how dumb is my dog again.

If you have a dog you may know the old 'hold a tennis ball in your hand and pretend to throw it and watch the dog get really confused.' I am yet to meet a dog who doesn't fall for this. Usually, after two or so fakes dogs catch on and watch your hand much more carefully.

But Ruby, described by a friend as 'unconditional love wrapped in a furry jumper, I mean she's smarter than a jumper but not that much' falls for it every single time, repeatedly. Yesterday I fake threw the ball and then held it behind my back, Rubes jumped around on the spot for five minutes. 

the economics of enough (David Bussau)

This morning I went to visit a friend's church which meets in a primary school conveniently located right in my new hood. (An excellent day is when I don't have to leave the peninsula!) 


The speaker was a man named David Bussau, who was the founder of Opportunity International and started the idea of Micro Enterprise Loans, or Micro Finance, although he doesn't like that term. (I've been interested in ME loans since I learnt about them partly because they seem to follow the 'teaching a man to fish' ethos and also because my dad has been involved in some ME loans in the Philippines.)


Listening to David Bussau give an extended interview (he doesn't do conventional sermons very often) was quite inspirational. Like so many of our most successful citizens, David Bussau is actually a New Zealander. He grew up in a boys home where he told us this morning that 80% of those who grew up there went into crime later in life. He never knew his parents, but he sees his childhood as a huge part of the reason he turned out the way he did. 


“I didn’t have the constraints of family holding me back. I didn’t have sibling rivalry or relatives intruding on my space and time. I wasn’t shaped by parents determining who I should be, how I should react and how I should imprint myself on the world. In fact, I changed my name by deed-poll and determined, by myself, who I was going to be, what goals I was going to achieve and the time-frames I was going to achieve them in.”


Bussau's first business venture was a rented hot dog stand at age 15. By the time he was 35 he owned several construction companies and was a self-made multi-millionaire. After an incident with Kerry Packer he started to question if what he was doing, was all there is to life. In 1975 he moved his family to Indonesia and helped rebuild a town destroyed by an earthquake. (If you want to know more about his story check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXW_Ld0eqo)


What I really liked about listening to David Bussau speak was his incredibly humility. You could tell that it wasn't the humility of someone who knows that they're supposed to be humble, but someone who actually doesn't think that they're better than anyone else. My dad has met him a couple of times through the ME work he has done and told me 'He doesn't think he's above anything.' The way he talked about his faith was so honest and gentle. He said he thinks that his drive to work towards the alleviation of poverty is because he really enjoys a challenge, he didn't claim a pure Christian devotion towards love of others. He spoke a lot about the answer to poverty being empowering the poor. Not giving them stuff and creating dependency but about giving them ownership and responsibility. Another thing he said (that I'm quoting wrong because I don't understand car-talk) was there are a lot of people living with 6 cylinder engines under the hood, but only using 2 cylinders. Not doing what we're capable of because we're afraid of taking risks. 


When he moved with his wife and two daughters to Indonesia and gave up the lifestyle he was living of accruing wealth, he explained it as 'the economics of enough.' I find my own wealth quite confronting, in that I have trouble thinking of myself as wealthy because when I look around me I see mostly people who have more money than I do. But when I compare myself to the world (where 1% of people have a University degree, 3% of people have internet access and more than half the world's population live on less than $2 a day) I have to think about when my enough will be enough?


(If you want to watch some interesting stats on poverty check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA6MhyK60iI&feature=related)

the bridge incident

On Friday morning I was sitting on a bus, and like any good Sydneysider, avoiding talking to anyone. The traffic was heavier than usual (but then I am new to this public-transport-forsaken area) and I only began to suspect something was up when the bus driver pulled into a side street and exited the bus rushing off to a nearby servo to, I can only assume, take a leak.

After breaking the golden rule and talking to the person sitting next to me I learnt that the bridge had been closed due to a protest and hence the usually bad traffic was woeful. I read the news on ABC online and learnt that a guy called 'Mick' was protesting about not being able to see his kids after his divorce. I was late to work as were around 60 000 people.

As have many people I've been following the stories from the Middle East and North Africa about the protests for regime changes there. I'm as far as you can get from being an expert on the political situation in that region but the way that some of the governments have responded to peaceful protests has to show that something is really seriously wrong. A civil war is now raging in Libya, and there are stories pretty much daily at the moment from Yemen and Syria about protesters being open fired upon. In Syria mourners at a funeral for protesters were shot at. (Not to mention countries that have fallen below the reportable radar.) But the people continue to protest. I don't think I would be that brave.

With all the current discourse in Australian politics it's easy to just criticise the government - (and we need to) BUT the fact that measures were taken to make this man's protest end peacefully despite the fact that it held up the city in peak hour made me feel quite grateful. I heard people on my bus quietly making phone calls telling their workplaces, schools etc that they were going to be late, but no one was really outraged. On the SMH website there was a pole at the end of an article about Mick that asked if 'a protest of this magnitude is ever justified?' and 63% of respondents said 'Yes.' I'm not endorsing his approach to getting his message out there but I wonder if us affluent Aussies who were stuck on the bus for ages are learning from watching the Middle East that protest can be a noble and amazing thing. Maybe we're not as apathetic as I thought.

a nice, undramatic birthday

There's a couple of things that I like to blame on going to a selective school, and one of them is the inevitable sense of inadequacy that I sometimes feel. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty happy person and I'm pretty happy with where I am now and what I'm doing and all that but there is something about birthdays that make me feel confronted by the stuff I feel like I should have done 'by now.'

This has been exacerbated by my 22nd birthday when I wrote off my car - leaving my high school car park (where I was parked - not exactly legally).

Anyway this year could be a nice step towards reclaiming birthdays as fun because it was pretty good, pretty undramatic. A friend at work made me cupcakes and I didn't do any marking. Now I'm 25.

Now it's six weeks until I fly out.

the move to the insular peninsula (aka the northern(ish) beaches)

It's about seven weeks now until I fly and on the weekend I moved in with my folks. They just moved to Allambie Heights, a quiet and cheery suburb about ten minutes up a hill from Manly. The nickname of the area, you may or may not know, is the 'insular peninsula.' (Tony Abbott is the MP, but thankfully, I assume because it's frickin' freezing I am yet to see him in speedos walking around the area)

So far all I have seen of this insularity are two things; the slightly frightening number of people who seem to read The Manly Daily and no other news (I'm being quite judgmental here) and the lack of public transport. But it is very pretty, and people seem quite friendly.

My life really isn't that interesting. I'm hoping when I travel it will be more and I'm trying to do this a little bit before I go.

I thought of a segment I could have until then:


How dumb is my dog?


I love my dog, and she is very friendly and pretty but she is not the brightest spark in the fireworks basket. Yesterday I was sitting on the floor when she brought a toy to me and dropped it on my lap. When she wasn't looking I put it behind my back so she couldn't see it. For about five minutes she turned her head back and forth frantically, like 'where'd it go, where'd it go.'

I also learned how to cook steak on the weekend.