I'm afraid I don't have any pictures but I got in some nice gardening today. I spent a while talking to Mom (thank you cell phone headset) while planting garlic, spinach, and kale. I don't know what will actually grow over the winter here, but it's worth a try. It was almost 18 degrees here today (that's Celsius of course, 65 degree for you hidebound Fahrenheiters). Not that I should talk, I had to calculate the conversion myself. But we should be operating on Celsius, just like we should be using dollars coins. So I will continue my ad hoc one-woman crusades to encourage both of those activities.
After that I spent another hour listening to the radio while digging rotted straw into my second bed. I'm constructing low raised (or at least separated by boards) beds using some lumber out of a weathering stack that was sitting on the side of the lot. Clearly no one had been using it for some time so I just appropriated some pieces. As Miles says, it is often easier to beg pardon than ask permission. No one has complained about it yet so I'll just keep gardening along.
The soil needs a lot of amendment so I'm reclaiming rotted straw from the straw bales around the perimeter. I assume they were originally placed there for erosion control but now the ground is pretty well grassed in and the bales are collapsing... Thus creating a handy source of soil organics for me.
And while digging straw into my second bed I listened to this interesting segment on Interfaith Voices. It's a public radio show (of course) that's on the local station on Sunday afternoons. The first segment in today's episode was an interview with Bob Lupton about his new book, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse it). You can go to their website to listen to this week's show. This first segment was about 20 minutes long. His argument is that giving, especially one-way giving, can feel great for the giver but may be problematic for the recipient. He goes on to suggest that we need much more assessment of the effects of charities on those they serve and cites the example of mission trips. It's not enough to say that our group had an amazing experience and really coalesced around this project... What was the impact on the community they worked in after the mission group had left?
Anyway it was a provocative piece and something to think about especially in the season of charitable fundraising. That is probably one of the things that makes the Heifer Project stand out for me. Their model incorporates the recipient "giving on" and and so moves toward the meaningful exchange and away from the abject recipient model.
What are your thoughts about right, and wrong, kinds of charity? Listening to his story I agree that the church breakfast project where I'm helping to cook on Sunday mornings definitely has some of those flaws. It's not immediately obvious what could be changed given the available resources and time constraints though. I'll have to keep mulling it over.
1 comment:
I think temperature is a bad place to begin your crusade. Temperature is, in the end, entirely about how something feels -- a subjective measure. I know when it is "65" that it is warm (at least for November). When it is "18," I have no idea. And that's all anybody ever uses temperature for, really. Start your crusade instead with distance measurements -- meters and centimeters and the like. There, a lot of the interactions go something like, "I have something, and it is 2 cm. That means I need something ELSE that is 2 cm, so it will fit." There, you don't really need to know what "2 cm" even is, you just need to know that it is that same as other 2 centimeterses. I can bumble along quite well, not having the faintest notion how long anything is, as long as I don't know how long everything is as part of a consistent and integrated system. In fact, I've already half converted myself to centimeters -- I use them all the time! Temperature, on the other hand, I'm always having to compare to mental models of what "18" should mean, and that's where the system breaks down. And really, outside of a chemistry lab, "18" is really no more rational than "65". I mean, it's not like I'm going to be boiling anything anyway, so all the benefit of the decimal system is lost, and indeed, by making the units larger (one unit of centigrade is larger than a unit of fahrenheit), you lose precision -- it's actually LESS practical! Anyway, that's all to say, I may take your centimeters, but you will pry my Fahrenheit from my cold (32 degrees) dead fingers!
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