I'm currently in Quixadá, a small town in the heart of Ceará (a state in northeast Brazil), home to my grandparents. This year, a cyber café--Quix, was opened, giving local people access to the internet at a *very* low cost. Since most of my family, that came here for Christmas, left sunday morning, I've been spending a lot of time here at Quix (well, my excuse is that I've been working on my college essays)

Soon, I have to add an update about my incredible adventures with my x-games family.


>^.^<

Por enquanto, fica a intraduzível conversa que minha mãe teve de manhã ao telefone com a padaria:

minha mãe: bom dia! eu gostaria de pedir um pão de cachorro-quente.

carinha da padaria: hã? o qué isso? é o pão bola?

minha mãe: não, é aquele compridinho...

carinha da padaria: aaaah... é o pão de hot-dog!

minha mãe: ¬¬

hmm I was reading through my computer in search of texts I'd written (to help with my essays) and I found this:

>^.^<

My New Dream Project

I can’t really explain it very well; I’m not sure how it would work exactly. The idea is similar to another update I have made, but it relates to organizations. With the myriad of organizations and initiatives out there it’s hard to keep track of what’s connected, how and if they work together and keep a holistic view of what’s happening and the smaller implications. Visuals can be very helpful, so I was thinking, why not represent the network of organizations graphically? And use the graph-like figure somehow to calculate impact and resources used? My summer project is to see how this could happen… Have organizations linked by goals.

One of the reasons some youth don’t feel motivated to work with social action is because they feel there’s to many problems to make a difference, bettering the world is impossible, etc. But what if they could visualize the impact of their and other's actions? And see that they’re not at all alone? All the actions come together to fulfill certain goals. And they can help out with what they are most interested in.

The same structure showing the connection between organizations could be used by each person to link they’re own activities and/or ideas.

Whatever activity one does simply for the pleasure of it could be linked to an initiative that uses such activity. The initiative could be to simply bring people together. That could create empathy and be the spring to a new action.