(via candysandwich.net)

Four days in New York were not nearly enough. Four days in a three-room apartment with seven other souls – six of us sharing a bedroom, all of us sharing the bath. At any given point, a dozen of us wandered the city, annoyed people on trains and talked of anything and everything.

“Do you know what I love most about your friends? Your Peace Corps friends?” I asked on the drive home, long after the sun had set and in the last leg or two of the journey.

“What?”

“They’re all flawed.”

I caught his look out of the corner of my eye and continued.

“I mean, we’re all flawed but you all know each other so well that you know the flaws and like each other anyways. That’s pretty awesome.”

“I think that’s the glue that holds us together,” he said. “None of us had anything like that before we went and we haven’t found it since.”

I was not part of it, not the Peace Corps, but they knew me tangentially and welcomed me with open arms. Literally.

“You’ve met before, why no hug?” one girl berated her boyfriend and he leaned in for a hug, all 6 foot, 7 inches of him. I spent much of the weekend in their company. More hugs followed.

Promises would flow – to meet again soon, to write, to call. Many would be broken but the intentions were true. These people knew each other, inside and out, and honestly liked each other. They would come together again and again as they had over the past couple years, their ties growing stronger with coupling and real world friendships and the formation of

their non-profit. Overlapping stories and overlapping lives.

I heard tales from their days in Guyana and their lives since. About drunkenness, defecation, and falling in love - in one couple, all three combined. I heard about falling down and rising up. I knew the characters and most of the places.

I scanned through pictures and asked for names, settings, stories, when he came back for Christmas. I visited twice. I listened. Talked. Shared.

Some of the volunteers are part of my life now, my neighbors, my friends. Others have visited and stayed with my brother. Stayed with me.

I questioned my brother on the way home about jobs and plans and stories half heard. I reviewed the faces and names in my mind.

“It’s not like it matters,” I said. “I just want to know. I like your friends.”

“They’re great.”

For four days, I wished that I had joined the Peace Corps. I knew that I still could and would create my own stories, my own group, if I did, but I wanted this one: Flawed, funny, accepting and great.

Some of the boys might move upstairs. A man from Chicago and a couple from New York plan to visit before summer’s end, and I have invited myself to Argentina. With each visit, we will move farther from Guyana. The stories will grow. They will include me. Some already do.

For four days, I stopped waiting. Waiting for my car. Waiting to find out if I’m sick. Waiting for the Metro and on the Metro. Waiting for meetings to start and meetings to end and for somebody, anybody, to get to the point. Waiting for doctors and movies and lecturers. Waiting to go home and do it all again. A life on hold.

For four days, hours on the subway melted into nothingness as we were together and the journeys eclipsed the destinations. I had nowhere to go. Nothing to do. I could wake up at noon and nobody cared. I slept better in a room with five guys than I did at home upon my return.

For four days, I simply existed. I was me: flawed, human, accepted and loved. That is just the way they are.

“I love Jesus, but he’s on vacation.”

I went to a party last night and a couple of guys had their iPhones with them. I took a snap of our site as seen through the iPhone.

RPCV’S Open Grassroots Development Organization with Fundraiser

QUEENS, NY- The formal launch of Friends & RPCVs of Guyana, (http://guyfrog.org) will be held on Friday, July 13th at 7:00 pm to Midnight. The fundraiser will be hosted at Liberty Express Restaurant & Bar, 120-12 Liberty Ave, South Richmond Hill, Queens, NY. A raffle will be held during the event, which will include prizes with all proceeds going to the organization. The event will be featuring DJ Sparber.

Earnings from the event will help the organization fund projects in Guyana through groups such as Peace Corps, volunteer agencies, Guyanese non-profits, and other organizations working towards development in Guyana. At this time FROG depends entirely on funding from events such as this one, and other grassroots sources.

“As a majority of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers will tell you, the desire to continue working towards the development of those in need remains strong long after their service is complete,” says FROG Chairman Timothy Delaney, RPCV Guyana 2003-2006. This desire can especially be seen in the many men and women who had the opportunity to live and work in Guyana through Peace Corps.

FROG was created to support community driven projects in Guyana that will bring lasting solutions to the needs of those communities. The organization is a grassroots development organization and will be working with groups in Guyana in such areas as health, education, IT, business, agriculture and the environment to further development.

“FROG aims to give additional assistance to communities in Guyana which demonstrate that they have taken an initiative to address their greatest needs,” adds Delaney.

FROG strives to meet the needs of the Guyanese community through small project assistance. The organization is a non-profit that fosters the revitalization of the Guyanese community through financial and programmatic assistance.

Liberty Express is located at 120-12 Liberty Ave, South Richmond Hill, Queens, NY. $10 donation at the door. If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Mike Geurink, please call 202-465-6688 or e-mail at mgeurink@guyfrog.org.

NOTE: Looking for developers to volunteer time on a Ning project for us, anyone out there good with php and have some free time?

In the past, organizations just about had to physically meet on a regular basis in order for most of the heavy lifting to be accomplished and for the start-ups to get off the ground. Much of the coordination was local/hyperlocal or very well funded, allowing for travel. From the onset, the effect limited immediate participation and hamstrung progress.

Before the interweb, telephones, faxes and cells alleviated some of the bottleneck of ideas, but the crossflow of information remained hampered. The exponential growth of web technology has streamlined the idea sharing process, making it easier than ever to establish and cultivate a start-up.

Guy Kawasaki, an early tech evangelist, describes the steps involved with his newest project, Truemors.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

$4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.

$12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

1.5. There are 1.5 full-time equivalent employees at Truemors. For me, it’s a labor of love.

$0. I spend $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

$29.96. Our monthly break-even point was $29.96 with Yahoo!

$150. Because Yahoo! evicted us, our monthly break-even point quintupled to $150. If you’re interested in buying a monthly sponsorship for $151, you’d make Truemors profitable.

From the beginning of FROG, we knew the operation was going to be bootstrapped. A number of returned volunteers invovled in the project were right out of the program and we were spread across the east coast with one member in Africa. It wasn’t possible to meet in person, so we turned to the web.

How did we do it? What tools did we use? We started out with using only a handful of apps and moved on to others as our needs changed, it has grown into quite the list. Here’s the breakdown:

Communications

PBWiki - we started off here, throwing ideas against the wall and waiting to see what would stick. The wiki still has great potential for our organization, but for the moment we’ve moved beyond this.

Gmail and Google Apps - we had to communicate yet keep a record of our progress, personal email wouldn’t quite work. The apps that come with this work just fine; with spreadsheet, word processor, calendar and now slideshow applications, this was a natural choice. It’s all integrated and free.

YouSendIt - very large files come through here, it’s not always practical to send and host chunky files on Gmail.

LiveMeeting - this has enabled us to meet and collaborate regularly and is used in conjuncture with Freeconference.com, which we used as our conferencing software. I’ve had some thoughts of holding meeting in SecondLife, for the sake of transparency and open participation.

Skype - still trying to get the rest of the group to adopt this. It’s free, you can record your calls and have group sessions. Perfect.

Publicizing

GoDaddy - we registered our domain, GuyFROG.org, appended it to our gmail accounts and it’s been love ever since. You can’t beat the price and their customer support has been solid. I spent a little less than $10 for the domain for a year, we were hoping to land FROG.org, but that didn’t happen.

Blogger - a service of Google, worked well initially as our main website but we have moved passed this and on to a more robust service.

Wordpress - we (the web guys of FROG) decided to move to the hosted Wordpress.com service, thinking it would be a great way to expand the site, add modules and tailor it to our needs. It’s turned out to be a very expensive and impractical idea. A number of core features are only accessible by paying for them, for a group with no money, we’re going to have to bail. After our launch event in July, we’re moving Wordpress to our own servers. Between another board member and myself, we spent less than $40.

FormAssembly - this free tool allows us to build ad-sponsored forms for whatever purposes until we’re able to get on our own server.

Craigslist, Upcoming.org, & Eventful are web-based calendar apps we used to publicly post our launch event and spread the word quickly. They each have unique and common features and I wanted to take advantage where I could.

Idealist - we registered with Idealist, a no-brainer, as a non-proft to take advantage of their services but also to post our event.

Reactee - this shirt printing service allows you to choose a slogan and a keyword that is then placed on our shirt. Anyone can text the included number with our keyword, which is FROG naturally. When someone sees this shirt and texts the keyword (and whatever else they want to write) to the number, a pre-set message written by FROG, is sent back to the texter. A novel way to interact with a passive audience. The shirt costs about $25 including shipping and handling.

Flickr - we can go a lot of routes with Flickr, since they have a robust API. For now the service exists for archival reasons but eventually we’ll be able to do a number of things like print photo albums and posters, build videos and slideshows, share content and so on. Web services like Qoop make printing a painless process. I bought the Flickr Pro account for under $30.

Facebook - we’ve set up a profile on Facebook and with the viral tendencies of the site, we’ve been able to spread the idea of FROG and the upcoming fundraiser quickly. The reach and impact of Facebook for whatever organization is tremendous. Facebook took the bold step of opening up their backend and API to third parties, allowing various sites and services access to its 20 million user base. From HotorNot to Last.fm to Flickr to Digg, you name the service, it’s either on Facebook or will be shortly.

Technorati & Feedburner - these services can push and pull our data much more effectively than a simple RSS feed. If you add services like Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and Popfly to the equation, future mash-ups of our data and media may have greater impact than we can currently anticipate.

Fundraising

Change.org - this is a fairly new website dedicated to connecting movements and people. They have a number of tools at our disposal that will help us raise money, organize people and spread our message. (should be in the Publicizing category also)

PayPal - we’re working on registering with PayPal, eventually we’ll use it to collect dues, fundraise, sell items and so on. It’s cheap, it’s easy and for now it fits our needs.

Future

Future apps? I’m sure I’m missing a few but the obvious are MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. Mash-ups using the sites mentioned above (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and Popfly) will eventually play a bigger role in data manipulation. Oh, and Rentacoder. Offering jobs to the lowest/bestest bidder will help us tweak our site, develop our ideas and move forward…on the cheap.

UPDATE: We got a little love from Mr. Kawasaki, thanks!

UPDATE 2:  Someone posted a link to the article on Digg, vote it up, it would really help!  Thanks!

I made and ordered this shirt for about $20 from Reactee. It’s not the most catchy phrase but it’s a fun concept.

Basically, you set a slogan and a keyword to text to the included number, our keyword being FROG, naturally. When someone sees this shirt and texts the phrase (and whatever else they want to write) to the number, a pre-set message written by me, is sent back to the texter. Cool.

You can get this exact shirt here, or make your own. So far just a handful have texted my shirt, another way to spread the word on FROG.

UPDATE: I received the shirt in the mail yesterday and I have to say I was quite impressed with how it turned out. The design wasn’t as gaudy as I thought it might be and the fabric (American Apparel) was quite comfortable. Unfortunately I didn’t receive any texts while wearing it but I did get a couple of inquiries, one from a girl representing a non-profit, “Genius” was how she described the concept. I do receive regular texts from people who run across the shirt on the Reactee site and from this blog (I presume). Interesting.

Welcome to Friends & RPCVs of Guyana’s Blog! I’m excited that we now have this blog up and running on our way to having a full blown website, a big thanks to Scott for all this. As was already mentioned we are on our way to becoming an officially registered non-profit organization based in Washington D.C. and will then become an affiliate of the National Peace Corps Association so current and future PCVs in Guyana won’t have to ask, “Why isn’t there a Guyana group on NPCA’s affiliate list?”

Our service won’t stop at putting an end to this question. We will actually be creating a new question in the minds of current volunteers: “How can the Guyana group help me and my community?” A general answer to this question is that FROG will be providing assistance in the form of small grants and resources to support community driven projects that volunteers are involved in. In addition to this we will be conducting Guyanese cultural events and awareness activities in the US, both as a part of the Third Goal and a means to create more support for the people of Guyana.

I look forward to hearing from other RPCVs, both those I know and those who served before me, in addition to any other interested person who would like to get involved. The email address for anyone interested is membership@guyfrog.org.

Mission Statement:

Friends & RPCVs of Guyana is a non-profit, service based organization dedicated to supporting education, health, social, economic, and environmental programs in Guyana through a network of RPCVs, Guyanese nationals, Guyanese-Americans, and all others concerned and interested in the Guyanese Community.