Having an adventure, or donor engagement

So here's a topic that's been obsessing me lately, and although it has been hitting me on two very different fronts, it's actually the same issue. One is what one of my board directors called "having an adventure." In his mind, there are 3 questions he asks himself when he does public benefit stuff, one of which is, "Am I having an adventure on this?" I thought it was a great question, and in fact a question I implicitly answer yes to every morning when I come into work.

Now how does this connect to donor engagement on GlobalGiving?

Well, the thing I have been struggling with lately is how to get donors, many of whom have never given before internationally, to get a feel for what a high-wire act international development, let alone social entrepreneurship is in the developing world. In some ways it's a miracle it happens at all. And it's a miracle not only because some countries are in such dire straits that wars, natural disasters, political unrest make everything iffy. It's a miracle because the exact concatenation of factors that makes a CFW clinic viable in a particular location depends at times on the personal situation of one key person--and talent is sometimes so scarce in the developing world that things like turnover that most organizations in the developed world more or less can cope with can turn out to be showstoppers. And while I don't want things to stay that way, the fact that almost every project leader on GlobalGiving deals 10 such crises before breakfast makes very success and victory very precious. And I want donors to understand that, and don't know how to convey it.

It even extends to understanding the very mundane--forget the high-wire act. I've always said that it's a really expensive proposition being poor in the developing world. That's because even if you're poor in the developed world, odds are you can get access to reasonably clean water pretty easily. In the developing world being poor means you spend 1/2 your day getting clean enough water (and sometimes not clean enough) for your family. And sometime we have a hard time conveying this too ... here's an exchange that started with a user asking about what was behind a donation option to the Dazzling Stone School project. And here's their response ...

thank you very much for your kind enquiry.the soap,toothpaste,bath items are very useful and important need for the children,these are daily using materials actually we need more money for the items.you say below 100$ is good then only we give 90$ for that. I give the expanses step by step.

we have 100 children and 10 staff. We need the follow items for soap, toothpaste, and bath items for one month.

1- washing soap (125gms ) - IRS 8.50

2 - Body soap (100 gms) - IRS 15.00

3- Washing powder(1kilo) -IRS-20.00

4- Sampoo 1packet - IRS 2.00

5 - VVDcoconut oil ( 200 ml)- IRS-34.00

6-Bleeching powder 1packet - IRS 10.00

7 -Phenoil ( for sterlizing) - IRS 30.00

8 - Acid (bath floor washing)-IRS30.00

9 - Tooth paste(100gms) - IRS 27.00

10 - Tooth brush - IRS 10.00

11 - Face powder - 50grams = IRS 16.00

12 - Baby powder - 300gms = IRS 90.00

&etc.

we need 1 washing soap for 10 children,1 soap for 5staff /DAY - Total(10x1 +2X1) x30DAYS = 360 numbers - IRS-3060(78$)

1 body soap for 25 children &1soap for 10 staff /day - 5x30daysxIRS 15 = IRS 2250(58$)

need 1 kilo/day - 1x30daysxIRS 20 = IRS 600(15$)

need 400 packets sampoo(weekly twodays) - 400xIRS2 = IRS 800(21$)-

need 400 ml coconut oil /day for all - IRS 34 x 2x30 = IRS 2040(52$)

need 2 packets Bleeching powder/day - IRS 10x2x30 = IRS600(15$)

need 1bottle /day - IRS30x1x30 = IRS900(23$)

need acid 1/2 bottle/day - IRS30x1/2x30 = IRS450(12$)

need 300 gmsTooth paste/day - IRS27x3x30 = IRS2430(62)

need tooth brush 110 numbers/month - IRS110x10 = IRS1100(28$)

need 50 grams Face powder /day - IRS 16x30 = IRS480(12$)

need 600grams baby powder/month - IRS90x2 = IRS180(5$)

Total for all needs = 381$

Washing brushes,Eye pro,creams,body spraies,bath towels,napkins and etc also needed.

The electricity charges changing every time.Now we are using electricity little purpose only ,mainly for lights and fans only.we are send the the children to free schools ,so some fees only they collected ,so the education charge is low.

with love,
etc.

I'm racked with how we can convey this quickly and easily to donors so they can get a real "feel" for the world that's contained in GlobalGiving ...

Jane Austen's heroines *were* happier

So this article in the NYtimes perfectly captures the debate my friend April and I have been having for over a decade now. We love the choices we have as women in the 21st century, but we read and re-read our Austen novels, and can so easily imagine ourselves as Elizabeth or Emma, and wonder, "Could we have been happy as Austen characters, with the very limited choices they had?"

And there's a quote in this article that pretty much sums it up:

Ms. Stevenson was recently having drinks with a business school graduate who came up with a nice way of summarizing the problem. Her mother’s goals in life, the student said, were to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I sort of want all those things, too,” the student said, as Ms. Stevenson recalled, “but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”

Opportunities are great, but it turns out you have to actually make choices (and eschew buyer's remorse), not actually count on or hope for doing it all to actually be happy. And as I may have blogged about before, one of my favorite books, The Paradox of Choice, makes clear, in a lot of cases--especially as regards not so important choices, less is definitely better. What's not so clear yet for me is whether in practice it's also true for more important choices too ...

People you would like to meet in your lifetime

So my husband and I have a game we like to play every now and then, usually when some wonderful author or other public personality dies. It's a very simple game--it's just a list of people (in our case, mostly authors) we would like to meet. And it can't include people like Jane Austen, who died long before we were ever born, much as many of us fantasize about meeting her. And of course, Madeleine L'Engle just died, which prompted another round of the game. Here's our latest list of people we really regret not having made an effort to meet them while they were alive:

• Madeleine L'Engle
• Penelope Fitzgerald
• Douglas Adams
• Richard Feynman
• Walker Percy
• Shelby Foote
  

Broken Buildings Busted Budgets

So I've been debating with myself whether I ought to blog about the travails of building a house. But the fact is that trying to build a house while you have a full-time job 70 miles away from the construction site actually means you have very little free time for anything, including blogging. And to be honest, the further I got into the construction process, the more, well, contingent the whole process felt, so that although my general contractor and subcontractors were extremely unlikely to be surfing the web and reading about my muttered complaints about their ways, I really didn't want to do anything to jeopardize the process. Plus it wasn't clear if I was compounding the problem by not being vigilant enough ...

But now it's built, it has passed occupancy inspection, and my favorite blogger Tyler Cowen has just posted a review of a book about the construction industry that pretty much sums up my extremely limited (but heartfelt) insight into the process. Here's the part of Tyler's summary that really sang to me:

The key problem is that building or new construction owners become completely dependent on information provided by their contractors. The contractors experience cost overruns and the commissioning owners have to suffer delays, cost increases, and the general feeling of having been screwed over.

The interesting part, though is that what he says next is not, I think, actually true in my specific case:

Opportunism and recontracting are rampant. According to the author, no institution successfully helps commissioning owners distinguish between good and bad contractors.

I actually don't think my contractor was particularly opportunistic, and I'd be hard put to say he was "bad." But his m.o., and the ways of his subcontractors were totally unsuited to allow me to exercise control over the process effectively (e.g., no itemized estimates, lots of "typed up" proposals that I could see were extremely difficult to change on the fly and keep track of changes and tradeoffs) so that even absent the opportunism and recontracting, it was impossible for me not to feel screwed over at times. Now that it's all over, and it's so nice when it stops hurting, I think I will actually examine the microprocesses that made the thing so unwieldy.

Hey, what's the use of mistakes if I can't learn from them, and now, anyone else reading my blog can?

Ridiculous, but addictive web marketing

I come by this cite legitimately... As many of you know I follow Christine Herron's blog, and maybe it was the effect of two diehard Simpsons fan (aka nephews) staying at our house this summer, but when I read her post about Simpsonizeme, I couldn't resist.

For sheer stickiness, it's genius. If I had more friends who think the Simpsons are as funny as I do, it would be amazingly viral as well. And I guess I'll find out if any of my blog readers are Simpsons fans--let me know if you try it ...

Eating your own dog food

There's an expression we bandy about the office about eating your own dog food. It's a distasteful expression; it makes me feel like I'm being hazed, but the concept is pretty clear. If you make dog food, you need to be sure that dogs will eat it, and as humans, we have a hard time fathoming that. So go out and survey some dogs, you say.

True. And we try to do that. And here's where I have to stop using the expression because fairly or unfairly, comparing GlobalGiving users to dogs sounds pejorative. And so inspired by the Stanford Design School students who did 5 different projects about us (you can read about them here on Dennis's blog), we sent out our summer interns with clipboards to the Mall (the National Mall) and busy metro stations to ask them to take 30 seconds to look at possible web pages and layouts and asked them what they felt inclined to click on. The results ... well you'll have to wait about 10 days for that when we will be launching our re-designed website. But suffice it to say that the interns and clipboards brought back great insights and we couldn't have done it without them.

The second thing about eating your own dog food is this latest progress report from Rob Small, which I discovered because we got RSS feeds for all our progress reports just about a month ago, and this lets me see in one glance as I read the blogs I subscribe to the newest progress reports from all the project leaders on GlobalGiving. And I read the report, and thought, "Wow, this is great. This is exactly what I had in mind when I thought project leaders would post progress reports on their projects that would make people feel like they are right there in the field." So although I usually don't write about specific projects on GlobalGiving, feeling a little awkward about singling out one from over 450, I had to make and exception for this report. And in the spirit of this post, "Why thank you, I will have some dog food ... I have to give to this project so I can feel like I am participating in what Rob is reporting."

Yeltsin and Rostropovich: two giants

I fell behind in my blogging to record my frustration that so many of the first canned obituaries for Boris Yeltsin that were trotted out subtly underplayed his contributions to a free press and a free political process in Russia ... and found myself overtaken by Mstislav Rostropovich's death.

The Washington Post had a great vignette from Slava's life in the USSR after he had stepped over that bright line to protest Solzhenitsyn's exile. As a persona non grata, he was no longer allowed to play at the best venues, forbidden to travel, etc. Yet when he did play, as he did to a Moscow audience once in the 1970s, he inadvertently gave them an opportunity to engage in political protest--for when they stood to give him a 10 minute ovation, who was to say they were not honoring the magic of his music rather than the magic of his courage in standing up for his dissident friend?

Stories like this make me both incredibly sad for and proud of the Russian people, and chagrined. Chagrined that perhaps we overestimated the passion of the Russian people for a day when they could openly celebrate someone as courageous as Slava and rely on the institutions of civil society to keep people like him in the public eye--perhaps a roomful of music lovers in a Moscow concert hall are just not enough to stand up to the ineluctable forces that seem to be gathering around Putin today.

Mind the gap

As I move from the e-stas conference in Sevilla to the Skoll Forum at Oxford, gaps have been on my mind. Cultural gaps, and gaps created by differential speeds, and bridges across these gaps.

Usually I pride myself on being aware of gaps. I grew up all over the place, and feel that I know what it means to be foreign, to be out of the mainstream. In fact, I was just reminded that about 20 years ago, I was a sophomore at Harvard University, convinced that if I made my way back to Magdalen College here, I would feel just a little less desperately foreign. In the event, I turned the opportunity down because, I suppose, I started to cope again, and I began to feel a lot less foreign in the US.

But when I was at e-stas, I ran headfirst into a gap I didn't expect to be there--at the podium where I was to give a plenary speech. I had an hour, and a 20 minute presentation. But it became clear thate most of the Spanish people I talked to were very skeptical about the idea of opening the floor up to questions from the audience. They also clearly didn't expect me to seize the wireless mike so I could walk among the audience (the wireless mikes didn't go through to the simultaneous interpreters.) In the event, of course, there were questions from the audience. But it brought home to me how many people assumed that a broadcast format--or as Allen Gunn (aka Gunner) put it, a pulpit format--was the most efficient way to get information across. But they didn't expect me, an expert, to have questions about whether the information I chose to impart in this particular slide set, was relevant or interesting to them.

Which brings me back to the gaps that I am very much aware of, on a day-to-day basis. The obvious one is the hardware/software technology gap between GlobalGiving project leaders in the developing world and everyone else operating from the developed world. A more subtle one has to do with the cultural expectations that everyone brings to the table--we see expectations in the developed world for the web-savvy set being set by MySpace, SecondLife, Facebook--where you are expected to speak up, to approach people you may not yet know, to "put yourself out there" to see what might happen. For those who do not spend their lives online, more often than not this kind of behavior not only strikes them as inappropriate, it would not even cross their minds to consider this sort of behavior.

Either this will lead to a bigger digital divide and/or charges of cultural imperialism, or we need to find a way to meld cultures--at least online. Let's make sure that we don't exacerbate the technological gap with a cultural one.

Report out from e-stas: shameless piggybacking

Yesterday I noted I was at the e-stas conference in Seville, Spain. They are doing real-time webcasting of the conference, as well as chat (open to anybody, but the chats and the presentations have been predominantly in Spanish).

But for those of you who are looking for a succinct summary of the proceedings, you need look no further than Ismail Pena's blog ICTlogy. Here is his latest post about yesterday's proceedings.

From Sevilla with love

Here I am in Seville, at the e-stas conference which has been a powerful reminder of being in a foreign place.

Being foreign was for long a very normal feeling for me as I grew up Japanese in Italy, Germany, and the US, and as I worked intensively in client countries at the World Bank. For the last 6 years, I've pretty insulated from this feeling except for annual forays to the developing world that is stil part of my job at GlobalGiving.

And why has it been so long since I had this little frisson of foreignness? Well, almost every conference or meeting I have attended lately has either been based in the US or UK, and/or the organizers have had an American sensibility. It's a powerful reminder for me how in some ways I've been quite cocooned lately.

As I told Pilar Rodriguez, Secretary General for Telecommunications and Information, what excites me about being here is the "strength of weak ties"--I have weak ties to the vast majority of people here at the conference. On the one hand, being introverted, it terrifies me slightly to be here with people I don't know. On the other hand, as Mark Granovetter has posited, weak ties are where you can possibly find the most undiscovered value.

So what reminds me of being in a foreign place?

• Well, not speaking the language, and trying to follow along either through translators or scurrying after cognates.
• Wanting to have my presentation at the conference to be an interactive session--and being told quite firmly and kindly that the Spanish tradition is to listen to a lecture, not to question the prof. (This, however did turn out to be honored more in the breach, for which I am very grateful--including, in the interesting real-time chat enabled by the conference organizers.)
• How even quotidian things are different ... like lunchtime/break. Our lunch break today is between 14:15 and 16:00, and dinner will be again at 21:30 until ... who knows when.

And much more, but it's all underscored by the fact that in spite of, or perhaps because of all these little differences, it's possible to connect to people, get an insight into what makes them click, and feel that commonality. So thank you CiberVoluntarios for reminding me what a pleasure it is to step out of my own little bubble.

Hands On Network: The power of integrating all the forces for change

I’m in New Orleans courtesy of the Hands On Network, to participate in their leadership conference to speak to their international affiliates about the opportunities that GlobalGiving can offer.

At first glance, this network is orthogonal to the work we do at GlobalGiving, which is all about giving. It is all about volunteering, for the most part doing that labor that is outside of the comfort zone of many of us who volunteer. At an abstract level it’s all about helping out locally—although it’s much less the case here in New Orleans since so many volunteers have come from all over the US to help. But the immediacy of the impact, pride, and the joy that both givers and receivers get in the process of direct service is palpable here at this conference And I’m in awe of that.

This was very much in evidence when we took a “rebuilding” tour of New Orleans yesterday. We stopped by the Lower 9th Ward, which was, to my great surprise, a big stretch of land bordering the Industrial canal that today is green as far as the eye can see. Trees and half-shattered houses dotted the landscape, but the predominant feature of the Lower 9th Ward was green weeds. And there was a small team of tyvek suited volunteers mowing the greenery in an attempt to preserve the tenuous property rights of the former residents (reportedly some local authority had proclaimed that lots that did not have evidence of occupation, including mowing weeds, were going to be considered abandoned). And to a person, my fellow passengers, all of whom are volunteers, some professionally--were moved by these young people and their sweaty brows.

We HAVE to find a way to integrate that emotional flame that real volunteering, real witnessing can spark into the work we do at GlobalGiving.

I'm increasingly convinced that we need to tap into the urge people have to be all that they can be. I used to think I would never understand Second Life, but increasingly I see it as an incredible outlet for people to be what they are limited from being in physical space. I see here at this conference that volunteering and service is another way for people to be the most they can be outside of their traditional roles as professionals, family members, as friends. If we can bring this all together online--by allowing people somehow to express their whole self, including their concern for communities and issues seemingly far away AND their acts of service locally AND their wildcap antics at school reflected in Facebook and in MySpace and Second Life, that's when we will have tapped into the fundamental shift that's taking place in philanthropy.


Coordination is the enemy of innovation in the early catalytic phases

Amazing site

Taco van Ieperen, who is our very first GlobalGiving Ambassador, pointed me to We Feel Fine. There's an applet involved, but it loads quickly, and the only thing I can really compare it to is the way I felt when I first came across PostSecret.

Check out Taco's other posts on TED, which I've never attended, but everyone tells me is an amazing conference ...

Understanding mistakes

I love JetBlue. I like their look and feel, I like the customer service I have gotten from them--both in person on the phones and over the phone when I've had to fix tickets. So it was with some shock that I read about their multiple snafus in the snow/icestorm that shut down many east coast airports last week.

And when I read the apology from Dave Neeleman, their CEO, in my email inbox earlier this week, I thought that their acceptance of responsibility would go a long way towards their rehabilitation. But when I brought it up with my colleagues didn't see it that way, and rightly so. They pointed out that they didn't explain what went wrong and they didn't explain how they were going to do things differently in the future to prevent things from going wrong. Which brings me to a great post by Jeanne Bliss (issued before JetBlue had had a chance to implement any solutions). Right there, in point 2, she says:

2. Be humble. Jet Blue has the advantage that because of their service record and history, they are in good emotional stead with their customers. Admit that they made a mistake. And explain as much as possible, what happened.

So far in all the communications I've seen from JetBlue, the being humble, the admitting they made a mistake have been totally covered. But as my colleagues pointed out, they didn't explain what happened.

Which makes me think that perhaps it's easier sometimes to apologize for a mistake than to understand why exactly, it happened. I know it's certainly true at GlobalGiving--when a donor or project leader tells us that something went wrong, or we see something melting down before our eyes, we're focused on making sure that people understand we are really sorry for the inconvenience, we totally understand that they might be upset. But then comes the forensic part--how DID that happen, and how do we need to change to make sure it doesn't happen again ...? And it's usually a lot harder. But my colleagues' reaction proves you need both. After all, apologies do sound thin if you make them too often.

Time to learn from take 2 of JetBlue's mistake.

Mandating Philanthropy

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that "A British cabinet minister suggested that financial companies in London should donate more of their profits to charity rather than give big bonuses to employees," reporting in turn from the BBC. GlobalGiving is obviously in the business of philanthropy, and we in fact help many corporate customers in their philanthropy, so in theory I should be happy when cabinet ministers start talking about mandating philanthropy--even informally!

But I'm not. I firmly believe that choice and will are key to the value that both donors and recipients get from the act of giving and receiving, and that in somewhat clinical terms there is a real exchange of value when choice and will are part of the picture. Recipients on GlobalGiving know that when a donor chooses to give to them, they have somehow connected with the donor who on some days can have as many as 400 other options to give--and donors in turn can participate vicariously in the amazing work carried out by project leaders in their communities through pictures and reports from the field. And when donors make a choice--no less than what project on GlobalGiving, but to choose to grant the money to a community leader, they are also choosing to forgo something else they could have spent their money on. It implies they value that gift more than the nice meal, the clothes, the new gadget. That's a key part of the philanthropic experience.

Don't get me wrong--governments absolutely deliver public goods and taxes paid by individuals and corporations are necessary to pay for those public goods. But I do believe that it would be far better if the individuals receiving bonuses would choose to give a part of that to charity--and get that philanthropic experience. I also know that for a combination of reasons, individuals in the US participate in philanthropy at a higher rate than individuals in the UK. Part of this may be tax laws, and if that's the case, I can imagine that there's value to seeing what government can do to encourage individual philanthropy. But mandating philanthropy at the corporate level seems neither fish nor fowl ...

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

So this isn't about cowgirls, even though it is about Sandra Day O'Connor, and she was once a cowgirl. And it isn't about Tom Robbins's novel, although I remember this book fondly as one of Gene Magill's favorites (more about him in a future post). It's about getting the blues about how complicated it is to have a gender neutral working experience in this day and age.

The Slate article that triggered this is by Dahlia Lithwick, who is almost always a hilarious writer. (She explains why here.) But Justice Girls caught my attention because she wasn't even remotely funny in this one. And there really isn't anything remotely funny about the women who reached the pinnacle of the legal profession by being appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States feeling that that the all-eyes-upon-you pressure of being the only woman on the high court is isolating. Or feeling that they were pressured into retiring early to save their boss's ego.

And yet my rant is not that we should get equal representation in institutions of power and influence so that people like Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn't have cause to express these sentiments. I suppose there are options, including mandates of some sort, but I don't think it would work here, and frankly I doubt most American women would feel comfortable with it--I wouldn't, and I'm not even American.

My rant really is really about how intractable it all seems, these asymmetries and the resulting isolation and grief they cause. From a continent away and perhaps worlds away, here's another story about gender asymmetries and isolation and grief. A couple of weeks ago, I was horrified to learn about tsunami survivors who are now reduced to selling their kidneys, and now Meredith, my colleague just back from Chennai reports that when she met with a women’s “self-help” group of isherman’s wives, she asked them why it was just women who sold their kidneys. The answer? Because only women’s kidneys were any good. Alcohol has destroyed the men's kidneys. It's horrifying enough that women are going under the knife to have 50% of a vital organ sold off to keep their families alive, with all the risks that it entails, and under suboptimal medical conditions (let alone after care). It's equally horrifying to think that the men of these households have been so disempowered by the disaster and what has followed to be poisoning themselves with alcohol.

Maybe Tora-san had it right--the hero of long-running Japanese movie series: 男はつらいよ. (Life's hard for a guy.)

Community Foundations and GlobalGiving

A colleague of mine just alerted me to a great write up on "Open Philanthropy Resources" on the Community Foundations of America website--where we're listed as a resource. Two things are particularly gratifying about this link.

First, that we are in a category called Open Philanthropy Resources--I have never heard the term used, but it makes total sense, and I'm honored to be contributing to open philanthropy resources. It's nice to get that little thrill of self-recognition on a webpage, "Well yes, that's what we are."

Second, that community foundations are thinking about global giving at all. And Community Foundations of America are not alone in this--we have had other thought leaders linking us to community philanthropy. Because traditionally, communities have been limited in space--usually residing in a discrete, and not-so-large area--they have more often be associated with local philanthropy rather than global philanthropy. But to see other making the link to us and community foundations more than once, that must mean that communities in the community foundation context are being seen the way communities have increasingly come to be seen on the web--virtual, global, sprawling, messy things, with few if any physical boundaries.

Now that's an amazing thing. And it only ups the ante for us at GlobalGiving to create that sprawling, multi-facted, far-reaching community online.

Porcine excess

So this is the article that started it all. I read it in the Washington Post over 2 years ago, and I was entranced by the idea of being able to roast a whole pig. Maybe it was because I knew Pam, the butcher at Brookville Market, and I thought she was an awesome professional--just like the kind of butchers I'd grown up with in Italy and in Japan who knew just about everything about meat, except she was a woman! Or maybe it's because my Japanese upbringing will out and although as a culture we're obsessed with food and plenty, most of us don't have the type of room to actually be able to roast a pig in its entirety--and that just really made it exotic for me (while those of you who grew up with pig roasts here in the US think nothing of it except that you have to get up at hte crack of dawn to do it.)

In any event it stayed with me for 30 months until Dennis's brother Dan asked me what could we do differently this Thanksgiving, and I blurted out, "cook a Cuban pig in a Chinese box." So Dan drove up a 60lb pig from Carrboro NC, and Jane was an amazingly good sport about it all in spite of being a vegetarian, and we set to work assembling the Chinese box, injecting the Mojo Criollo into the pig, and resisting the urge to open the box for 3 straight hours while the magic box did its pressure cooker imitation. (The metal lined box holds the pig and all the steam inside, while the heat is applied from the top of the box.) And sure enough, 4 hours later, we had a fuly roasted pig.

I don't know if other cooks feel this way, but I love the transformation that cooking involves. I also love the things that go into cooking--the rich smells, the textures, and the freshness of stuff--but I love the fact that in many ways cooking is like a perfect black box; inputs go in, outputs come out, and what happens in between is something that the cook needs to be able to visualize and imagine and predict. In my best cooking moments, I can feel and imagine the ingredients transforming under the heat or the pressure or the chemical reaction, and I know exactly when things have to be taken out of the oven or tastes have to be corrected. This wasn't quite there--we didn't fix the pig right in its little holder, and we forgot to add another batch of coals at 2hr 30min as the instructions did say, upon closer reading--but it was quite the tour de force anyway.

So two tips for other Caja China rookies:

1. Coals need augmenting at 60mins, at 120 mins, and at 150 mins before you can open the oven at 180mins. We missed the 150 mins mark, and I noticed the external temperature of the coals had dropped by the time we opened the box at 180 mins. If we had remembered the 150 in fillip, I think the pig would have roasted in 3hr 30 mins as advertised. As it was we were done in 4hrs.
2. The Caja China comes with 2 wire racks that you fix on the outside of the pig by way of 4 s-hooks, and the wire racks have little legs. In our haste we faced the legs into the pig instead of out, which made it harder to actually latch the s-hooks on, but more importantly, it meant the pig didn't sit above the metal floor of the box, so that parts of skin on the bottom got soggy rather than dried out, and didn't get perfectly crisp after it was turned to the heat source in the last 30 mins. Legs out.

Can't wait to try it again, though. Dan, I hope you're bottle feeding the next Thanksgiving piglet.

And in late breaking news (well, not so timely, but I just found it), here's the article that should cap this experience--the Piggy Confessional.

Why I blog

I hadn't quite realized it's been over 45 days since I last blogged about anything ... but it's time to get back. And if nothing else the hiatus has helped me figure out why I blog.

In no particular order:

• I blog because it reminds me of a time when I was in junior high, and my best friend was in 6th grade. We didn't get to spend any time together at school even though our school was K-12, so the only time we got to spend with each other was on the long train rides back to each of our homes). So to make up for it we kept an "exchange diary," (trust Wikipedia to have a reference for an obscure Japanese custom common among high school girls), and writing my blog feels like keeping an exchange diary, except with all my friends
• So fundamentally I think of my blog as a relatively public journal. And as such, I like to write about all sorts of different things that shape my view of life, rather than going narrow and deep about one particular thing, even if that thing is as important as GlobalGiving.
• This is in contrast to other people like Elisa Camahort, whom I admire greatly, and currently maintains, at her count, 8 blogs. I had the privilege of meeting her in person last week, and asked her how she did it, and understood more clearly that Elisa's audience is segmented into different elements of who she is and what she does and is a maven about so she actually feels responsible to keep her blogs on topic, as it were. This is why I'm not a professional writer, much less a professional blogger, like she is. I'm in awe.
• And because I'm an amateur, I do stupid things like set my blog comments to be moderated (because I had been warned about spammers), and not realize that the moderation requests are going to an email address I had set up solely for the purpose of setting up a Google account and which I do not check at all. So Tim, Elisa, Daniel, and Beth--public apologies for letting your comments lie fallow for so long. And here I was thinking nobody read my blog anyway ...

And one more thing. Because this blog is really about my life, but the part of my life that I am willing to show anyone in the world, it's not deeply personal in that it doesn't expose anything about anyone else that they would not make public themselves, or about anything I wouldn't mind some stranger coming up to me and talking to me about. Which means that sometimes things or events dominate my life that I don't really care to blog about, which relegates blogging to 10th or 12th place in my life. But then time passes and you have to blog again, just because it's fun to share your thoughts.

Motome, are you reading this?

Eli goodbye

I will not see another pomegranate again without thinking of Eli and her great pomegranate cook-off. To me the event epitomized so many things about her, starting with:

• Take-no-prisoners approach to competition. As I mentioned, this was a friendly cookoff with friends. But she planned and strategized for this like Hannibal plotting his course over the Pyrenees.
• Her love of food. This came up again in my last trip with Eli to California, when we went to a vegan restaurant for lunch. As we drove away from that meal I started musing about how much healthier a vegan lifestyle was ... and she interrupted me with a very serious, "But Mari--we're foodies. Who are we kidding? We come across the best ever cheeseburger, we're gonna HAVE that cheeseburger." Touche, Eli. And the care with which she constructed the pomegranate dinner menu was proof of that--she was as obsessive about food quality as she is about the quality of projects on GlobalGiving.
  
• Her love of people and ability to create communities. This cookoff was a long-standing competition she had had with friends, and she and her friends had managed to create a tradition out of it and kept to it in spite of busy schedules and changing lives. She's done the same in the supply fortress at GlobalGiving. It's always been one of the things I have most admired about Eli.

So as you can see, all of these things will stand Eli in great stead as she makes your migration north. Portland IS the next San Francisco as foodie haven, and being able to scale the Pyrenees will be a great asset in the Western mountains of Maine. And the Maine Womens' Foundation will be an incredible beneficiary of Eli's ability to create communities around her wherever she goes.

Gender and Prominence

Two things came together for me several weeks ago about gender and prominence.

One, I got asked by a former intern who is a grad student at University of Michigan if I could recommend a speaker on international development to him. He and his colleagues had already lined up Joseph Stiglitz, Guy Pfefferman, Allan Meltzer, and Stan Fischer--and he wanted my help in rounding out the group with someone with a critical view of the international financial institutions, preferably a woman. And even though the students had managed to line up a male foursome--an impressive male foursome at that--I had a hard time coming up with more than two. Nancy Birdsall and Jessica Einhorn were the only women I could come up with who had the kind of stature I felt the other panel members had. And as I thought about it, it bothered me that I could think of other possible panelists, but they were all male.

The Slate article also asked "Why aren't there more female CEOs?" a couple of days after my intern's query, and just yesterday, the New York Times covered the dearth of female bosses. The articles do a much better job of exploring the whys and wheretofores than I can, but it's a lot more disquieting to be asked to come up with options yourself, and discover that you can't do it. That's when you can't just blame the board members of the companies for not being imaginative or inclusive enough. Damn, damn, damn ...

P.S. I suggested both Nancy and Jessica to my intern, and added Manish Bapna to the list feeling that I wasn't giving him enough wiggle room given that people's schedules are so booked. After all, I was as interested in injecting more diversity--any dimension of diversity!--into his august panel as he was.