The End is Never the End... A New Challenge Awaits

Despite the extreme lack of blogging, I am, in fact, alive and well. I finished the first year of my master's program and am now beginning my summer fieldwork/internship project. A lot of frustration came out of that first year, but I survived a punishing work load and am ready to let the "real" learning begin!

As it has been a long time, I should probably include many updates. But these will be very brief, as I know many of you are more interested in what is next (I will mention it here, but will also describe in more detail in a separate post about my internship).

Updates:
-One involvement of mine this semester was our school's New Media Task Force, and we held a number of interesting training sessions. I thought a few may interest readers, especially our resources on Mobile Data Collection (via Formhub) and Open Source Mapping (via TileMill).
-Madagascar Mining- One of my old homes, Didy in Madagascar, is now the center of a sapphire mining rush. Take a look at my colleague/RPCV idol Ryan Marsh's blog post on it here and current PCV Brendan's post on the effects in Ambatondrazaka here. It sounds like prices have shot up and the local people are not benefiting at all. I hope to write up a full post on this soon, with my impressions of Didy and the local area (including comparisons to the illegal logging in the area, my experiences with community forest protection groups, and maybe even another reliving of my forest trip / scorpion experience!). Also, I am hoping to conduct a research project on this issue next year, perhaps in collaboration with the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment.
-You may remember my trip to Ethiopia and my thoughts about it. Well, here is a great write-up about the current state of political life under PM Meles Zenawi (this whole blog is excellent, by the way).

Rice farming inTimor-Leste

Summer Internship (aka Field Experience):
I write this entry from Singapore, where I have a one-day layover en route to Timor-Leste (aka East Timor). I will try to write up a few thoughts about Singapore later, and will extensively cover the my summer program soon as well, but for now I will be brief: I am working in Seed Production Business Development with Seeds of Life (SoL) and Ministry Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF). More specifically, I will work with Community Seed Production Groups (CSPGs), Contract Growers, and other Farmers’ Associations to develop business plans, explore diversification of income-generating activities, and/or alternative business models for “privatizing” aspects of government-run services. This will complement components 2 and 3 of SoL's program.

Again, much more to follow on the internship, and I will be reverting to a more experiences-based blog (a la the Peace Corps years). That means probably shorter, episodic posts. And maybe even a return to song-lyric-based blog post titles!

As for this blog post's title...


The end is never the end.
A new challenge awaits.
A test no man could be prepared for.
A new hell he must conquer and destroy.
A new level of growth he must confront himself.
The machine in the ghost within.
This is the journey of the man on the moon.