Another video from our bloggers’ trip to South Africa.

In March 1886, nearly forty years after the California Gold Rush, legend has it that Australian gold miner George Harrison stumbled across a rocky outcrop of gold in what was then the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. Says Wikipedia: “Ironically, Harrison is believed to have sold his claim for less than 10 Pounds before leaving the area, and he was never heard from again.”

That 10-pound claim soon transformed into a mining village called Ferreira’s Camp, which today we call Johannesburg.

The above-earth portion of the gold reef (’rand’ in Afrikaans, for which the South African currency was named after) discovered by Harrison has since become the most profitable source of gold ever found on earth. 40% of all gold mined on earth comes from this single reef.

And, as we discovered 3.5 kilometers below ground on our tour of the TauTona gold mine, that gold reef continues pretty far underground. Here’s a video of our tour:

The mine, in fact, is so deep that were it not for the ice cold air conditioning pumped down from above, the temperature would be around 55°C. When electricity outages hit South Africa last year the mine was forced to close down for nearly a week.

I was impressed by the obsessive focus on safety throughout the mine. Still, as John noted even before our trip, being a miner at TauTona remains a dangerous affair. (More than four people die in South African gold mines per week.) During the introductory presentation at the mine we were shown a graph of TauTona’s improving safety record over the past ten years. There was, however, a slight increase in deaths last year. A new part of the mine vulnerable to seismic activity was causing a flurry of ground fall and resulting deaths. The mine executives decided to cease mining there once the death rate reached a certain threshold. Still, I could picture in my mind someone coldly calculating the potential financial profits in one column and the loss of human life in the other.

We were told that, depending on the price of gold over the next couple years, AngloGold Ashanti plans on digging the TauTona Gold Mine even deeper - perhaps all the way to five kilometers beneath earth. The funny thing about economic crises is that they tend to be good for gold mines as investors hurry to exchange weak dollars for solid gold. While the rest of the world slumps, it’s boom time for gold towns like Battle Mountain, Nevada. So, as long as the global currency markets stay weak, expect TauTona Gold Mine to get deeper and deeper.

I have seen a city besieged by itself; a town commit suicide, and a island under terror. So I don’t have as bright a view.

Worlds end. All the time. Southern California may seem very different from any from these places, but sometimes a scratch, not even that deep, reveals what is roiling underneath the surface. You don’t have to listen that hard to hear the sound of different histories crashing and colliding.

The belief that one can live separate from one’s ancestory is an invention that emerged from the “discovery” of your continent (or as Derek Walcott more elegantly put it: “Amnesia is the history of the New World.”) Plus you are in California, my friend, where selves are constantly being recreated. But don’t be fooled — you’re not, are you? — you’re very much still on this tragic planet.

- Jose Manuel Tesoro, 1971 - 2008

The last email I got from Joel was exactly a month ago. He wanted to continue this conversation. What will happen to all these global networks of communication we’ve created when there is no longer money to keep them going? When we all have to take much closer looks at our budgets, will we still be willing to pay $100 a month on our cell phones and $50 a month on home internet access? Will we still care about what’s happening half way around the world when our priority is putting food on the table? Joel wanted to talk about all these things. And in person. He was tired of online communication. Me too. But now, this is all I have.

Joel, a constant over-achiever, was one of the founding editors of Global Voices. After having worked as a staff writer for Asiaweek and then publishing a book, he decided to become a lawyer (at Harvard Law School no less) while working part-time on Global Voices. I don’t think I ever enjoyed arguing with anyone as much as I enjoyed arguing with Jose. Over the years he left dozens and dozens of comments on this blog, always slightly wittier and more authoritative than my response could ever be.

He was firmly part of the community of this blog when this blog still had a feeling of community. In January of 2006 he had a dream about El Mas Chingon:

In my dream, he was a midget with a huge head and that we were communicating only through IRC on our respective laptops. The reason I think my brain thought he was a midget is that my only image of him is his head on his gravatar and my brain could not imagine his voice, hence the IRC.

But our lives crossed offline many times as well as they tend to do when you dig deep enough. His wife, another former barista, went to my same university. And today, I receive Lapham’s Quarterly for an xmas present and remember that Joel once had Lapham as a professor in college: “He lifted from my final essay and used it in his Harpers column. True story.”

It’s so strange to look back at all those comments and to realize that we only met once in person. Sparshles, Steph, and I met up with him for dinner. I still haven’t met Paloma, his daughter, or Tania, his wife, despite our repeated efforts. I thought it would finally happen in less than a month.

Joel and his daughter Paloma. Photo by Boris Anthony.

Today I was telling my friend Heather that I think it’s time to bring back the Catalog of Pop. Volume 5 never materialized last year. Volume 4 was sent out as a CD. Joel, as always, managed to turn it into a joke.

One of the things that Joel and I talked about frequently was our mutual addiction to and skepticism of travel.

Travel is an addiction. And you, my friend, are a junkie. Not the functioning Of-course-I-can-quit-any-time addict. Nope, my man, you’re the hollow-cheeked lotus-eating kind. The far gone. The unredeemable.

I recognize the signs very well. Because I, too, was a user. So I know those highs: the enervating unfamiliar city, the excitement of the unintelligible, and the artificial promise of another self. And like all highs, they are temporary. So that’s why you start looking for them again.

Joel ended up getting married to a beautiful woman and having a beautiful daughter. He broke the addiction. So it’s a cruel twist of fate that he passed away while in transit at Hong Kong Int’l Airport (where I just was last week). Far crueler that Dopplr still says he started a trip to Jakarta today.

Wherever he may be, may he rest in peace. May he be remembered for all the thousands and thousands of words he’s left us. We’ll miss you Joel.

More homages at Walk This Way and Tesa Celdran.

Application Deadline: January 18, 2009

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities in the developing world. Please visit our current list of grantees for project examples.

The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices. Grantees are expected to host regular workshops to train participants how to start and maintain a weblog, upload and share digital photographs, and produce basic videos. Grantees are also required to post regular project evaluations and updates to the Rising Voices website.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, January 18. Please submit your completed application on the Rising Voices apply page.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org.

Hard to believe that the year has almost come to an end. Dopplr just sent me an email to let me know that I took 44 trips to 34 cities in 2008. That’s a lot of city. One of the most frustrating parts of living life at such a fast pace is that you can easily miss all the amazing sights passing by the window.

Some of my warmest memories from the past year are from Medellín - especially hanging out with the kids from HiperBarrio. This Saturday evening they’re hosting a party to raise funds to finish building Suso’s new house.

So inspiring.

If you’re feeling charitable, you can donate $10 to the cause by pressing the donation button at the end of this post on Rising Voices.

Happy Holidays.

I’ve been in Taipei this week for Culturemondo, a gathering of individuals working in the field of online cultural portals. Thanks to the kind invitation of Ilya, I presented Global Voices as an example of bottom-up grassroots cultural curation. I used I-fan’s post on Xiepingan (謝平安) and Thanksgiving as an example of how people use citizen media to build cultural bridges.

I also argued that Global Voices is often a space for the preservation of culture and heritage. For example, Taiwan’s flying saucer houses:

The destruction of Old Damascus:

And, the destruction of Luanda’s Kinaxixe Market:

A couple of days ago, walking around Taipei with Leonard, we saw some street art of a rat and I asked him if he had ever heard of Banksy before. He hadn’t, but as bloggers are prone to do, he looked him up online and then pointed me to Bbrother, describing him as “Taiwan’s Banksy.” Check it out:

Check out his website for more. There is also a feature piece on Bbrother in the English-language Taiwan Journal.

My time in South Africa, sadly, came to an end a couple days ago. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long, long while. And I met some new friends on the We Blog the World tour who I hope will soon enough become old friends.

Depending on how you count, this was my third or fourth visit to South Africa and the country has become, like Mexico, Medellín, Buenos Aires, and Christchurch, a sort-of second home. I would love to return next year for Highway Africa and the year after for the 2010 World Cup.

Our trip was paid for by Brand South Africa, a government-funded initiative to improve South Africa’s image abroad in the hope that doing so will attract more tourism and foreign investment. It’s called country branding and its big business. On the US side of things it was Renee Blodgett who organized the bloggers and the marketing of the trip. She has done a similar trip to Israel and I believe she plans on organizing many more in other countries that want to elevate their national brand among the connected digerati. It’s a good strategy and I have a feeling that Renee will have many more clients over the next couple years.

Throughout our trip, however, my mind kept drifting back to the above-photo from the !Khwa ttu photo exhibit, “The San and the Camera”. Who should be recruited to build up South Africa’s brand? A bunch of American bloggers or South Africans themselves?

I asked Simon Barber, who is in charge of the Brand South Africa Blog. He thinks that South Africans are in the best position to tell their country’s story, but that it will take some time before adoption rates of digital tools are anything near what they are in the US. Right now he’s asking South African Twitter users to use the hashtag “amazwi” when they have something good to say about their country. I assume he’ll be collecting these anecdotes for a summary post on the Brand South Africa Blog.

I’m happy to say that on one of our last days of the trip I inspired Simon to try a new strategy to his documentation efforts. Rather than shooting a video himself about our hiking with an Outward Bound group of youths from inner Johannesburg, he handed his camera over to Lesego Mlambo from the Braam Fischer section of Soweto and taught him how to make a video. (Which includes a very embarrassing clip of me nearly naked.)

Inviting American bloggers to your country is a nice way to gain some Web 2.0 exposure abroad, but imagine if the South African government had instead invested the money in teaching people like Lesego how to make their own media. The problem, of course, is that it wouldn’t reach nearly as many people. But what about some hybrid model? What about inviting six high profile bloggers from the US to train six locals how to blog and make videos and then tour around the country to document all they see?

I am thinking about all of this because I just finished translating a column written by Laura Vidal in Tal Cual about the Nari Jibon project. One of the things she notes in her piece is how the project challenges many of the stereotypes that Venezuelans hold about Bangladesh. They are, essentially, helping build up their country’s brand. With future leaders like Taslima and Afrin how could you not want to invest in the country?

Coincidentally, I just saw on Rezwan’s blog that Bangladesh has just started its own country branding process. After the laser show at the expensive hotel was over, however, all it amounted to was a single logo. If Bangladesh wants to build up its national brand it could learn a thing or two from Brand South Africa and start involving its own citizens.

Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside. Photo by Sam Nzima, 1976.

My good friend Sameer at WITNESS is leading an online conversation in commemoration of today’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s the question: What image opened your eyes to human rights?

Last week, as part of the We Blog the World tour in South Africa, we visited the Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West, Soweto. If you have never cried at a museum before, here’s your spot.

Street behind Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum.

Hector Pieterson was 12-years-old on June 16, 1976 when he joined his fellow students to protest Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the South African townships. As they were singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, refusing to stop their approach, police open fired. Today it is known that Hastings Ndlovu was, in fact, the first student gunned down by police, but it was Hector who became the martyr and icon of South Africa’s liberation struggle because he was captured in the above image by photographer Sam Nzima.

Nzima wasn’t the only person to take photographs that day, but he was the only one to get them out without being confiscated by the police. (He stuffed the rolls of film in his socks.) His photographs were immediately published in The World, which led to widespread riots and protests all over South Africa. Hector Pieterson was, largely, South Africa’s Rosa Parks. Just like the Civil Rights Movement in the US didn’t begin with Parks, neither did South Africa’s liberation struggle begin with Pieterson. But both icons mark the tipping point when built-up pressure exploded into movements that would never step back.

I highly highly recommend that one day you make the trip to South Africa and spend at least an entire day in Soweto. There is nothing like being there, surrounded by all its history, for yourself. When we were outside the museum our guide pointed to a woman walking down the pathway. It was Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, the very same person screaming in Sam Nzima’s famous photograph.

Antoinette Sithole walking through Orlando West, Soweto.

It’s amazing to see such history walking around in real life. But … in the meantime, Babak and Ismail have put together a truly incredible map mashup of the events that took place on June 16, 1976. Before you start clicking around on the map, however, I’d recommend that you read through their blog as well as the online book, “I Saw a Nightmare …” Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick.

Bonus: Check out this video by Ray Lewis of Graeme Addison, a South African journalist who was on the scene at the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976.

For thousands and thousands of years the Nama people of Southern Africa maintained a nomadic pastoral way of life, tending their flocks of goats and sheep, gathering firewood, and collecting wild honey. Driving along the dirt roads surrounding Richtersveld National park you can still see the same lifestyle, supplemented by some modern conveniences like butane lanterns and plastic tarps.

Nama Iharu oms (huts) in the Richtersveld.

Land sovereignty has been a historic struggle for the Nama people. When Namibia - where the majority of Nama people then lived - was colonized by Germany, the Nama joined forces with the Herero and took up arms against their invaders from 1904 to 1907. This resulted in what today is called the Herero and Namaqua Genocide.

Herero people chained in 1904 by German troops.

According to the 1985 Whitaker Report on Genocide, an estimated 50 - 70% of all Herero people and 50% of all Nama people were killed. On the South African side of the border the Nama people were mostly left to their own as British and Afrikaner explorers searched for diamonds in the Northern Cape province. They continued their nomadic pastoral life with a policy of communal land ownership. Says Wikipedia: “Nama women still dress in Victorian traditional fashion. This style of dress was introduced by missionaries in the 1800s and their influence is still a part of the Nama culture today.”

You can see the influence in a video shot by Ray of a group of Nama youth performing an initiation dance, which marks young girls’ transition to adulthood.

Simon recorded a brilliant piece of audio of Cecilia, the mother of two of the young female dancers, singing a hymn in Nama.

Cecilia

Those British and Afrikaner explorers did in fact find their diamonds. Lots of them. In the 1920’s the South African state-owned mining company Alexkor evicted Nama residents from their diamond-rich land and began operations that would yield hundreds of millions of dollars to help support the country’s Apartheid regime. Since the end of Apartheid in 1994, however, new legislation allows communities to seek compensation for lost land and mineral wealth. The 3,700-strong Nama community launched their claim in 1998. Alexkor spent over a million dollars on legal costs, but in October 2003 the constitutional court ruled that the community was entitled to restitution, as well as to mineral rights. The court rejected their demand for a 90 percent equity stake in Alexkor, however, instead offering a 49% stake and a trust to benefit the Namaqualand community.

The Namaqua community now has more than $40 million coming its way. That is a big chunk of change for a group of 3,700 individuals. We had an opportunity to talk to local community leaders. I asked Leon Ambrosini, mayor of the Richtersveld municipality, how the money would be used, but he only answered in general terms.

My fear is that even with $40 million coming its way and a 49% stake in Alexkor, the quality of life and opportunities for those 3,700 Nama people will not improve much over the next ten years.

“We don’t want to get rich quick. We are solely thinking about the long term future for us and the children who will come after us,” said Floors Strauss, secretary of the Richtersveld Community Property Association, which will manage the $40 million. But I saw little evidence that the right investments are being made for sustainable development.

Nama girl from Port Nolloth.

I asked if there were any plans to build a college or university in the area, but there are none. (The entire province is without tertiary education.) The only specific expense we heard about was a $300 handout to each of the 3,700 represented in the court case. Which brings up some interesting questions: what if the money gets squandered? What if Alexkor becomes less profitable, jobs are lost, and the Nama people are actually worse off ten years from now than they are today? Land restitution in Zimbabwe, for example, is largely responsible for today’s shortage of food there as fleeing White farmers took off without transferring their agricultural skills.

My hope, obviously, is that in Richtersveld the right skills will be transferred to the Nama community so that they can manage their own development as they see fit. But to do so, I believe, will require an investment in education that community leaders don’t seem too concerned about. I’ll be keeping my eye on how things develop.

Extra bonus: Check out Lova’s summary of a fascinating conversation about land sovereignty and economic development in the Malagasy blogosphere. (The deal was later rejected.)

An article in this morning’s Times, cleverly positioned next to a marketing blurb about an increase in traffic to their website, says that South African bloggers are thriving in cyberspace. A new study released this week by World Wide Worx claims that 4.5 million South Africans are now online and that over 5,000 are consistently blogging. (According to Rick Joubert of Vodafone, another 9.5 million connect to the internet with their mobile phones.)

The Times article claims that 1,000 of these 5,000 bloggers took part in a survey to learn more about the social demographics and motivations behind South Africa’s blogosphere. Some interesting findings:

• Cape Town is the epicentre of blogging in the country with more than 75% of bloggers living in the city;
• 58% of local bloggers are aged 25 to 44
• 95% of them speak English or Afrikaans
• 42% earn more than $2,000
• 46% of them have children and 55% are married
• 88% describe their blogs as online hobbies rather than income-generating tools
• 65% spend more than 10 hours a week blogging

What I want to know is where is the raw data? In the open spirit of the web, will it be made publicly available? The survey says that 95% of South African bloggers speak English or Afrikaans (I assume they mean “write in English of Afrikaans”.) What are the other languages represented and where are their blogs? (I have a hunch there are probably more Urdu blogs than Sotho despite the fact that there are way more Sotho speakers.) Also, I was amazed that 42% of the bloggers participating in the survey earn more than $2,000 a month. But what were the average and mean salaries?

On the second night of our Bloggers Roadshow of South Africa, we joined our South African blogging colleagues at Asoka Bar and Restaurant in Cape Town for a few rounds of drinks. With lounge techno in the background we clinked glasses and exchanged business cards. I finally got to meet some bloggers that I had been reading for years like Rafiq Phillips, Matthew Buckland, and Chris Rawlinson.

Among the dozens of bloggers packed into the bar, however, only two or three were black. And, as I learned from Rafiq, they were Rwandan, not South African. When I asked Rafiq about the lack of non-White bloggers at the meet-up he said there were two explanations. First, more Indian and Pakistani bloggers would have showed up if the event were not held at a bar serving alcohol, as the majority of Indian- and Pakistani-South Africans are Muslim. (Rafiq makes a point of noting that he was drinking orange juice at the bar, which I dutifully confirm.)

Second, South African bloggers of different ethnicities tend to stick to their own spheres, as I’ve written about in the past. This was quantified in a study by Annie Kryzanek of the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy project. She selected 30 blogs from AMATOMU’s life section, categorized them as English-speaking white bloggers, black bloggers, and Afrikaner bloggers, and then examined their linking patterns. 30 blogs is a very small sample size, but the results are provocative: South African online society is nearly as segregated as it is offline.

There is an obvious history behind all of this. Like in most other countries, South Africa’s bloggers started out as a community of tech-centric geeks. They had the computers, internet access, and time on their hands to figure out the new tools and develop their voice. They were nearly all White males in their 20’s and 30’s. Once the community was defined, it unknowingly became an exclusive clique. Mario Olckers, looking at South African social media through the framework of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, argues that the South African blogosphere’s exclusive start already spells out its impending failure.

Any kind of Social Media Strategy is therefore little more than inside baseball amongst an incestuous clique of privileged practitioners who retain and guard the old money and benefits of the old apartheid regime. Whatever Social Media campaign is launched online will necessarily only be seen by a handful of regular old faces who continually regurgitate each other’s utterings and bounce around any newsworthy items or movements within the local South African Web 2.0 zoo.

I think that he’s right-on in his diagnosis, but I tend to be more optimistic about the future. South Africa has centuries of ugly race relations history. The only way that things are going to improve is with dialogue. And social media - be it forums, twitter, blogs, or social networks - are ideal for that. But it’s going to get ugly, emotional, and difficult as it did a couple years ago at the Digital Citizen Indaba. Those are exactly the kinds of conversations that need to take place and we need leaders like Ndesanjo and Ory who can summarize them so well, step back, and offer some clarity and perspective.

The first step for any White South African bloggers reading this post (or anyone else for that matter) is to subscribe to the feeds of all the bloggers featured by Ramon Thomas in “Who’s who in the non-white Web 2.0 South African Zoo“.

Over the past five years the vast majority of South Africans have been excluded from the new public spehere that is the social web. Ridiculously expensive internet connections ($20 an hour at the hotel where I am writing at this very moment) and a lack of new media training programs means that only the wealthy are able to participate. Furthermore, English and Afrikaans have centuries-long histories as written languages. You’ll find that many bloggers - and writers in general - are more comfortable expressing themselves in writing than in person. South Africa’s other 9 official languages, however, have, comparably, only recently existed in written form. Unlike in Tanzania, where written Swahili was a significant and symbolic part of their independence movement, formal education in written indigenous South African languages has never really taken off.

I don’t want to discount the up-and-coming movements of Zulu and Xhosa literature, but it has to be said that most South African languages are still 99% oral and are rarely put down on paper. Which I believe is why the bloggers in Kwa Mashu tend to be unenthusiastic about updating their blogs with text, but become instantly excited when there is an opportunity to communicate with video, audio, performing arts, and music. For them, those are simply the best ways to communicate. Unfortunately, South Africa’s bandwidth constraints means that participating online is still restricted to text-based communication. But in the next few years a number of international and domestic projects are going to vastly improve connectivity in South Africa. Once video becomes the major medium of South African cyberspace, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s the old guard of White tech bloggers who are clamoring to keep up.

On a final note, it is increasingly difficult to define what is and isn’t South African. This country has always been cosmopolitan. The majority of its people, languages, and culture actually came central-Western Africa when Bantu-speaking farmers migrated south. Yesterday, walking around Soweto’s Freedom Square, the majority of merchants were not South African, but rather from Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Today two of the most highly regarded bloggers living in South Africa are probably completely unknown to the majority of South African bloggers. Manal and Alaa are hugely popular Egyptian bloggers currently living in South Africa, as is Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan who is one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most authoritative voices internationally. Meanwhile, there are plenty of influential South African bloggers living abroad, like Mohamed Nanabhay. It is becoming increasingly difficult to categorize bloggers by nationality or location. Soon enough we’ll just have to treat each other as people.

And for an extra bonus, I recommend Théophile Kouamouo’s “Why I blog about Africa.”

The surprise highlight of this trip for me so far hasn’t been a helicopter flight, luxury resort, or journey down three and half kilometers to the world’s deepest mine. No, what has impressed me the most was a lunch-time visit to !Khwa ttu, a culture and education center for the San people of Southern Africa that sustains its operations through a tourism lodge and restaurant.

!Khwa ttu’s restaurant and gift shop.

Trip out on this: if you trace your ancestry from your parents to your parent’s parents and their parents and so on for thousands of generations (back 60,000 years ago), then you’ll find that you share a direct ancestor of this man:

That’s Andries, a 30-year-old from the ‡Khomani community of the Kalahari who learned how to become a tour guide at !Khwa ttu. Along with his colleague Kerson, Andries taught us how to pronounce the klicks and klacks of the various San languages.

Video by Simon Barber.

After our lesson in Khoi and San languages we were shown the following video about the making of the photographic exhibit “The San and the Camera.” The Khoi and San peoples have long been exoticized on the covers of travel pamphlets, in museum exhibits, and in movies like The Gods Must Be Crazy. But their current reality, marked frequently by discrimination and poverty, is ignored by most media.

You can see a more general video about the !Khwa ttu center on their website. What has me excited about the project is that it is able to preserve dying cultures and languages, generate jobs, teach new skills, and educate others all while staying sustainable from its tourism revenue.

If you ever visit Cape Town I highly recommend taking the hour drive to !Khwa ttu to check things out. Their meals are delicious, the photographic exhibit is impressive, and the staff are absolutely lovely. Plus, you’d be supporting a very good cause. Now we just need to get them blogging.