| May. 28th, 2007 12:08 am The Struggling Fragile
THE STRUGGLING FRAGILE The title of my entry this week was gleaned from a past post of gracesmom. In her post, she urged us to go out into the community and seek out the weak, the fragile, that could use our help. In an earlier post, I mentioned that my students would be out looking for old buildings to tear down and recycle the lumber. That mission didn’t yield as much as I had hoped. In addition, we are finding that there are a lot more homeless around here than we thought. I took the entire day today to look for solutions. Let me tell you what I came up with. The Worldchanging site that has already been posted in a previous entry yielded a ton of information. More than I could have ever dreamed of. First, there is an organization of people in Georgia who are building some quick and dirty housing for the homeless. They call themselves the Mad Housers. Pay particular attention to the section on emergency stoves. A cautionary note: If you are going to use a stove like this, use it very carefully and educate yourself on avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning. I was not too enamored with their hut design so I continued to research. Shortly after leaving the Mad Housers site, I hit the Motherload! I discovered the HexaYurt project. The HexaYurt design has been around, in its present form, since 2006. The structure has been tested often and has proven to be viable. The beauty of this concept is that the basic structure can be up in about 30 minuets. Anybody can put one of these things up with minimal training. The only tools required are a utility knife and a straightedge. The project did a presentation for the Pentagon which lays it out nicely. (It’s a Pdf file so it may take a bit to load) The designer, Vinay Gupta, has made this project open source. In other words, there is no patent infringement if you start to build these things. If you have homeless in your area this might be a great solution to their plight. Again these are band aid solutions. Just enough to get us through this winter. As I read ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lead_tag post tonight, I am disheartened. Will we move forward, or just acclimate to the situation? For crying out loud! We have over 1700 people signed into this site. When do we decide that we are the force to change things? It is not the Brunni, it certainly not a failed leader as we have now, it is us. As I close, please understand one thing. It is not Megiddo, working on his projects, it is not miawithoutoil working with her family dynamics and staying alive, it is not about redhatty living her reality in a truly decimated city, not about rocklobster following her calling, or cycleboy_wwo trying to pull things together…… it is all of us trying to fix things, in our own, apparently, insignificant way. Know what? All of our attempts are not insignificant... They are very important, our efforts are a way that we contribute in meaningful ways and then let something larger than ourselves take over. If you can keep this concept in your thoughts, I think that we’re gonna be OK. Bright Blessings Megiddo
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