Traveling Trevor

For those that done know what I’m up to for the next few months, I am on the setup and strike crew for burning man. I arrived in Gerlach (The very small town next to the event site for Burningman) at the end of July and I am going to stay here until the middle of October. I got here a day before the managers arrive and all the locals took one look at my Orange hair, smiled and said “Oh crap, here the burners come”. There was a definite feeling of a calm before the storm. The storm officially began today.

I just got back from Haiti and I can already tell this is going to be more intense then Haiti was. I am going to be working in the Saloon until midnight every night, waking up for a 7:30am meeting then doing manual labor on the site until around 1, after that I plug in to my computer and work for the University until dinner, after dinner back to the Saloon. These people are going to run me ragged and I’m looking forward to it. The crew out here are some of the hardest working people I have ever known and they play even harder then that. I am honored and excited to be part of this.

Since I have got here a ton of people have been asking me how the playa is. Today I went to the golden stake ceremony which was the first time I have actually been to the site. The playa is really bumpy from past years abuse but it’s not dusty at all. So far the temperature has been super nice, not too hot during the day or cold at night. If it says like this, all the variables that natures provides will be perfect for the event.

The ceremony it’s self was an experience. It’s a small ceremony where people gather in a circle, say a few words and take a swing at the golden stake. The thing that struck me about the ceremony is how much this crew is like a family. My greatest hope for the next few months is that I will earn a place among this dysfunctional family that builds my home each year.

Heh, posting a blog takes time and there seems to be a serious lack of that around here. So instead, here is where I am posting photos. I have uploaded a couple hundred so far.

http://ellermann.net/gallery2/v/trevors-photos/haiti/

“Fist bump!” an intoxicated Haitian yells to me as I am riding on the back of a motorcycle taxi with Sabina in the middle of a parade as we touch our fists together. I should explain a few things. Sabina is a five foot tall hundred pound force of nature that is spending most of the year out here in Haiti helping out with mapping and farming among numerous other projects. She speaks Cereal (The Native Haitian language), French and English and was helping me on my mission.

Brazil is just about Haiti’s closest friend in the world. They have gone through much of the same struggles and have a very close bond. The parade was an impromptu celebration of Brazil’s win against Ivory Coast in the world cup complete with a marching band using various homemade instruments like PVC pipe flutes and trash can drums. We ran into it on the way back to LogBase after completing our mission. It was awesome to see so much Joy, they really need it.

The mission was an adventure in its self. We took another moto taxi down a bunch of streets and ended up in a traffic jam. Haiti’s biggest Highway was completely blocked by a party with loud music and thousands of Haitians crammed together dancing in the street. We were going nowhere fast so we did the only logical thing we could. We hopped off the scooter and danced our way to the other side of the crowd. We were trying to meet the dealer and the street was so crowded we ended up having to walk down a dark side street where he pulled up and we hopped in his truck. He was dealing in one of the most popular addictions in Haiti and it was the only place we could get it. After almost twenty minutes of negotiating we got the envelopes we were after.

I’m of course talking about cell phone access here. Cell phones really are like a drug in Haiti. There are dealer for minutes all over and women will actually prostitute themselves out for minutes. It even took us several days and we had to go through back channels to get sim cards.

The cool part of the transaction came at the end when he was so excited to hear about OpenStreetMap that he made Sabina tell him all about it and where to get access. He was psyched to hear that there was a good map of the country and that it’s free. The Haitians really like the idea of actually having a map of their country and are eager to contribute. It feels pretty good to know that they actually really want and will use what we are making.

It is now Monday morning and I am waiting for our driver to fix the flat tire on the truck. We are about to leave for Jacmel , a town on the southern coast, to teach mapping to the people there. So far I think we have trained more than fifty people in the ways of the map maker.

Oh, we have a team slogan now too. “HOT is OSM” where OSM is pronounced awesome.

LogBase is the UN logistics base in Port au Prince and where I have spent all day for the last several days. On Friday we went in at 6:30am and took off “early” at 8:30pm for a Friday night BBQ. These humanitarian workers are some of the most hardcore office workers I have ever met. They are like well dressed Burningman DPW speaking three languages and hammering keys on a keyboard all day long in a hot tent then tossing back whiskey and debating how to fix the world at night. A fourteen hour day on the grind is the norm around here followed by an evening discussing work and making plans. If anyone gets more than 5 hours of sleep they are doing well. The people who are here are doing everything they can to help the Haitian people and it’s a desperate situation.

We have spent all of our time so far hopping from one UN camp to the other so it has been a bit hard to feel the pulse of the country so far. However from the Haitians I have met and the UN workers I have talked to things are pretty bad here. The government is totally corrupt and the country has little sense of unity. Everyone is stepping on their neighbor just to survive. A Haitian smile is a rare thing in the city and it’s obvious why. There are tents on every open patch of land throughout the city and still there are people sleeping in ditches getting maybe one meal a day. It is estimated that at the current rate 300 truck loads a day it will take six years just to clear the rubble away.

There is a silver lining to the earthquake though. There is much more international attention and aid than ever before. Already in a few areas some of the utilities are better than before. The Haitians have better access to communications including the Internet than they ever have had. There is also nothing that helps build a community faster than shared hardship. Several Haitians have talked about how it’s not just the walls of their houses that were destroyed but the walls between classes are falling down as well. The educated are sleeping on cots in tents next to the poorest of the poor and they are having a real discourse for the first time in many years and under the air of desperation is a feeling of hope. All of the Humanitarian aid has created jobs for people who after finishing school spent years searching for one and found nothing. These people can’t wait until the Elections in Aug to vote in a new Government. There is now a sense of purpose, to re-build Haiti and make it sustainably better.

OpenStreetMap is a huge help here. It is the most detailed map in existence and just about everyone in the country uses it for all their map needs. In the small office corner of the tent we are working in, there are two teams of 16 Haitians constantly updating the map. Each team alternates one day in the field then the next in the office entering their GPS data and Geo tags into the map database. We are constantly continuing their training and training new people how to contribute. Today and tomorrow we are training 30 additional Haitians and on Monday we head down south to Jacamel.

In short, it’s a bad situation here but people really are making the best of it and I’m grateful that I have this opportunity to help.

It’s been the better part of a year since I updated this. I figure since I am currently sitting in Camp Charlie in Port au Prince, Haiti, I have doing something worth sharing.

I have joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). The quick summary of what we are doing here is we are training the Haitians how to create a detailed and accurate map of their country. For more details on that check out the above Wiki link or read our blog at http://hot.openstreetmap.org/weblog/

I’m going to keep this short because it has been a very long day and a half on planes then in the heat all day. I’m here until the 29th and I plan to write an update every day I have internet access so check back for more informative posts about my trip to Haiti.

It’s good to be out of the country again.

I have been making Beef Jerky for Burningman for the past few years and this year I apparently did a good job at it. A few people have asked me for my recipe. I don’t really use one so here is my attempt at it. The measurements are kind of vague but that’s how I do it, make it to your taste.

First off, I use a food dehydrator. My experience has been that they are all about the same so just get a cheap one, around $40. I understand you can use a stove, but have never tried.

You can use just about any kind of beef but my preference is top round. The key thing to remember is fat will go rancid so you want it to be very lean. If you want it to keep for more then a few weeks tops, you need to trim any fat as well. I ask the butcher to cut me between two and three pounds sliced between 1/8 and 1/4 inch. Just about any grocery store has a butcher that will do this for you if you ask.

The marinade, I do this in a large mixing bowl:
- The Teriyaki sauce I use is either the Soyaki from Trader Joe’s or Very Yaki Teriyaki from Safeway. I put in most of the bottle
- Whatever your favorite soy sauce is will be fine. It’s important though that you not use low sodium, you need it to preserve your meat. Put in roughly as much soy sauce as teriyaki
- Dice up most of a cluster of garlic and throw it in there. I mean a whole cluster, not a clove. I use 10+ cloves
- A cap full of liquid smoke
- Two dashes of Worcestershire sauce
- Two pinches of ground ginger
- Two pinches of garlic powder (yes, more garlic)
- Two pinches of onion powder
- Red pepper to add spice if you like, I used about two table spoons of it
- If you want it to last a long time I would add some salt too. Mine generally does not stick around long enough for me to worry about it so I don’t

Take each piece of meat and put it in the mixing bowl individually to make sure it’s coated. Once they are all in there, throw some plastic wrap on it and put it in the fridge for a night. The rest is just using a dehydrator which hopefully it comes with instructions. It’s pretty simple though, just put the meat on the trays, plug it in, let it sit for a few hours, shuffle the order of the trays, repeat until you are happy with it.

If you try it, let me know how it turns out or if you have any suggestions. Enjoy!

It’s been far too long since I updated this blog. My last post was a challenge to myself and I did not feel I could write more until I really lived up to it. I have started many “something’s” since then but none of them have panned out. Even Burningman was kind of bland for me this year. I had some great company for the trip there and I loved hanging out with my burner friends, but the event it’s self was not as amazing as years past for me.

I know it’s me because there were a number of new burners or “virgins” that were totally lit up and blown away. I just never really got there, I hardly even danced. Fortunately I had some good news waiting for me when I got back.

In July I knew I needed to make a change. Tucson is just not where I want to be anymore. Especially after the thrill of wandering the world and having so many new experiences, the place where I spent the first 27 years of my life was just not doing it for me. So I started a job hunt as I always do, by asking friends. My burner friend Silicone Buddha hooked me up with a phone interview at Insight and another friend Matty G hooked me up with a phone interview at GoDaddy, both in Phoenix. Both of which I am very grateful for. I ended up dying my hair dark brown and going to in person interviews two days before I left for the burn. When I got back, I found out I managed to maintain me record of getting offered every job I have ever applied for.

There was another offer waiting for me when I got back as well. Before I went up to the interviews my boss asked me if there was anything they could do to keep me. I simply replied that I do not want to live in Tucson anymore thinking that was a no. Their offer on top of giving me a raise is the ability to work remotely all but two days a month. I can back to back my visits so if I really want to I only have to come back 6 times a year. I had to cut back to part time but it turned out to be an offer I could not refuse.

The ability to work remotely part time opens up a whole bunch of possibilities. I am now taking on contract work that I find interesting but what is really exciting to me is where I am going to live.

Starting Oct 25th, I am going to spend the next year of my life living out of my truck road tripping around the USA. Some of my itinerary will be dictated by conferences, contracts and trips back to Tucson, but the rest is up to me. I can work from any place with a net connection and cell phone service.

I already have plans to spend time in Colorado with my cousins and unbeknown to them, my cousins in St. Louis as well. I’m also going to spend a while wandering up and back down the west coast and plan to hang with some friends in New Orleans. This is where your couch comes in, If you live outside southern Arizona, and would like a visit from a world traveling nomad, let me know. Living out of my truck of course really means surfing couches of friends and family some of the time. This is my time to visit people all over the US that I don’t get to see a lot. I don’t have any really solid plan so who knows where I will make it to, but let me know if I should put ya on the route.

I’m super excited about when the next year holds in store for me! I also have some other interesting projects in the works, but I can’t seem to get any of them really off the ground yet. We shall see though, some of them are super interesting. I also plan to be much more active with my blog as I travel so stay tuned for more adventure!

The last 5 albums on my parties page are my last 5 weekends. Check them out at http://ellermann.net/gallery2/v/trevors-photos/Parties/

I have a petty big blog post I have been working on that should be done in the enxt few days as well.

Vanya just sent me links to his photos from AU and NZ and some of them are awesome. Check them out at.

http://www.vjc.com/vanya/photos/

Some crazy stuff going on in my life, a better update coming in the next few days.