I once had a government job as a manager with a small direct-report staff and responsibilities for training more than 200 employees. I was called into my supervisor’s office and asked to stop talking about mistakes I had made and failed business efforts. I was destroying employee confidence in me it seemed. Our corporate culture valued appearances more than honesty and learning from failures.
I always hope organizations will value honesty and courage in pursuit of success while analyzing failures.
A number of very successful business people have failed one or more times in their careers, notably Walt Disney. He had a bankruptcy early on but seemed to do pretty well later in life.
I don’t think we learn much from success in most cases. If we make a good guess about a business or new program and it all works out, we just think we are brilliant. If we have a program or business enterprise fail, we have to readjust, do things differently. Hopefully we analyze why the idea was not so good and learn from it so that we can apply what we’ve learned as we plan our next venture.
In April of 2011 Amy Edmondon wrote in Harvard Business Review about Strategies for Learning from Failure, saying “the unfortunate consequence is that many failures go unreported and their lessons are lost.”
Corporate cultures that embrace failure as an opportunity to learn often have very high standards for performance. I’m reminded that restaurants that ask at each meal how the food and service was are usually the ones that don’t need to ask. They value honest feedback and use it to continuously improve.
Some of the best research and development organizations actually have protocols for analysis of failures because they expect many approaches to fail. They’re looking for the few successful approaches hidden within.
Cultures that cast blame and discourage open discussion of failures run the risk of seeming trouble-free when they actually harbor deep systemic problems. When we simply cast blame after failures, we are powerless. Someone else screwed up. Taking personal responsibility to have honest discussions, analyze what did not work, and enlist everyone in making improvements has hope of getting results.
Many organizations have a core value about honesty. That plays out in myriad ways, including the embrace of failures as another chance to learn and improve.
Every time I go in my bank I expect to hear one of the clerks I’ve seen many times to call me by name. It never happens. I am in there every week or two and have been using this bank for 15 years. They are consistent. No one, even if they’ve seen me a dozen times in recent months, knows my name or remembers anything about me. They do ask me questions about our business and what we do for a living, but they don’t remember a week later or connect the story with me.
Yes, I live in a college town with lots of staff turnover. Bank tellers see a lot of people in a day. But the lady that cuts my hair every six to twelve weeks remembers me and chats about what I’ve been doing lately, starting from where our conversation left off the time before. She bothers to remember regular customers. What’s the difference?
This simple nametag invites guests to chat with Nancy and her smile is welcoming at Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia.
Many of your employees or colleagues will only see a guest one time for a few moments. I don’t expect the personalization there, but if you run an organization with memberships and repeat visitors, be assured they will notice whether you remember them or not. Most membership software can be customized to differentiate between legal names and the nickname a member prefers or the title, if they wish to be addressed as Doctor or Reverend. Some software allows you to make additional notes about family members and preferences.
You have an opportunity to get personal every single day you meet customers, clients and members. You can find out who they are and what interests they have. You can share your own personal story, your passion about what you do for a living. You can have that conversation that both you and your guest will remember. In a community where people come back regularly to places they enjoy, relationships grow and become more important when customers are treated less like customers and more like extended family.
So how do you encourage your staff to get more personal without being intrusive? I like nametags with first names and the city or state where the worker grew up. At a park, zoo, museum or resort that location can be a real conversation starter and many concessionaires and resort operators use this technique. I see “Illinois” on a tag and I explain I grew up there. We are off and talking. It is a starting place. But a name tag with a last name or “Officer Jones” is off-putting. It is a way of saying, “keep your distance.” Worse yet, no nametag at all makes it hard for guests to know who works at the site and whether it’s okay to ask questions or start a conversation.
I like it that this docent at an aquarium has a name tag and clear ID as a volunteer. It also recognizes that he has put in more than 500 hours.
When you are going to spend all day or multiple days touring with a specific group of people who have just met, name tags for everyone makes it easier for the group members to get to know each other. I’m not suggesting you should always use first names. Some cultures (Chinese, for example) usually say Mr. or Ms. ________ as a usual protocol and prefer that. Some older Americans expect to be addressed more formally. But you can always ask for preferences or allow people to fill out a nametag by hand with how they wished to be addressed. They may actually prefer a nickname. If you solicit information for a tour because you will prepare nametags in advance, ask how they wish to be addressed. Do not assume. I’ve been Timothy my whole life due to a birth certificate, and I’m automatically irritated if called that. It tells me the person addressing me is looking at a legal identification and does not want to be more personal.
You can train your staff to be skilled in this area and help them build more lasting relationships with guests. And if your customers or members are from other nations or communities, training in cultural competency has great value. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so starting the conversation well matters.
And if I ever have the good luck to meet you in person, please, call me Tim.
Sometimes it is helpful to watch guests looking at signs or exhibits.
Phil Hewlett and David Packard of HP fame suggested that “management by walking around” is an extraordinarily useful tool for seeing how operations are going in the workplace. Just getting out and seeing how your employees are working and interacting with each other can tell you far more than staying in your office and only observing reactions to question and answer sessions during annual evaluations.
I’ve found that same principle to be valuable in interpretive planning. In fact, it’s my second principle of interpretive planning from Interpretive Planning: the 5-M Model for Successful Planning Projects (second edition). Simply stated, it’s “pay attention . . . to everything.”
I find that it helps me pay attention if I take something to write with or on everywhere I go. Once upon a time, that meant carrying a little notebook and a pen, but these days, I’m just as likely to pull out my iPhone to record images or thoughts as I have them.
You can also see how you think the exhibit works.
What I’m recording is what I’m experiencing in various settings. What works, what doesn’t, how other people are reacting to different media, what they’re saying to the other people in their party. Yes, I suppose that counts as eavesdropping, but I try to be unobtrusive unless I decide to actively engage them in conversation. It’s not that I’m stalking for any nefarious purpose . . . I simply use every observation and interaction as a learning experience. I tuck away what I’ve seen and heard for future reference, but I find that actually shooting a photo or making a note helps me remember what I’ve learned.
Planning by wandering around should not have you bumping into things in a purposeless daze. Instead, the idea is to focus, but on everything instead of just one thing. By being completely conscious of your surroundings at all times, you will find yourself seeing and hearing more than you ever thought possible. You don’t necessarily have to analyze your observations on the spot, but going back to your notes will help you make sense of what you’ve seen or heard or smelled when you have time to reflect.
It is always good to pencil test a trail or path through a site from the view of a guest.
Planning by wandering around also means field-testing your ideas by walking through your plans before you put them on the ground. If you are working on something where the infrastructure has not yet been built, this may mean that you have to pencil-test your ideas by literally taking a pencil to your floor plan or site plan and then trace the proposed steps of staff and visitors using a variety of perspectives. Doing this will help you identify and correct potential bottlenecks, glare issues, and other problems (why did the architect propose keeping food for the live exhibits in a room on the other side of the building from the animals?) before they are built.
So whenever you are out, pay attention. Wandering around can be one of your best planning tools. And it’s a heck of a lot of fun.
I cringe when I hear the words Ready-Fire-Aim used to describe the planning approach that many organizations use in developing new programs and facilities. I cringe because it was my favorite approach thirty years ago. I simply had no planning experience and it seemed reasonable to try something, anything, and hope it would work. Funders and managers
Lisa Brochu directed the interpretive planning process in 2001 at Wolong Panda Reserve in China. Walking the route visitors will take helps in analysis of site mechanics.
sometimes enable this process by providing money for an idea without a plan because it just sounds like something that might fly or because an ego drives the process, causing you to build a new facility, exhibit, or program because the boss or a donor wants it.
Most companies, organizations and agencies have a stated mission. They know their purpose, but then they guess about what will work to help them achieve that mission because guessing is faster, cheaper, and easier than participating in a thoughtful process. Here are five reasons to slow down and invest in a plan.
Save money – You won’t waste money on useless facilities or programs. It is easy to build a theater that rarely has an audience, an exhibit that doesn’t get seen, a building that has no traffic, or a tour that never quite has enough people to break even. With a good plan you save more than the costs of planning by not building things you don’t need. You also don’t spend money forever maintaining facilities or programs that underperform.
Enhance quality – The very best experiences are designed with specific customers in mind to achieve objectives and work seamlessly making thoughtful use of available resources. That rarely happens by accident.
Builds consensus – Great plans involve diverse stakeholders and build an understanding of what is being planned. It’s a team-building process. Top-down orders that don’t consider the needs of staff, customers and partners often result in projects that fail due to lack of support from those who must implement them.
Everything sends a message – Often an architect or engineering firm is hired for the specific purpose of building facilities. After the infrastructure is on the ground and it’s difficult to make changes without great expense, they invite an interpretive planner to determine what to put in or around the facility to create amazing experiences that engage people and help them understand complex processes, people and places. But in so doing, they’ve sold the experience short – the building, landscaping, flow of traffic, site, elevations, aspects, mechanical systems, lighting, textures, colors and more can help tell a story and encourage engagement. If the architects or engineers don’t understand the story and objectives in telling it, they can inadvertently create conflicts with the desired impact of the interpretive experience. Form should follow function in these facilities, and that requires thoughtful planning right from the start with a full understanding of the interpretive implications.
Well-planned facilities/programs get better as they age. They get fine-tuned, improved, morphed toward a planned future. Ill-conceived projects are abandoned, retrofitted to new uses and continually modified to work in a minimally acceptable way.
The Wolong Interpretive plan involved managers, scientists and local citizens.
A thoughtful interpretive planning process will bring people together around the mission and vision of the organization and objectives of the project and/or program. There are no doubt many other reasons for starting your project with a well-reasoned interpretive plan, but if you need help convincing yourself, your boss, or your donors, the five listed here should give you a place to start that conversation.
Think of the last time you had a dinner party. Perhaps your spouse invited the boss and his family and now you’re faced with figuring out the menu. You ask your spouse what to serve, and he or she says, “It doesn’t matter, you decide and I’ll be fine with that.” Okay, you’ve been given authority. So you make a decision to have steaks cooked on the grill and you’re about to head to the market to buy the meat when your spouse says, ever so gently, “You know, the boss is a vegetarian.” Your authority to make a decision has gone right out the window. Your spouse’s boss has power to call the shots even without being party to the discussion, simply by virtue of being the keeper of your spouse’s job. And so, based on your spouse’s influence, you opt for a vegetable lasagna and green salad instead. You could, in fact, put your foot down and say, “We’re having steaks – it’s too hot to turn on the oven,” but you know that even though you have the right to make that call, it’s not in your best interest to do so. And so is born the power-authority-influence conundrum – who’s really in charge?
When planning, it is important to have the right people involved. (LIsa leading a planning presentation in Sweden in this photo).
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a small committee meeting to plan a single special event at your workplace or getting stakeholders together to discuss a multimillion dollar community development project, the dynamics required to achieve success depend in large part on who does or doesn’t come to the table to take part in the discussion. A good facilitator will try to assess who holds the power, authority, and influence in the group that he or she is facilitating, but without the right people at the table, it may be difficult to facilitate the group to a successful conclusion. I’m measuring success, of course, by the ability to achieve the objectives set forth by the group.
Power, authority, and influence are very different things and although some individuals or entities that make up your planning group may fall into more than one category, chances are good that most will land squarely in one and only one. Over the life of any project or meeting, players may even shift from one category to another depending on the specific issue on the table at the time.
Skillful facilitation requires recognition of who falls into what category and then using that knowledge to help achieve the objectives of the group overall.
Authority gives someone the ability to sign off on and take responsibility for various decisions. This person might seem to be the most important player at the table because he or she has the right to make decisions, but that’s rarely the case in actual practice. The person with real power may be the one who holds the pursestrings or some other valuable resource, without which the project cannot be completed. Unfortunately, sometimes that person or entity realizes the strength of their position and uses it as a bludgeon to get their way, in effect holding the authority figure hostage so that he or she must make the decision the power figure desires, regardless of whether it is good business to do so. But that’s where influence comes in. Influence might be exerted by a single individual (for example, the person who was the founding father of a program or place, which causes people to listen and consider what he has to say before making a decision). Or it might be exerted by a stakeholder group such as consumers, supporters, or friends. In either case, influence may sway the course of a decision depending on how persuasive the argument becomes.
Ideally, these three individuals or entities will work together to arrive at consensus or general agreement about how to proceed in any given situation. A good facilitator can help that happen, but if one or more of the three groups (or individuals within those groups) simply refuses to participate or cooperate, be prepared for a project to stall or end without achieving its objectives. To avoid that situation, think ahead about the individuals or groups that should be invited to meetings and at what time in the process to create the most desirable discussion and decision-making environments. Crafting the right team and keeping all members of that team engaged at critical points along the way is vital to success.
We have just returned from an excellent Interpret Europe Conference in Sigtuna, Sweden, with about 165 colleagues from 40 nations. I am mulling over the ideas than ran through the presentations. “Be a facilitator,” certainly seemed to be one of the consistent messages. Excellent keynotes by Ted Cable, Mette Knudsen, Poul Seidler and James Carter were especially thought provoking.
Poul Seidler from Denmark spoke about our audience taking ownership if we facilitate well.
I think of the many titles under which interpreters work – naturalist (expert), historian (expert), presenter (communicator), ranger (problem solver), guide (expert communicator), visitor information specialist (expert) and program specialist (communicator). In most cases we are doing the same kinds of work but the title makes us sound tilted one direction or another. Most organizations seem to value titles that set us up as content experts, information specialists and people with answers. And yet we know that good interpretation is much more than giving information.
Despite the titles, we might well be ahead to think of ourselves as “the question people,” not “the answer people.” Mette and Poul emphasized the value of an interpreter being not in front of or beside those with whom we work, but behind them. We facilitate experiences by helping others understand the world and stories through our questions. “What do you find here of value? What do you see? How would you like to explore this place? What should we do here?”
Sam Ham gave a great presentation at the Nordic-Baltic Seminar at the Swedish Centre for Nature Interpretation just before the Interpret Europe Conference. He described the transitions in the field from didactic approaches, being experts giving information, to being entertaining presenters with no other purpose than to keep people engaged, to being true interpreters, facilitating self-discovery of the visitors’ own thoughts and meanings about a place or story. Research suggests that effective interpretation gets people to think more deeply, having internal conversations and discussions with others about what we encounter. When interpreters simply tell visitors what they are seeing, the visitors may or may not really be thinking about the subject. Interpreters who ask a question that invites visitors to explore, think, process and remember engage their visitors’ minds. Few people are given the title “facilitator,” but facilitation is what helps others find answers for themselves that endure, enlighten and grow.
Sam Ham urged us to inspire people to think and have conversations during the seminar at the Swedish Centre for Nature Interpretation.
Dictionaries suggest that “to facilitate” is to “make easier,” but interpretation’s aim is not necessarily to make things easier, for the interpreter or the visitor. Perhaps interpreters even make experiences with nature and culture more challenging, to understand, to plunge into the depths of our minds with new ideas, unanswered questions and the desire to learn through exploration. Simply naming things and being experts is certainly easier than thinking about the use of powerful themes, asking questions that provoke people to think and planning experiences that create lasting engagement. But facilitation of heritage experiences is likely better for everyone when the interpreter chooses not to be just an expert. The challenge is to ask the right questions and place people in situations where they will start conversations with themselves and each other.
Lisa and I want to thank the keynoters named above and Patrick and Bettina Lehnes of Interpret Europe for facilitating a thoughtful conference with friends and colleagues from all over the world. The entire group challenged us to think more about heritage interpretation, always a good thing to do.
We are on the road again in Stockholm, Sweden, on our way to the Interpret Europe Conference in Sigtuna and the Nordic-Baltic Seminar on Heritage Interpretation and Cooperation in Uppsala. We were here eighteen months ago for a conference in Visby on Gotland Island and enjoyed wandering around Stockholm for a couple of days at Christmas time when the winter decorations and celebrations add a festive atmosphere. On both of our visits here, we’ve stayed in Ostermalm in the heart of the city and enjoyed the food of the 1895 Saluhall markets and cafes of Gamlastan, their old town.
We kept walking near the Musik/Teater Museet on both visits and this time we stopped by to see how it compares with other music museums we’ve seen around the world. The entry fee is 70 Swedish Kronors (SEK) each (about ten dollars) and we really didn’t know what to expect from the signage outside. It’s in a very old and beautiful building but the entry is understated and somewhat difficult to find.
We started with the interactive musical instruments in the hall of music history. This was not the grand display of every lute ever collected or elaborate labels about the origins of each drum. The museum has many of the instruments mounted and ready to play (even in tune – wow) and you are invited to try them, creating a delightful cacophony with other museum goers. Signage is in Swedish for the most part, but since so much of the exhibitry revolves around sounds rather than words, we rarely referred to the English translation provided in a carry-around notebook. Some of the exhibits have videos or recordings behind them with earphones or audio wands to avoid an overload of repetitive
Lisa tried the harp and liked it a lot.
soundtracks. Lisa and I both enjoyed playing a variety of drums, especially with the complete trapset which allows you to play backup to ABBA, the famous Swedish group of the 70s. Lisa also tried the harp and swears this could be her future career. A Karaoke room invites you to become a lead singer with ABBA and other musical groups.
The museum also includes a couple of galleries devoted to theatre and the marionettes exhibit was fun to see. I had a puppet theater in the 1970s and 1980s in my work with state parks and a nature center, and had pointedly avoided marionettes because they are more challenging to make. The ones on display were beautifully crafted by varied cultures. Ipads mounted in tables and a couple of staged areas highlight the marionettes in performance.
The museum building itself seems positively medieval, which adds to the ambiance as you tread on creaky wooden floors and move from gallery to gallery via substantial stone staircases. The current photo exhibition in one wing features the
The gift shop is thematic and shares instruments from varied cultures at reasonable prices. The cards, posters and other artwork are all about music and theater.
The drums are from Africa but you are invited to play them.
We enjoyed the museum a great deal, largely because of the friendly greeting we received and the encouragement to interact with the instruments. If you have the chance to visit, don’t miss the Saluhall just a few blocks away to enjoy the tradition of fika – time for a great cup of coffee and a baked treat with friends or family.
When we first read Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fosse and then saw the movie, we were intrigued by the possibility of one day visiting the Virunga Volcanoes to spend time with mountain gorillas. It seemed a distant dream until October of 2012 when we were training guides in Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. On our days off, we took a short side trip north to
Mountain gorillas are the attraction in Volcanoes National Park in northern Rwanda.
Musanze and had an unforgettable experience with mountain gorillas. We felt privileged to spend time with the gentle giants of the Kwitonda group, one of ten gorilla families visited each day by tourists. Visitors are asked to stay seven meters (21 feet) distant from them, but the gorillas don’t seem to know the rules. Occasionally, they approach out of curiosity or just to get somewhere they need to go and it is breathtaking, but not at all scary.
Rwanda has three great national parks that differ in a variety of ways. From January 22 to 30, 2014, we will lead an ecotour taking a small group of ten people through these amazing parks, including chimp tracking and a visit with the Fosse’s beloved mountain gorillas. You can join us on this amazing adventure.
Nyungwe National Park in southwest Rwanda gives us a chance to track chimpanzees through one of Africa’s largest and most pristine rainforests at the famed headwaters of the Nile River. Surrounded by tea estate communities, we will enjoy meeting local people and sharing their cultural traditions of dance, songs and stories. Skilled guides will take us through forests dripping with orchids in the hopes of spotting some of the 268
Chimp tracking in Nyungwe is a rewarding hike in rainforest.
species of birds including 26 endemics (species found only there). Nyungwe is also one of the best primate parks on the planet with 13 species, including chimps, Angolan colobus, red-tailed monkeys, mountain monkeys, blue monkeys, olive baboons, and many more. We saw eight of the 13 species in our brief visits there in 2012 and early 2013.
After Nyungwe, we travel on to the famous Virunga Volcanoes and spend an unforgettable morning with mountain gorillas. Skilled trackers stay with them 24/7 both to protect them and to know where they sleep at night. Following our guides’ and trackers’ advice and supervision, we’ll take a hike into the bamboo forest to spend an hour up close and personal with these giant vegetarians. Permits to see the mountain gorillas are not cheap, but mountain gorillas simply would be gone if park managers were not expending such great effort in protecting them from poachers and habitat destruction. Your permit fees are an investment in the conservation of one of man’s closest relatives in the animal kingdom. The tourism program started by Amy Vedder and Bill Webber over twenty years ago has provided consistent protection for the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, allowing this population to triple in size from a low of just over 200 to over 770. That’s still a very small population, but you will be one of the fortunate few people in the world who have had a chance to see them behaving normally and naturally in their own habitat. The habituated gorillas have learned to ignore the humans that take their photos for an hour every day.
Topi are one of the many beautiful savannah animals in Akagera National Park.
Our last park on the itinerary is Akagera National Park on the northeast border of Rwanda near Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Akagera’s combination of savannah and wetlands provide habitat for an astounding variety of birds and big animals. Here you can find the more traditional African safari animals – elephant, black rhinos, giraffe, cape buffalo, impala, zebra, wildebeest and more. The birding is world class with more than 500 species of birds. As of this writing, leopards are the only cats found in Akagera, but park management has plans to reintroduce lions and cheetahs in the near future. The wetlands are beautiful and teeming with wildlife including hippos and crocodiles.
We will stay in four and five star bush resorts in Nyungwe, Volcanoes and Akagera, some of the best in the world. The food is wonderful, the people are delightful and the cultural stories are unforgettable. We travel with Safari Legacy, one of the most experienced safari providers in east Africa, but this trip is absolutely unique, designed to give participants a once in a lifetime experience in one of Africa’s smallest but most biodiverse nations.
Ruzizi Tent Camp in Akagera National Park is an amazing bush resort with hippos just in front of your very comfortable tent/room.
People who travel with us often say they go looking for the wildlife experience, but leave with a deep connection to the place and the people. For us, Rwanda has the potential to make that incredible connection. The nation has a unique history and has held on to some of the most beautiful natural places and unique species in Africa.
The trip begins and ends in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. The Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali, which we will visit, is a museum of immense power, telling the story of the events leading up to and sparking the genocide thoughtfully and with great compassion. People heal after tragedies but telling the story and remembering in order to avoid similar difficulties in the future is part of the healing. Like the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, this museum leaves its visitors with an appreciation of the power of the human spirit to recover and work through heartache.
As always, we will provide plenty of opportunities for souvenir shopping and time for relaxation. Anyone can opt out of any activities that are uncomfortable at any time, enjoying some down time at our accommodations instead. Please note that the minimum age is 15 for most hiking activities requiring permits. This tour will involve moderate hiking and physical exertion at elevations ranging from 5000 to 9000 feet (1700 to 3000 meters), but is suitable for most people in reasonably good physical shape.
Blacksmith plovers are common in the wetlands area at Akagera.
You can download a PDF file of the complete RWANDA NATIONAL PARKS ECOTOUR ITINERARY. The base cost of the tour is $4,750 and does not include the round-trip plane flight to Kigali, tips for guides or soft drinks and alcoholic beverages purchased along the way. All other ground travel, food costs and parks fees, including permits for chimpanzee and gorilla trekking are included in the tour price. We have very few seats left so please register right away if you wish to go. It’s important that we get gorilla permits purchased well in advance since the number of visitors each day is severely limited.
Please call us at 970-231-0537 if you have any questions at all or are concerned over the physical requirements for this trip. We have trained all of the guides at Nyungwe National Park and know them to be among some of the best in the world. We look forward to sharing these unique places with you while traveling with a very congenial group to enjoy spectacular scenery, communities and wildlife.
I was just walking back the last quarter mile after running with Blue, my blue heeler running buddy. Lisa Brochu, my wife, and I pick up litter every day on this stretch of road near our home in Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s an early morning stewardship task that we willingly and voluntarily take on to help keep our community cleaner. This morning I found a shattered beer bottle with broken glass spread in a three-foot circle. I held on to Blue’s leash to keep her off the road and carefully picked up the fragments I could see easily, adding them to the other paper and plastic in my free hand. We walked another 200 yards to the county’s trash barrel in the small natural area park behind our house and deposited the litter there.
I spoke to the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village Environmental Club about guide careers during our brief visit.
As we walked on home, I worked at a small shard of glass caught in my fingertip. Broken glass is like that. It gets under your skin and worries you until you figure out a way to resolve the problem. It occurred to me that our world is full of broken glass of all kinds. Eighteen plus millions of orphans in East Africa are broken glass. Since our first trip there, they’ve been under our skin. We keep searching for ways to do what we can for them with our limited resources and talents, including sharing our admiration of the work of others who have helped these children affected by wars, disease, and lack of basics like food, clean water and education.
Anne Heyman started Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in northeast Rwanda to provide homes, family and education for 550 at-risk young people, mostly orphans. We stopped in at the Youth Village on a recent trip to Rwanda and a group of articulate youngsters took us on a heartwarming tour of the nature area they have developed. They showed us a shelter they built and exhibits they illustrated and put up along the trail. Their personal stories hang in our hearts, little shards of broken glass. We know these particular youngsters are well cared for but millions more with similar stories have little or no support or prospects throughout East Africa and the world.
Elephants protected in wildlife reserves are poached for their ivory by men with automatic weapons.
In February on completion of the ecotour we were leading In Tanzania, we chatted with Pritik Patel, CEO of Safari Legacy, about his work as the chairman of the African Wildlife Trust campaign to stop poaching of elephants. The slaughter of elephants represents thousands of pieces of broken glass. Though they are the world’s largest land mammal, and impressive in all that they do, they are helpless against automatic rifles. Their populations are being decimated at such an alarming rate, it’s possible we could lose all the world’s wild elephants in our lifetime and for nothing but vanity. When you see the bleached bones of elephants in Africa and learn that poachers killed these graceful giants for their tusks only to supply a black market industry in carved ivory (largely in China), another shard of glass hangs in your heart. A tourism industry built around viewing wild elephants is sustainable. Poaching is not. Broken glass.
In Malawi, we continue to work with our friends at the Museums of Malawi. Aaron Maluwa and Michael Gondwe are museum educators who have done programs on HIV and malaria for tens of thousands of villagers over the past decade. Their city museum collections sat idle so they took the work of preserving cultures to the places where people live. Saving
Mike Gondwe has young people in Chikwawa laughing and enjoying his program about the dangers of HIV.
cultures means saving lives, especially when you use traditional stories, dances and songs to deliver messages that matter to those who rarely have the opportunity to see a doctor. Diseases and the lack of clean water and nutritious food can ruin a nation. More splinters of broken glass.
How do we find ways to help people and wildlife threatened and devalued by the carelessness of others? Some unknown person’s careless act of throwing a beer bottle from a car window to shatter on a road was a reminder to me that cleaning up what we find is a daily effort. It’s an unspeakable shame that broken glass is all around us and even more of a shame that some people walk right past it without noticing. The carelessness of others can only be undone by the efforts of those who pitch in and work to clean up, educate, bring medicine, and provide some hope for a better future.
Lisa, my wife, and I write non-fiction and fiction, train interpreters of nature and culture and work with communities around the world in hopes of inspiring others to find their own ways of helping pick up the broken glass. Our novel, The Leopard Tree, follows three orphans from Kenya on a journey across the world to tell their personal stories to the Secretary General of the United Nations. A special on HIV in Africa by President William Jefferson Clinton and The Clinton Foundation in 2006 inspired our story so we sent him a copy. He wrote back, “Thank you so much for The Leopard Tree . . . what a creative approach to raising awareness of HIV/AIDS! I commend your efforts on this critical issue.” His foundation continues to put people and essential anti-retroviral drugs on the ground in Africa, making a difference everywhere they work.
There’s a lot of broken glass in the world. In some places, it’s more evident than others, but if just look around, you’ll find it wherever you are. The little shards of broken glass that get in our hands and hearts cannot easily be removed. They remind us daily to look around and see how we can care for each other and the world in which we live. We may never clean it all up, but if everyone does whatever he or she can, we will make a difference.
– Tim Merriman
“Everything you do makes a difference. Only you can decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Jane Goodall
I have been a gardener my whole life and Lisa and I have now established eight large raised-bed gardens behind our home in Fort Collins. My mother and sister were florists, my dad ran a lawn mower business and my grandparents were farmers. Growing things has always given me a source of renewal and connection to the earth that I would miss if I didn’t have a place to grow things. But what if you live in an apartment with only a small patio, or a townhouse with a tiny backyard?
The completed lettuce tower at ten days old is well-stocked with lettuce, spinach, cilantro and strawberries.
Will Allen, a former NBA star, has become even more famous for urban gardening. He teaches young people how to grow food, raise fish and be productive in agriculture in a warehouse or on a rooftop in Milwaukee. His Growing Power program has won recognition with a 2005 Ford Foundation Leadership Grant and a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. I have admired his work and thought about the empowerment that this kind of program has in bringing urban young people into science and agriculture.
Lisa and I were recently in Hawaii and saw a small scale Tower Garden at a farmer’s market, growing beautiful lettuce and spinach vertically in a very small space. I had to try it, but wanted a way to do it without spending over $500 for the tower and shipping costs. So as we started our garden this spring, I built a lettuce tower, a vertical garden, a hydroponics mini-farm for about $180. I made it from a variety of materials I already had or that could be bought inexpensively from local sources. Most of the expense involved is a one-time set-up cost, so the more greens you grow, the more you will eventually save over time. But saving money on fresh greens is only one benefit – growing your own food allows you to control what goes on your table and in your body. It’s the only way to guarantee freshness and pesticide-free food available all year long just a few feet from your kitchen.
I call it the Lettuce Tower, though you can grow a great many herbs, strawberries, spinach, kale and other greens on one of these units. Here’s the idea.
Gather these materials (you may find other items you have on hand that substitute for any of these equally well):
4×4 foot piece of 2X4 inch welded wire (plastic coated preferably) – about $5
A germination tray allows you to start seedlings year-round.
Plastic tray with lid and Rapid Rooter Plant Plugs – $13
Place the welded wire on the ground, the plastic dropcloth on top of that and the cocotek mat on top of that. Curl the entire thing into a cylinder and use plastic self-locking ties to hold it in a cylindrical form.
Set your washtub where you want your lettuce tower. We have ours outside in full sun (with access to an outdoor electrical outlet) but we will move it inside to a sunroom with southern exposure in the winter.
Place the submersible pump in the bottom of the washtub with a Pondmaster foam filter block around it to keep out small particulate matter. Set a concrete block or bricks on each side of the pump to steady it and provide a base for the tower. Screw the 4-foot nipple with the spray nozzle on top into the pump so it stands upright (my pump has suction cups on the bottom that stick it where you put it but the pipe sways and that’s a problem. I’ll explain next.)
Put the cylinder of cocomat, plastic and wire over the vertical nipple (pipe) so it is resting on the bricks just at the water line with the pump beneath it. Insert a piece of 12-gauge plastic coated electrical wire through the side of the middle of the cylinder, reach in and wrap it around the ½ inch pipe and then push it through the mat on the other side. I adjusted it so the pipe sits in the very center of the cylinder. This controls the sway of this spray nozzle to keep it centered.
The cap I made is planted with flowers just to give the whole tower a cheery look.
Fill the tub with water to just cover the base of the cylinder and add Cal-Mag according to instructions on the back. This provides essential magnesium, calcium and iron. Then I add the amount of A & B Coco Canna liquid fertilizer the package recommends. Never mix the concentrates directly together. Plug in the pump and look inside the cylinder. It should create an even ring of spray in the top of the cylinder but will overspray a bit out the top so you’ll need to create a cap.
To make the cap, take the two 15-inch hanging cocomat baskets and remove the hanging chains provided to suspend them. Place both cocomats in one of the baskets, place the other basket over the cocomat to create a sandwich – wire basket, cocomat, wire basket. Wire the two baskets together so that you have an inch thick cap for the cylinder of 15 inches diameter with the wire frames holding the mat in place. Hinge it to one side of the cylinder with another small piece of plastic coated electrical wire. Now the cap causes the water to rain downward through the cylinder. You can look inside when you wish by lifting one side of the cap to see if the spray is working correctly and see the root growth.
We are growing seedlings of lettuce, spinach, strawberries, cilantro by placing seeds in little Rapid Rooter Starter plugs in a plastic tray. About ¼ inch of water in the bottom of the tray keeps them moist but add water daily. These are best grown in a warm, sunny place in your house. A small commercial warming mat speeds up germination if you wish to add that cost. Grow the new seedlings for about a week after they first show leaves.
When your seedlings are ready to move to the tower, gather three or four of the seedlings out of the germination tray, still in their starter plugs. Use a small knife (I use one of our steak knives, but don’t tell Lisa) to cut an inch slit in the plastic on the cylinder, reach in with two fingers and spread the cocomat until you feel the dripping water. Push one of the one week-old plant plugs into the hole so that the green leaves are hanging out fully visible on the outside of the tower. Add a few of these plugs each day to stagger the harvest dates of the lettuce crop. Keep them 8 to 10 inches apart. I want to harvest a bunch of greens every two or three days when they are big enough.
Flowers grow well on this too, but the lettuce below on the cylinder is what I grow to eat.
I’ve been amazed that the tiny seedlings show 3 inches of lush growth within ten days of planting, growing much faster than the same plants in soil in our gardens. As your plants mature, you can harvest greens by pulling the entire plant out and cutting the roots off. We bought lettuce grown in this manner in Hawaii and it was very tasty. Strawberries can be harvested right off the tower and should keep producing.
I confess that I am not very mechanical but I love playing with ponds and aquariums. This was similar so I enjoyed the hour and a half of assembly. It took no particular skill to build it since the four-foot cocomat (3/4 or 1 inch thick) is just the right size for this project.
We live in a world of challenges to feed people, educate young people about science and to design more sustainable approaches to everything we use in life from energy to water to food and air. These projects are great ways to engage young people in a school, at a nature center, in a museum or at a demonstration farm in growing food in creative ways that recognize the limitations of space, soil and outdoor resources.
Will Allen has aptly demonstrated the power of this programming in Milwaukee and his daughter operates a Growing Power program in Chicago. Dylan Ratigan, a well-known journalist, was just featured on The DailyShow for developing hydroponics farms to employ returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
As I watch the lettuce tower each day, I experiment with the process. I am growing johnny jump-ups and allysum on the cap of the cylinder, just for the look of it. I find the jump-ups growing as volunteers in our yard and transplant them. They adapt to the soil-less environment immediately and grow well.
I am working on a video to post on YouTube that explains and demonstrates this particular process. If you want to try it, be creative with it and try using things you have already around your house (we had the horse trough, electrical wire, and aquarium pump all sitting in the barn from previous projects). Let me know what works and I will share it with our readers. Involve young people in your project, your students or your children or kids from your neighborhood. Be sure that enjoying the food in a meal is part of the process. That helps make the connection for kids who have grown up with a supermarket as the source of everything. It’s empowering to learn they can grow their own food at home. And it’s just plain fun.
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