The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

In this post, I’ll not mention the name of the country we were in, but do a best efforts attempt to describe the environment and experiences.

We arrived after our time in Hong Kong and China, and entered a hot, dirty country that has beautiful people in it. This was only my second time to be in a third world country, and was still getting used to what to expect and what to plan on doing without. There really is no middle class - just the haves and the have nots. As you can guess, the have nots outnumber the haves. We were in a city of 5 million that had almost every type of transportation - bicycles (individual or as a taxi of sorts - rider standing up and passenger on the seat), scooters, taxis, buses (which were packed like sardines), to name a few.

We had a 30 minute commute each morning to where we were meeting, from the hotel near the airport. The hotel itself had good food and great service. Internet access was dialup and was frustrating for an addicted broadbander. No TMobile hotspots or Starbucks to be found here. (The last day we were there I finally found a broadband Internet Cafe, but too late to do anything about it). We stayed 6 days and really missed the people when we left. Some things just were not able to be found, but then again, we were able to purchase 2 HP/Compaq computers while in the country to give to people we did some work with - about the same prices as we would find here in Dallas, so I was pleased that we were able to contribute to the work these people were doing in such a way.

This is a country with many oral learners in it - and those that can read don’t have much access to printed material, in that it can be very expensive. Many different cultures and points of view exist here - learning to navigate the differences and work together is an interesting challenge - one that is somewhat unexpected. Racism exists almost everywhere in the world, I’ve come to learn. I do hope they can learn from us, but I do hope that we have an example that is worthy of learning from. We may not be the best example, but the U.S. has worked hard to acknowledge the issues and make some attempt to change. We have a Civil War in our history to mark the beginning of the battle for human rights. May others not have to go to that extent.