a safe and delightful culinary experience.

“Traveling Spoon currently offers home dining experiences in over 35 cities throughout Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, and more countries are coming soon!” More here.

I have no doubt that Traveling Spoon is also boosting international understanding. What a good way to use an MBA! Business school is not all about becoming an investment banker, as Suzanne and Erik would tell you.

Photo: Traveling Spoon
Traveling Spoon founders Aashi Vel and Steph Lawrence met at the Haas School of Business.

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Indonesia’s Green School

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

And speaking of schools that develop a love of the natural world, check out this story from the radio show Living on Earth.

“On the other side of the world, in the tourist paradise of Bali, there’s a school that the U.S. Green Building Council named the greenest school on Earth for 2012. It’s called the Green School, and it educates some 300 students from 25 different countries. Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb went to check out what’s so green about the school.”

Among the people he spoke with was Charis Ford, director of communications for the Green School.

“BOBBY BASCOMB: It rains a lot in Bali. Humidity and bugs typically destroy a bamboo structure in about 4 years, but the Green School buildings should survive 20 years or more.

“CHARIS FORD: We use treated bamboo, but it’s been treated with salt essentially. We heat water and we submerge the bamboo poles into the saltwater and it makes the bamboo unpalatable to termites and mold and funguses and other things that would biodegrade the bamboo. …

“FORD: All the building companies that he spoke with were like well, ‘You have to have walls. All schools have to have walls,’ and John [Hardy, a Canadian jewelry designer who moved to Bali in the 1970s and founded the school] said, ‘Why do they have to have walls?”’ They rubbed their chins and scratched their heads and said, “’Well, where are the kids going to hang the art?’ As it turns out, you don’t have to have walls. And we don’t have walls and we’re quite happy about it.

“BASCOMB: Just outside the classroom, a chicken wanders through a patch of green beans. Gardens are everywhere, integrated throughout the campus. They mimic a natural forest ecosystem using edible plants, a design called permaculture.

“FORD: When you wander around Green School’s campus, you might think it looks kind of like it’s wild, but then as you tune in and look at the plants that you’re around, you’ll see that that’s a bean trellis, and that’s a guava tree, and that’s ginger. Even though it looks like a jungle setting, you get a little closer and you see that’s chocolate — cacao pods — hanging from a tree next to you.” Lots more here. You also can listen to the recording of the radio interview.

Photo: Mark Fabian
On extremely hot days a canvas envelope can be pulled around a wall-less Green School classroom so cool air can be piped in to keep kids comfortable. 

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Volcano That Colored JMW Turner’s Skies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2014| 2 Comments »

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
Volcano in Indonesia, Turner sunsets for years.

OK, I made that last part up. But there really is a connection between volcanoes and sunsets half a world away.

Writes Sindya Bhanoo at the NY Times, “Sunsets painted by the great masters are now providing a type of information their creators could never have imagined: important clues about air pollution.

“Polluted skies result in redder sunsets, and artists captured this redness on the canvas, said Andreas Kazantzidis, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Patras in Greece who was involved in the research.

“He and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of high-quality digital photographs of paintings done between 1500 and 2000. The period included more than 50 large volcanic eruptions around the globe.

“In each painting, they looked at the red-to-green ratio along the horizon of each sunset to estimate the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere at the time.

“When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere, producing bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years. This is evident in the paintings of the British master J. M. W. Turner.” More.

 At the NY Times, an 1829 landscape by J. M. W. Turner that researchers analyzed for its sunset.

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Stealth Poetry Project

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 2, 2012| 4 Comments »

Last year around Christmas my husband visited Southeast Asia on business and came back with descriptions of Christmas trees decorated from head to toe with written words on strips of paper.

That got me thinking about a new stealth project, one I hinted at here.

I printed out the quotes below and covered the paper with sticky plastic. I will put one set of quotation strips on our Christmas tree, but the first strips are now posted here and there around town. We’ll see what happens to them.

Feel free to use the lines here for a stealth project of your own, with or without sticky plastic. Or send some other quotes that I can use. If you are really ambitious, you might put strips of poems at the bottom of a poster headed something like “Help Yourself to Poetry” so people will be encouraged to take one.

“The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.” T.S. Eliot

“The endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.” Louis Kahn

“God inhabits the praise of his people.”

“Flowers have their agendas.” Mark Jarman

“I’d like to have a hand in things, what’s going on behind the screen.”  Kate Colby

“I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.” Carl Sandburg

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Ups and Downs in Cultural Exchange

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2011| 2 Comments »

Originally, I was just going to write about a new State Department program that brings foreign cultural acts to the United States. There had been a story in the Boston Globe.

“The US State Department, which has long sent American artists abroad as part of its cultural diplomacy efforts, is for the first time launching a sizable program to bring foreign performers here — an initiative administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts. Comedians, puppeteers, musicians, and dancers from Pakistan, Haiti, and Indonesia will tour to small and midsize cities across America next year as part of the nearly $2 million Center Stage program. ‘Since the early ’50s, we’ve basically sent groups overseas to do people-to-people exchange for mutual understanding,’ said Ann Stock, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. ‘This is the first time we’re bringing 10 groups to Main Street America.’ ”

It sounded like a nice experience for foreign visitors and audiences alike.

But not all summer visitors who come in under the auspices of the State Department get what they expect. J-1 visas, for example, are given out for young people to work here and enjoy cultural interactions. But according to Monica Lopossay in Thursday’s New York Times, things cans go wrong, especially if job placements are contracted out to contractors who also contract them out.

In Palmyra, near Hersey (PA), “Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.

“The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. The students said they were expecting to practice their English, make money and learn what life is like in the United States.

“In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.” Read more here.

In Rhode Island, our family often meets up with young adults on J-1 visas. They staff the grocery store and the restaurants in summer. For us, it is a nice cultural exchange to talk to people from Ukraine, Moldova, or Serbia, but it’s hard to know if the visitors are having a valuable experience. Often their housing is not great, but the location is beautiful and many make good friends.

If you know more about this, do weigh in.

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