some people thought that because of my last post that i was “pro mccain” – again let me just state: i am incredibly NON political, and i’m australian! i strongly believe all politicians are liars and will say anything to please people. a USA election only holds fascination for me because i loved the west wing tv show!
on a spiritual level i do believe strongly that as a christian politics are something that i should be aware of/ educated about but not overly concerned with. i know Who really is in control.
so, as far as i go in such matters, i am happy for Barack Obama and the american people who voted for him. i was moved by the Big Picture’s coverage on him – some amazing pictures!
but i get very bewildered by super Patriotism. no matter if it’s here in Australia, over in the USA, in Germany, China, South Africa, wherever, that flag waving fervour just get’s me a little worried. i mean, i am proud to be an Australian, i love this country and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. but i get suspicious of people who have to australian flags all over them to feel as if they have some sort of “identity”… and americans are the kings of such super patriotism, but they mix it all in with some weird version of christianity and it’s just plan scary to me.
so… anyway… all the best to Barack, i hope he really digs into the true faith in this job. i hope he does well. i just hope he doesn’t start believing his own hype and i hope the american people settle down and realise he is just a man, by all accounts a very smart dude and someone who should be able to do the job well…. but he’s not the saviour and he’s not the antichrist. he’s just a president. who gives a flying fig about the amount and type of melanin he has. it does not matter. it’s all about the job he does. after all being a politician is just a job. a dirty dirty job that usually only insane power crazy people might want….
i am not a political type person…. but i am interested in the results of the election in the USA today. it seems the americans have a choice of two christians:
a} seriously insane old, war loving, white dude who actually has a sense of humour and a lifetime of experience, and would look and feel right at home in Dr Stranglove.
b} seriously super intelligent middle aged black dude, who is just crazy for killing babies, has very little experience, and obviously believes his own righteous hype.
or as i keep it in the shorthand of my mind: that crazy funny old guy or that unfunny uber nerd….
wow…. this is the best that you can spew forth america?
coming from someone on the other side of the planet, who has no vested interest… coming at it purely as someone who wants some good laughs, i’m sorta rooting for the underdog, the insane old dude. at least he makes me laugh. can you imagine how earnest and contrite it will become with brainiac at the helm?
today is Blog Action Day 2008, and this year the theme is POVERTY…. and so here is my story in two parts: part one is my working for World Vision as a display coordinator. part two is the amazing “co-incidence” of receiving the first letter from Xolo our sponsor child on the 15th of October 2008: the very date of “Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty”.
part two: the positive.
as i already mentioned in my last post, we signed up to sponsor a child thru world vision australia. we did what is called a special request, we asked for a boy the same age as our oldest son Drummond, give or take a month and we also wanted him to be from South Africa {my wife Benita is South African coloured}. so after a few weeks we got XOLO in the mail….
you can see a bigger version of that here
it isn’t the world’s greatest picture of XOLO, it’s a janky pixelated washed out picture of an unhappy looking little guy, as a photographer i long to go over and take pics of a lot of the kids i see come through our displays… anyway inside the XOLO’s picture folder it has his stats:
you can see a bigger, readable version of his stats here
So we have had little XOLO’s picture folder in the kitchen with us, Drummond has been learning all about him and has gotten with the programme straight away, he has been putting aside part of his pocket money for XOLO and he even get’s a mention every now and then in Drum’s bedtime prayers.
We’ve been meaning to write to him, have the boys draw him a picture, take a picture, etc etc, but things have been busy over the last month.
Today on the 15th October, it is the actual day of Blog Action Day on Poverty, so this morning i was thinking about whether i will blog anything about the subject… and then in today’s mail there is a cool looking envelope:
my mind was seriously on everything else under the sun and i had no idea who could be sending us a letter from SA, it must be Benita’s relatives or something… and then we opened it and was knocked out that it was a letter from our sponsor child XOLO!
Well XOLO is about to turn 5 so it’s not written by him of course, it’s actually written by one of the WV co-ordinators there in SA, the hand writing is a little tricky, but we now know that he lives with his 72 year old grandma who has bad eyesight. he lives in a little village with a well that is about 20km’s from the closest town, XOLO’s mum is away in Durban looking for work, no mention of XOLO’s father.
talk about timing, God has a great sense of comedic timing. on the actual day i receive the letter from my sponsor child. classic. so of course that has moved me to write today. and come to the conclusion of what i think we should do about poverty… HOW DO WE RESPOND TO POVERTY? by doing something!
something tangible, personal, and ongoing. and the most common sense thing i can see to do is make a difference in one child’s life.
it costs about $1.50 a day.
$10 a week.
you blow more than $10 a week on crappy take away food, coffees and drinks that are killing you. i don’t care who you are, you can afford $10 a week to save the life of a child.
if you want to save a child’s life with your spare change please contact me. i can help you make it happen today. don’t just blog links to resources or read the thousands of blogs out there posting about the problem, and though it’s helpful i think just giving a one time donation is not as powerful as actually connecting with an actual child in need personally.
do something. sponsor a child. i’d love to help you make that happen. there is nothing in it for me, i get no commissions, i get no gold stars, i get nothing out of it other than joy of making it happen.
today is Blog Action Day 2008, and this year the theme is POVERTY…. and so here is my story in two parts:
part one is my working for World Vision as a display coordinator. part two is the amazing “co-incidence” of receiving the first letter from Xolo our sponsor child on the 15th of October 2008: the very date of “Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty”.
part one: the negative.
like you i have grown up in “average” conditions in a western country and pretty much live everyday thinking how life would be better if i only had more stuff; if i only could afford that new MacBook Pro… i can’t wait till that new 5D Mark II camera comes out… etc etc… and if you work for yourself then you know the joys of wondering how you will pay rent next week when you have no work coming in… this is the stuff of our lives, committing to going on a diet tomorrow but tonight i will cruise through mcdonalds drive thru for one last fast food meal. we are wrapped in our own worlds doing the best we can…
and like you i’ve grown up seeing starving children on my TV and hoping that one day i could make a difference, do something, anything.
but here’s the killer, MOST people {including myself} NEVER do ANYTHING. oh yes we are full of good intentions and we promise ourselves that one day we will get around it. {just like that diet, or that gym membership} and that is the killer. we just don’t actually do anything. we can justify spending hundreds of dollars on films, DVD’s, albums, phone bills and the stuff we “need”, but we just never quite get around to looking into sponsoring that child, donating that money or finding about that organisation.
for years i’ve been planning on doing something, and it never eventuated. until this year when i saw a job advertised for a part-time “display co-ordinator” on the Gold Coast for World Vision Australia. i had no idea what it entailed or exactly why i was doing it, but i applied, then got rejected, then got an interview, then got the job, then got the training, then was on the job…. and THEN i finally got a sponsor child.
yes it wasn’t until my first shift actually on the job that i actually signed up to sponsor a child.
my very part time {2 shifts a week of around 5 hours each, for about a six week “campaign” and then two or three weeks off and then another campaign} job with World Vision is what they call the grunt work, the face work, the rubber on the road work: i stand at a table covered in sponsor children in shopping centres and malls and try to get total strangers to stop and sponsor a needy child through World Vision. it’s pretty much the best and worst job i’ve ever had. i couldn’t even imagine what it would be like doing this job full time….
this job is actually lifting me to new ends of thinking too much and seeing life as this weird existential experience. i mean i stand in the middle of a shopping centre, surrounded by shops selling all sorts of useless crap and pampering services, the whole mall is designed to make people want to shop, and each shop within the mall is screaming out for attention with latest sparkly beads for sale, and here i am standing in front of a few card tables with a bunch of childrens pictures from around the world. it is seriously like sending out a Amish farmer in his horse and buggy to compete in the formula 1 grand prix… on a good day i like to think of it as David out to fight Goliath.
sometimes it is hard to not look at the entire western civilisation as some disgusting monstrosity, an example of the pinnacle of selfishness… i cannot tell you how many times i have watched a woman refuse to even return a “hello” to me when she realises what i am there for, only to walk straight to the display window of jewellery store. or to see couples in the twenties ignore you with their Boost juice and shopping bags in their hands. i cannot tell you how many families have walked past and said something along the lines of “we couldn’t afford it” and each of the children is chomping down on lollies while sitting in shopping trolleys laden with food, toys and the latest XBox games.
by far my “favourite” top two responses from the public walking past in shopping centres are:
The Head Snapper & The Concerned Lips. The Head Snapper is someone who is usually slowly walking thru the Mall/Centre in that shopping induced haze, they are not in a hurry, they are just idly walking and gazing around when their gaze slowly lands onto our World Vision display and before they can help it they are staring at all these children’s faces, they are trapped by all the orange of the sponsor children’s little cardboard picture folders. then all of a sudden they realise that i am there, a human being who wants them to actually do something about it, and they realise exactly what they are looking at. and then: WHA-CRACK! they snap their heads away from me and the display so fast i can almost feel the whiplash. The Concerned Lips is someone who walks past and maybe nods at you and the stand, but they have no intention of stopping so they give you that i-am-concerned-so-i-will-tighten-my-lips-a-little-and-give-a-concerned-tilt-to-my-head look, if you are really lucky they will even give you one of those and even a slight concerned moan or sigh as they slightly pause at a child’s picture…
but can i be straight up honest with you?
getting the everyday jo public to sign up for a sponsor a child is HARD. REALLY HARD! and even though i’m pretty new to it all, it’s getting harder every week.
personally i think the whole world vision approach at the shopping centres is a bit soft, i would love to do something radical and have massive banners and television displays with really confronting messages and images. we cannot compete for peoples attention in a shopping centre, but we could get attention with the “rude” reality of truth and the power of contrast. Big signs that say “SAVE CHILDREN NOW” or “YOUR CONCERNED LOOKS DON’T FILL HUNGRY BELLIES” or “STOP FEELING GUILTY, DO SOMETHING GOOD”… i know, i know we’d be booted out of the centres with a chorus of boos. because people don’t like to feel judged.
that commercial above is excellent in my opinion, it gives it to people straight, BUT the advert was considered a flop because jo public complained because it was too judgemental. people don’t want to feel like World Vision or the little starving children are judging them. well the bad news for such people is that they have already been judged, and they have been found wanting. history will look book at our generations with disgust, how can we in the west be spending so much on ourselves when we could easily make a massive blow to poverty? 700 billion just from the USA to bail out the rich crooks and banks? 70 billion just from China on the Olympics? we sit back in the glow of our televisions while Africa, the most amazing country on earth, implodes….
so how do i go on? what will keep us from throwing our hands up in the air and saying “too hard!”? stay tuned for part two: the positive.
so i am sitting here in sydney at our excellent friend’s house claude & keren’s in the western hills suburb of seven hills… i am checking the intertubes and i wander over to my blog {this one you are reading now} and i can see that my “recently listened to” Last FM widget is listing songs by DIDDY… hmmmm… i’m not home in front of my iMac that feeds my last.fm account, so who is? i think what is happening is that benita has been playing one of her favourites Deitrick Haddon and she has walked out of the house and left iTunes playing… sigh…. let’s see what crazy stuff gets dredged up today…
i apologise in advance for the embarrassing music in my itunes collection.
i’m gonna take a break from my photo website search out for a week – {lot’s of interesting news on that tip} – because it’s that time of year again! the first weekend in october is a long weekend in NSW and for the last 20 some years it has been the weekend of The Black Stump Music Festival! And this year is a big change for me in relation to the “stump”, this is the first year in a very long time {a decade} that i am not involved in any way of organizing anything there. i have been handing over all those “mustard” responsibilities this year… it’s been hard and good and i’m still in the process of handing over. i am passing the batton to the Krosswerdz Sydney team: namely three of my best friends- Mistery, Oakbridge & Kristy D. a few big steps of that handing on process will happen this week. Blackstump for one, and secondly we have a meeting with our record label’s distributer and explaining the change and laying out a plan for them to exclusively distribute the entire new Krosswerdz Record Label.
and as if that isn’t busy enough 6 days, this coming saturday i wake up very early and fly out of sydney down to melbourne where i will be photographing a wedding on the day! this is a last minute booking {2 weeks ago!}, but it should be a really cool wedding. the couple loves my work so that is always a big help. i will try and catch up with the werribee cronies that night, sleep in geelong and then get up early sunday morning and fly back up to sydney and back out to the stump…
and i am going to be up most of the night trying to get a few clients jobs out of the door before i go!
so i will be updating the blog when i can, i will be Pinging, Twittering & Flickring as usual… stay tuned!
in light of me writing to all these photo storing / sales websites and getting back some great / good customer support responses… i turn to a company that has probably the very worst in customer support and general helpfulness: Yahoo!.
For starters let me state the obvious: the user experience with Yahoo is HORRIFIC. the main yahoo home page is like someone ate every magazine and newspaper in the store and then threw up a website. it is totally confusing, services all over the place, news, weather, ads… but the worst thing is the stupid “region” thing. i get to experience the scintillating “YAHOO!7″: australia’s version of yahoo. i don’t want to experience the dumb aussie site just because i am in australia! anyway, i don’t want to talk about that today, i want to talk about my experience with Yahoo! 360°….
when Yahoo! 360° first started i joined up and played with it for a few months, got bored and then i deleted my account. {mistake} but recently, due to great usefull services like Ping.fm, Yahoo! 360° is looking like it might be fun to use. so i head over to sign up and basically i can’t {details later}, so after trying everything i can, i look for help and the closest thing to help i can find is “Yahoo! Answers”, where yahoo get’s everyday schmucks to answer their help calls for them. i could find people who had the same problem, but nothing i could find in the “answers” actually helped. so i asked my own question {after being forced to “join” answers} – and you can read it “after the jump”-
from the story: {emphasis from me}
“The U.S. financial crisis making global waves is no excuse for governments and companies to walk away from helping the world’s poor, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and rocker Bono said on Wednesday.
As Congress debates a White House-proposed $700 billion bailout for the worst financial crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, Bono questioned why wealthy countries had not been able to come up with enough aid for the world’s problems. “It is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable treatable disease and hunger,”the U2 lead singer told Clinton’s fourth annual philanthropic summit in New York. “That’s mad, that is mad.”
The Group of Eight wealthy nations vowed in 2005 to raise annual aid levels $50 billion by 2010, $25 billion of which was to go to Africa. But under current spending plans, the G8 will fall $40 billion short, according to a June report by the Africa Progress Panel set up to monitor implementation.
“Bankruptcy is a serious business and we all know people who have lost their jobs,” Bono said, referring to the bankruptcy declared by Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “But this is moral bankruptcy.”
ok, i’m still searching… and there has been some interesting things happening. {there will be a special “aussie collection” of similar sites coming soon}. one thing that really made my day was when Jo O’Brien from RedBubble sent me an email. now i already had a lengthy reply from Clare at redbubble support, so when i got this email i was interested:
“Hi DJ Paine,
Thanks for the write up about RedBubble on your website – it’s always nice to see artists and creatives taking an interest.
I hope you don’t mind but I left a rather extensive comment on your post. It appears one of our casual staff members responded to your email and I’ve replied to several of the questions she was unable to answer fully. Please feel free to give us a call on 1300 ________ if you have any further questions. We’re always happy to have a chat or partake in a recorded interview if you’d like.
Thanks again for the write up. Much appreciated
Jo O’Brien “
cool. i’ve seen some of Jo’s photography artworks on redbubble in the past, so it’s alway nice when you make some sort of connection “through the ether”… and you KNOW that when i get the podcasting working again on this blog i will be taking Jo up on the offer of an interview… next time i’m in melbourne shooting i might even try to get a tour of the redbubble HQ.
anyway, as mentioned in the email Jo left an extensive comment on the previous post, i’ve copied it here….
Redbubble is my wild card entry in this top 6 online photo companies. i KNOW that they are not exactly what i am looking for, but i just love these guys. i have a soft spot for them because they are Australian, based in Melbourne, they are fairly new and they are pretty darn cool.
according to the wikipedia: Martin Hosking is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of RedBubble. The other co-founders were Paul Vanzella and Peter Styles. RedBubble is: ”an online marketplace for artists and art lovers. Membership of the site is free, artists retain their copyright, set their own prices and choose which products they want to sell (prints, t-shirts and gift cards). In keeping with the evolution of the web, RedBubble is fostering community above and beyond transactional interaction.” Since launching in February 2007, RedBubble has become one of the most successful websites to come out of Australia. Simon Baker, CEO of RealEstate.com.au, has been appointed non-executive director.
so they are a unknown “aussie success story” so far… which is awesome. i know they might not be what i am looking for in client galleries but i know i will be using them in the future for at least one other project i am working on…
but let me just have a little rant for a moment: RedBubble have the infrastructure and the know how… why don’t they start a service for australian pro photographers!?!? they could take on companies like smugmug, zenfolio etc here in Australia and CLEAN UP. there is such a gaping hole for this type of service here in Australia! seriously the couple of australian companies who are doing similar services to what i am looking for are absolutely pathetic… {there will be a coming entry about them soon} RedBubble have the potential to come out kill that market in Australia! i just wish they would. it would have to be under another name, but how cool would that be?
anyway…. click on to read RedBubble’s response to my email…
