…if, that is, seeing is knowing, knowledge is power, and power is helpful for changing things.

A new venture from Google Earth lets you explore humanitarian or philanthropic ventures by seeing what these activities actually look like. I’m avoiding a problem set right now, checking out a refugee camp in southern Chad. NGO people: note that there is a nice grant available to help you get your story out to donors using this tool.

Here is some news coverage, and here is the official Google Earth Outreach site.

If you need help figuring out how to take advantage, read on for some tips

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Okay, maybe the blimp was a poor choice (though excellent to curb your roomate’s excessive chatting, provided you live in a mansion or treehouse.  A much better example of what’s available on makezine is this DIY household flood alarm, which texts or emails you when water levels reach too high.  Cool, eh?

After a few requests for group emails regarding Central America, I’ve finally ceased to be communicatively lazy. So, for those interested, here’s a quick update.

After a brief visit to SE Arizona for Corina & Dave’s extremely aerobic wedding and some tramping into the desert, I headed down to Guatemala City late last month with Heather. Since then, we’ve been through several of the main tourist cities in Guatemala and S. Mexico (in Chiapas), doing normal western tourist things, like over-eating-out, looking at old things/places, and walking accidently down streets of questionable character which may contain large(r) men (than me) who may have lots of guns, jerry-curls and motor-scooters and maybe power/drugs/money.

Some of the highlights include:

• all of the public markets, an amazing scene and the best place to pick up some slang (the newest is ‘para llevar’ or ‘have it to go’, maybe not so slangy, but definitely useful considering the choice coffee around these parts)
• relearning to bargain,
• the easy pace of Guatemalan Spanish,
• meandering and meeting up in the south with friends from the north,
• amazing live music (including killer original vocal solos by an American Rasta,
• a few rare moments of quiet, as the cities are amazingly noisy, as is the hostel scene by likely default
• plenty of fresh, softball sized avocados (yes, the big ones do make great guacamole) among all the other fresh produce
• I’ve also enjoyed the sun quite a bit, and all this walking has been erasing the old pasty Juneau tan.

Some of the definite downsides:

• trying to pick up Mexican Spanish (its much too fast for this greenhorn’s ear)
• keeping up with distance classes
• cholera (too many hallucinations and indigestion)
• being rushed (which may make you shove your passport casually into your pocket, where it likewise may fall out or be filched, necessitating an expensive and untimely side trip back to the embassy instead of doing other, cooler things, like visiting a water project in Honduras, sorry Dan, it ain’t going to happen)
• fried food, which effectively nixes most local cuisine, with the exception of some amazing beet tostadas
• the sinking feeling that every poor country opened to western tourism and interests is experiencing the same awful growing pains, though maybe with less violence and repression than the worst rated democrazy in Latin America (the U.S. even dropped their partnership and support in the poorly-aimed war on drugs in 2002).
• a deeper understanding of how truly terrible U.S. foreign policy has been towards Latin America since independence.

Soon, language school and a new passport. Next time, a better plan to not get stuck in the regular gringo route, which is fun, but unproductive to maybe for everyone but a few.

Also you should check makezine.com has lots of funky DIY projects of all types (some of them are even useful) and especially their rad forums. My favorites here are the Altoids iPod speaker, rare-earth LEDs for illuminating the metal object of your choice, and a gigantic semi-intelligent helium blimp that is attracted to EM waves (i.e. cell phones), how cool and annoying!