The Stereotypical S. America Bus Ride

So I brushed the dust off of my external hard drive and pulled it back out to finish posting a few picks from the Peru trip. Consider the lost archives.


This pic is dusk on Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake located on the boarder of Peru and Bolivia. Though the landscape looks serene the journey getting there was not.

We decided to catch a midnight bus from Cusco to Puno (the major Peruvian city on Lake Titicaca). The bus was surprisingly, but deceptively nice. Before pulling out of the bus station, they took a mug shot of everyone on the bus, so if we tried robbing the bus or something, we were already on the police files.

My seat was next to a native. She fell asleep as soon as she hit her seat. We got off to a nice start and I dozed off. What had to be about an hour later, I awoke to the sound of metal clanking metal. The bus was stopped and the driver was gone, apparently outside the bus wacking at the engine. Looking around, I saw no lights, and at 1:30 am in the middle of nowhere Peru, there were no other cars to be seen on the highway. For almost an hour, with no word or explanation the driver clanked around outside with the engine. Finally, he got back on the bus, and with some struggle, but no further explanation, he started the bus up and we were once again off.

I dozed again only to be awaken the second time. This time I awoke with more of a startle--about 7 Peruvian SWAT team members were on our bus. They started at the front, saying nothing, reaching above our heads to open and inspect our bags. They moved slowly, front to back; when almost to the very back they apparently found what they were looking for. They grabbed at a bag of a Peruvian lady, who grabbed back and clutched the bag with everything she had. She refused to give the bag up and more and more of the SWAT members started grabbing at it and at her. She started screaming and crying but wouldn't let go of the bag. Finally, they overpowered her and without a word, marched to the front of the bus and left. They took the bag, but left the woman unquestioned on the bus.

We fired back up, and this time it is harder to fall back asleep. And just when I thought we had to be through the weeds, about an hour post-SWAT, we arrive in a small city located on the highway, to find that the highway is blocked by a bus and a semi-truck that tried to pass on the narrow building-lined road, only to find that they didn't both fit and had wedged themselves between the two buildings.

This "highway" was not wide enough for two large cars to pass at once, and there were only about two options for side roads. But they were both dirt, skinny, and windy. Many buses, blockaded and less determined, had already given up for the evening and were sitting in park waiting for the morning to come. Our bus driver, I think flustered by the course of the night's events, decided to brave one of the side roads.

These side roads would have been rough on a 4x4 pickup, and I confidently say, no bus had ever driven on these roads. I had 0% confidence that there was even an outlet for our bus along this road, but determined, our bus driver went for it. It wasn't more than 20 feet that a turn in the road required, literally, a 20 point turn. Another 20 feet, and the same thing again. This road winded through this little city, turns at every block that required people to get out and to guide the bus through several point turns. At one point a car was parked on the road that blocked us from getting by. Without the faintest possibility of being able to retrace our path in reverse, our only option was to bounce the car off the road--so that we did. Several people got the car bouncing and tossed it far enough out of the way for the bus to get by. At one point, the street narrowed so much that one set of wheels had to descend a staircase, while the other set descended the road.

It was hairy.

Two hours of effort, and we finally did make it past the barricade. Those hours managed to get us an effective 100 yards closer to our destination. But... the story ends well enough, as we did make it in to Lake Titicaca, alive and well.


The famous floating islands of Lake Titicaca. Those are man-made floating islands that people live on. Very cool.


City center in Lima at night.


Machipichu as seen from the peak of Winachi Picchu. Amazing.


Myself, Justin, and Dan in front of Machipichu (the peak behind us is Winachi Picchu).

Peru

Ruins about 3 hours outside of Machu Pichu.



Temple where the Spaniards found a statue of Jesus Christ. BofM anyone?



The Sacred Valley. The Incas used these tiered planters to acclimate their potato plants to altitude.



Dead guy we found. Still wearing his tuque.



The guinea pig we ate for dinner.



The Shaman Priest giving an offering to Mother Earth.



Filming in the Andes.



The valley of the community we stayed with.



The NorthFace tents they put us up in.



Cuzco city center. This Catholic church is the biggest building in town.

Impact International Trip to Peru

I just returned from a trip to Peru and Bolivia with Impact International. Impact was founded by my younger brother Daniel with the purpose of involving students in support of other worthy, established non-profits that don't have a student arm. The purpose of the trip was to document and create marketing materials for the non-profit Deseret International, a medical non-profit that supports local third-world doctors in performing corrective surgeries on cleft lip, cataracts, and clubbed feet. We also shot footage for a piece that Impact will be doing on food and starvation.

The trip was awesome. We made stops in:

1. Cuzco, Peru
2. Puno, Peru
3. La Paz, Bolivia
4. Lima, Peru
   

I will post some pics of the sites and the cities, but first I wanted to drop a few of our pics of the children we saw that were being treated:







I grew up serving within the ranks of Operation Smile, another non-profit dedicated to fixing cleft lips in third world children, and though I have seen thousands of pictures just like these, it was incredible to actually get to see the children and hear the stories of pain told by the mothers when others treat their children so terribly. To see the surgeries was incredible, that in a few hours and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, a person's entire life can change so drastically.

It was an amazing experience and I am grateful for how lucky I am to be blessed with a healthy body, a beautiful and healthy family, for the ability and freedoms to work and provide for ourselves, for a brother who is so proactive in making the world a better place, and the many factors that facilitated and allowed me to participate in this trip.

Those interested in supporting Impact International can do so by making a donation here. For $20 a complete surgery can be performed, changing a child's entire life. This cost per surgery is the lowest I have found anywhere in the world, and is facilitated by a genius and well executed model used by Deseret International. Through the use of donated American medical supplies, supporting the local doctors, Deseret is able to support these doctors in doing the surgeries for just a few dollars.


Find more videos like this on Impact International

Hacking the EDU Trifecta

Education is already free. Certification and degrees are not.

Liberating knowledge is useful in that it brings convenience to education, but the nut that really needs cracking is how to make certification, courses, grading, textbooks, teaching, and degrees, scalable and cheap.

There are three main components that need to be hacked to make this happen:

1. The University
2. The Professor
3. The Textbook
   

There are efforts underway to hack each of these components and I just wanted to share some things I had found this week regarding each point:

1. The University. The advantage of the university is that there is power in proximity, communication, and interaction. But with technology, it will no longer be required that we are in the same room. Tech University of America is bringing college courses to Facebook. Now I honestly would not want to complete an entire degree over Facebook, but as someone in between my undergrad and grad schooling, I would be interested in taking a course or two. Just one example of a scalable solution driving The University to continue losing its relevancy.
2. The Professor. Read a great blog article by the VC, Fred Wilson. The article is titled Let the Student Teach. He references another post and quotes this great story:
   
   

   Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called "independent study", that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C -- 60% -- really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of 'brainy' students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring group (the 'keeners') who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents' behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.
   
   To the astonishment of everyone, including myself, I did very well at this. By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects. I'd become friends with some members of the 'clique' I had aspired to join, and discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all. We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others' work).
   
   As the year progressed, the 'keeners', to my amazement, found they were struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular structured classroom program. Now our independent study group was a remarkable group of non-conformists, whose marks -- on tests we didn't attend classes for or study for -- were so high that some wondered aloud if we were somehow cheating. My grades had climbed into the low 90% range, and this included English where such marks were rare -- especially for someone whose grades had soared almost 30 points in a few months of 'independent' study. The fact is that my peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in the school literary journal. On one occasion, a poem of mine I read aloud in class (one of the few occasions I actually attended a class that year) produced a spontaneous ovation from my classmates.
   
   The Grade 12 final examinations in those days were set and marked by a province-wide board, so universities could judge who the best students were without having to consider differences between schools. Our independent study group, a handful of students from just one high school, won most of the province-wide scholarships that year. I received the award for the highest combined score in English and Mathematics in the province -- an almost unheard-of 94%.
   
   

   Another great way to make great teaching scalable is to open access. This can mean larger classrooms or as is the case in Korea, letting the best teachers speak in sports arenas. Let the teachers become super stars.
   
3. The Textbooks. Found an interesting company this week whose goal is to make etextbooks free to students. FlatWorldKnowledge is bringing great texts digital and think they have a model to make it sustainable. While the ebooks are free, their revenues come from students paying to print the book, softcover versions, quiz banks, flash cards, and other study aids. They are venture funded, having raised $8M from Greenhill SAVP, High Peaks Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners. Here is a their clip explaining the product.
   

A Little Sunday Treat

Jon Schmidt is a local Utah talent. I live like 5 minutes away from this guy. Great talent and an awesome entertainer. Enjoy. (Embedded video stopped working - here is a link).