schooldad

This site now lives at http://www.lancebledsoe.com/ .  I’ll forward this domain eventually.

Earlier this year I made a $25 loan thru Kiva to a man in the Congo who wanted to expand his biscuit-selling business. This week I got an email from Kiva with an update on the loan. It said:

José vend des gaufres, galettes et beignets. Il est très content car le crédit qu’il a obtenu au mois de février dernier lui a permis d’acheter une friteuse pour fabriquer des beignets en grande quantité. Il faisait avant en utilisant la braise qui coute cher et détruit la foret. José a maintenant beaucoup de clients et son activité a augmenté en stock et revenu. Il remercie très sincèrement tout le monde qui l’a soutenu financièrement.

The more observant among you will notice that this update is in French, and since I don’t read French, a quick trip to Google Translate gave me this translation:

José sells waffles, pancakes and fritters. He is very happy because credit he obtained in February enabled him to buy a deep fryer to make donuts in large quantity. It was before using the embers which is expensive and destroyed the forest. José now has many customers and increased activity in stock and income. He thanked most sincerely everyone who has supported financially.

How cool is that! Thanks Google, and thanks Kiva for keeping me updated.

One of the charities I decided to support last Christmas (in addition to Kiva, which I talk about here and here) was smiletrain.org, an organization that provides free cleft lip surgery to poor children around the world who are born with a cleft lip or cleft palate.  If you can look at the “Before” photos on the smiletrain website without it breaking your heart, you’re a stronger man than I am.  And if you can look at the “After” photos without wanting to be a part of this neat organization, you must have something better to do with $25 than I do.

A few weeks after I sent in my last $25 donation, I got the below email, which is kind of a cool reminder that there are actually real kids who are being helped by even a small donation like mine.

————————————————————–

Hi,

Meet Sareap Tuy, a 9-year-old boy from a very poor area of Cambodia, who we were able to help thanks to your support.

Sareap’s family is extremely poor and his parents could have worked for 100 years and still not be able to afford to pay for the cleft surgery he desperately needed.

Poor Sareap lived with his cleft for 9 long years, tormented by other children and shunned by his village. He was not allowed to attend school because of the way he looked, because he was a distraction to the other children.

Luckily, someone in their village told them about a hospital that had a free cleft surgery program and they took Sareap to National Pediatric Hospital where Sareap received free cleft surgery on April 2, 2009. Dr. Long Vanna did a great job!

Now, Sareap can go to school for the first time and learn how to speak properly. He’s very lucky to have received the surgery he so desperately needed and can now begin a new life.

Unfortunately, there are still more than 4.6 million children in the world who are not so lucky and who are still waiting for their clefts to be repaired.

Will you help us help one more child?

Send us a donation of any amount and we’ll use 100% of it to help another kid like Sareap. (I’ll send you another photo, too, as a small token of our appreciation for your help.)

Or call 1-800-935-7308.

Thanks for reading this and for helping us to help these kids.

All the best,

Brian
Co-Founder/President

I’m about ready to declare the Maker an avid reader.  He just spent the last hour and a half reading “The Mask of Maliban” (#13  in the Secrets of Droon series) to himself, and he did the same thing yesterday with #12.

I’ve written on the Maker’s developing love of reading before (including here and here), and am tremendously pleased that what had once been something of a distasteful chore for him has turned into something he genuinely enjoys.

With both of his older brothers already in “regular” (i.e., public) school, it was probably only a matter of time before the Maker decided he wanted to try it as well.  I can understand the attraction.  Most of his friends are already there, as well as a bunch of other kids, and it seems like there’s always a lot of interesting stuff going on there.  My wife and I have always felt like we’d stick with homeschooling as long as we felt like it made sense for our kids and our family, and if the boys decided they wanted to try regular school, and if we felt like they were ready for it, that would be okay with us.

So last week the Maker and I visited the school where he will likely be attending 4th grade in the fall and got a 20 minute tour from one of the school counselors.  In addition to the school counselor, we met several teachers, all of whom were very nice and, I was pleased to notice, talked almost exclusively to the Maker rather than to me.  It was mostly just nice-to-meet-you kind of chitchat, but the fact that they were so nice and spoke directly to him made me feel good, and I’m sure it did the Maker as well.  Afterward he said he liked the school and was looking forward to starting.

So barring any drastic changes of heart, I will likely be hanging up my homeschooling hat in the next few months.  All in all, I’d have to say I feel pretty good about it.  Homeschooling is a lot of work, and while I’m glad to have been able to do it, especially when the kids were younger and we were moving around a lot, I’m also looking forward to handing that job off to the public schools and taking on the supportive parent role.  Knowing myself (and the Maker), I predict the transition may be easier on him than it is on me.

A few months ago I loaned $25 to 5 women in the Dominican Republic thru an online micro-lending service called Kiva.  Kiva works with “field partners” around the world, organizations that actually oversee the administration and repayment of each loan.  It turned out that there was a problem (which the field partner in the Dominican Republic identified) which prevented the loan from going thru, so while Kiva and the field partner sorted things out, Kiva refunded my $25 which meant I could loan that money to someone else.

So I looked thru Kiva’s loan listings and selected a man in the Congo who wanted a loan to increase the profit he made in his biscuit-selling business by adding purified water.  And last week I got an email letting me know that he’d already posted his first loan payment of $1.56.  Woo-hoo!

Kiva’s a really neat organization.  If you’re looking for a way to help small (really small) business entrepreneurs in poor countries around the world, and you don’t have a lot of money to lend, this could be the site for you.

Henry on the couch

We got a new cat a few months ago.  His name is Henry, and the cat adoption people told us they think he’s about three years old.  Henry seems to think we’re mostly okay and allows us to feed and pet him, and we’re generally pretty happy with Henry as well.

One relatively minor issue that came up had to do with Henry’s claws and where in the house it was acceptable for him to sharpen them.  Henry’s preferred spot was the rug in our living room, but my wife objected; his second choice was the couch, but we weren’t really thrilled with that either.

With some of our other cats we had used a scratching board that we got at a pet store, and it had worked pretty well.  It’s  just pieces of corrugated cardboard glued together in an appealing (to cats) way, and mounted in a little container so that it looks kind of like a small ramp.  I had purchased one of these when we first got Henry, and every time he clawed at the rug or couch I or my wife would scold him and move him over to the scratching board to try to get him to use it, but he had expressed indifference, or maybe confusion: “Why should I use this thing when there’s a perfectly good rug right here?”

Now that we’ve had Henry for a few months, we’ve had a chance to learn what his personality is like.  In particular, he’s a very methodical cat.  He likes his routines, and he likes for us to have routines, and when we deviate from our routines it really irritates him.  I noticed that the going to bed and getting out of bed routines seemed to be particularly important, and I eventually noticed that his morning routine went something like this: wake up man (bite his feet if necessary), wait by food dish for man to fill with food (even if there is already food in the dish), eat a few bites of food, go sharpen claws on living room rug.

Since Henry usually went to the same spot on the rug, it finally occurred to me to make sure the scratching board was sitting in that spot in the morning (actually, I put it there right before I went to bed), so it would be ready for his morning wake up, eat, scratch routine.

And it worked!  That first morning, he started scratching on the board and I immediately began heaping “Good boy!” praise on him, which he seemed to like much better than the “No!”’s that he’d been getting before.  Then when he was finished scratching I went over and petted him for a couple of minutes, while continuing the verbal praise.  He pretty quickly figured out that scratching on the board got him a LOT of praise (and petting), and so he started doing it more and more, even waiting until I or my wife or one of the boys was around to make sure he’d get maximum petting.

So chalk another one up for positive reinforcement as a training tool for cats.  Next I plan to teach him to mow the lawn.

If you haven’t yet heard about Kiva, it’s an organization that facilitates micro-loans, loans of relatively small amounts of money for entrepreneurs and business owners in developing countries to start or improve their businesses.  Kiva acts as a sort of middleman in the loan process by 1) providing a website for investors/donors to contribute online, 2) coordinating with over a hundred “field partners” around the world, and 3) vetting the potential loan recipients through the Kiva Fellows Program.  The field partners are microfinance institutions, essentially local banks that lend money to the working poor, and Kiva Fellows are people who volunteer to work with these institutions to verify information on potential loan recipients, “facilitate connections between Kiva’s borrowers and lenders,” and blog about their experiences.

Here’s a neat video that walks you through the Kiva loan process from beginning to end.

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Back in December I signed up for a Kiva account and loaned $25 to five women in the Dominican Republic who run a beauty parlor out of their home.  They needed $600 to purchase supplies, and will pay it back over six months (the first payment is due on February 15, 2009.)  There’s no interest charged, and after my loan is repaid I can either withdraw the money or re-loan it to someone else.  I can also keep up with how they’re doing in the My Portfolio section of my account on kiva.org, which tracks all of the people or groups I’ve loaned money to (currently just one).

It’s a pretty neat setup, and Kiva has gotten rave reviews from a ton of publications, including Time magazine, Forbes, and CNN.  Not bad for 25 bucks.

The Maker recently bought a Ripstik with some money he got for Christmas.  (Got a great deal for a practically brand new one on Craigslist, w00t!)  It took him a little while to get the hang of it, but he’s gotten pretty good as you can see from this video.

Download The Maker rocks the Ripstik

For the record, I have not attempted to ride the Ripstik myself and have no plans to do so.

[Also for the record, this is the first time I tried uploading my own video to my Wordpress site and I'm not really crazy about how it turned out.  I'm thinking I may have to go with some outside video host (e.g., YouTube) to store my videos and just embed them here.  Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments.]

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

While both of The Maker’s older brothers have read at least some of the Harry Potter books (The First has read them all), The Maker himself has not, as they are a little above his reading level.  He has, however, seen three of the HP movies (and part of a fourth), and has also played a few of the HP video games on his Gameboy.  (The Wife also read one of the books a couple of years ago, I believe in an attempt to be able to engage in HP-related conversations with the First.)  Up to now, I have had only tangential contact with the Harry Potter tales, though that has now changed.

A few days ago, the Maker was engaged in a project in which he was attempting to make a book about wizards.  I believe the primary impetus for this project was the fact that one of his brothers received a DVD of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” for Christmas, and the Maker had watched it and was intrigued by all of the magic and other wizardy-type stuff.  He was experiencing some frustration making his book so he came to me for help, asking me if I knew anything about wizards.  In addition to pictures of wizards, one of the things he seemed to want to put in his book was a list or description of wizard spells, but he didn’t know many wizard spells, and for the few he did know, he didn’t know their correct spelling, or any details about them.

After a failed attempt to find some wizard books at the library for him (there are apparently few HP-like books for younger readers), it occurred to me that there might be something online that he would find useful, and after a quick google search I found this wikipedia entry called “Spells in Harry Potter”, and printed off a copy.  Not only does it list every spell from every Harry Potter book (that’s 30 pages of spells), it also tells you how to pronounce each one, plus provides a “Suggested Etymology” for each one, since pretty much all of them appear to come from Latin (though the entry notes that the “phrases resemble Latin words of appropriate meaning but are not proper Latin themselves”).  The Maker was thrilled, and was soon reading all about many of the spells he had heard from the movies he had seen.  He also soon realized that some of the spells he remembered from the movies were not in the list, which led us to this list of non-canonical spells in Harry Potter.

I also picked up a copy of the first HP book (HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone), and we just read the first chapter.  (The maker interrupted me several times to let me know what was coming up next, or to say, “Oh, I remember this part.”)  I confess I was surprised at how immediately engaging the story is; I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it.