And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood. The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me …
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Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place. I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind. *** I visited The Apartheid Museum today. The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides. The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams …
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For the first time since 1978 I stepped today onto a new continent. I have never been to Africa before, not even close. Today after travelling thirty hours from almost exactly half way around the world, I arrived in Johannesburg, on a hazy and warm summer morning. It is a strange thing to fly over Africa at night. As we winged south and east from New York a little more than half way into our flight we skirted the west coast of Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. I looked out the window and could see nothing save a little high …
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The vacation in Hawaii has ended for me and I’m now somewhere over the middle of the United States on the third leg of a four leg journey that sees me flying from Hilo to Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Johannesburg. I arrive in South Africa Monday morning in time to recover and help design and deliver and Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with friends from REOS Social Innovation. It’s exciting to be heading to South Africa, the birthplace of my wife, and therefore one of the ancestral homelands of my kids. Exciting to be working with …
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Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a …