Ted...

My first Ted talk...

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Ramblings in August...

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I’ve been sick for the last couple of days, to the point of being stuck in bed without being able to get up… that’s a lot of time to reflect… 11 months after arriving in Bangladesh, this paradoxical, improbably, impossibly beautiful mess of a country, I still hear the question: “why Bangladesh?”… Except now it always seems to be followed by “why for free?”… I find it to be the least comfortable of questions to answer; my experiences and reasons naturally differ greatly from those of others in my program. Our backgrounds and motivations are difficult to compare, so I often hesitate to respond, lest my answers be taken as a general rule… So why Bangladesh? Because that’s what I was offered. Had I been offered Somalia, Colombia, the Philippines, Laos or Samoa, I would have accepted any of them… someone once told me that if I was serious about working in development and aid, my primary purpose should always be to work myself out of a job… unfortunately, as it stands, the need for help is s
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Speech to Campbell High Year 10 Graduation...

I've re-written this speech 100 times this week... I struggled with what to tell you, what to impart... let's start with what I won't tell you. I won’t tell you what to do with your life.   While the specifics are always interesting, there is never just one right path or option. I won’t tell you what your profession should be.   What you choose to do in life is never a matter for anyone else to judge or dictate. I won’t tell you what your opinions should be.   Where you end up philosophically is a matter for you and no one else.   I won’t tell you what you should do, what you should think, what you should feel, how you should speak. I won’t tell you to have the next few years of your life figured out.   I certainly didn’t at your age. I won’t tell you to go to university or not, to become a doctor or a mechanic, a teacher or a musician.   I won’t tell you to travel the world or never leave this town. I won’t talk to you about obstacles in life,
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Kosovo...

I'm really struggling today.  The volume of work is ridiculous, looking forward to basketball tonight to sweat all this tension out. It's frustrating to be so close to achieving your goals and yet be held back by red tape and processes which seem to exist only to test my resolve... There are rules for various things, but no one can tell me why they exist.  There are constraints on activities, but no one can tell me why.  There are methods and processes, but either no one knows what they are, or no one knows where they came from so chasing anyone or anything down is a long, arduous process with very little reward... Kosovo declared its independence last night... It doesn't quite seem real.  Less than a decade ago the term "ethnic cleansing" became all too familiar, when Kosovar-Albanians were being massacred by Milosovic's Yugoslavian forces... In the last 5 years or so I have been trying to track down a news report which shocked me into organizing relief for
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