Em.'s In & Outs

I just came home to Lac-Etchemin, Québec, yesterday, and knew it as I was leaving Toronto's streets, which are saturated with cell phones ads. I must say I was shocked to see how these differed from Montréal's streets, who are filled with posters about the National Library, the African Drumming Festival and the Week for International Solidarity... How different is that from culture shock? :)

Speaking thereof, coming home means coming back to good old wood heating. This form of energy seems to have went down in popularity, maybe because it just takes two week-ends to split and cord all the firewood. And it makes a mess. And your back aches. (This is a post for those who aren't from the countryside by the way!)

I always wondered why my parents never switched to fossil fuels for heating. I don't think it really is because of neither environmental or sustainability reasons. It also made me think that some people need to walk several miles to get their fuelwood, and here we just have a range of options for house heating with price tags.

My grand-father is 84 years old and he still goes in the forest every day. I don't think I inherited his passion, but despite my despicable mark in forestry, the other day I had a reflexion about plantations. The guy next door has a pine plantation, which is probably especially great during Christmas time. I was thinking since it does not produce leaves of any sort, then it's branches can not really be used for fodder, and clearly I could not see any other benefits to this establishment than the socio-economic ones. No agroforestry in sight, no protected areas either.

Then I realized that my dad put pine branches on the grass just over where the water pipe lays. It seems like this creates an isolation that keeps the cold from freezing our water supply during the winter... All in all, wood here is much more used for climatic reasons than for cooking, but it is still liked to well-being and survival, hey?

While I was in CÉGEP I used to get together with my friends from the astrophysics committee and then design fractals on the computer and watch psychedelic movies that exploited a camera's magnetic field (as well as Pink Floyd's groove) to make amazing light effects.
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I thought these days were gone... Before I downloaded Inkscape. Inkscape is the open source version of Adobe Illustrator, and it is used for making vectorial graphics, which in turn are widely used to make logos, patterns, etc.

If one day you want to have fun. Download Inkscape. Draw a star. Then pull it inside out, drag it around with your mouse. Click on the nodes button and play around with them. Rarely had such a fun time with computer software...

Everybody knows shea from being the favorite commodity at the centre of the Body Shop's socially counscious discourse. I was reading about the shea global market and realized there was much more to it than, one the one end, the domestic use by families in West-Africa (oil, butter, soap) and, on the other end, the ''exotic'' cosmetics used by cosmopolitan Western consumers.

It occurs than most of the time it is written something like vegetable oil on the back of a mass-produced chocolate bar, it most likely refers to shea oil! How strange?

Another thing I notice is that shea is a trade that empowers and bound women together. It takes the strenght of the youth, the capital of the middle-aged and the experience of the elderly to produce shea butter, which is a tremendously labor-intensive activity. Women in Ghana are said to keep the income from the sales of shea butter to themselves, and young women learning how to set up their own shea business become more independent on their husbands later in life, which in turn, by increasing their ''bargaining power'', might have the effect of their vulnerability to domestic violence. In addition, many women of the same neighbourhood contribute to each other's efforts in a rotating basis, which garantees a supply of labor and thus diminishes the need for taking loans and hiring employees. Neat, hey?

I have recently gotten news about going to work in Burkina Faso with WUSC-Uniterra, as part of the twelve-months co-op placement for my university degree. I'll be (most likely) working on monitoring and evaluation of income-generating activities with people with HIV AIDS, focusing on women cooperatives in the shea butter industry. This is a chance for me to explore emerging sectors in economics that are somehow more related to my interests than, say, price theory. With so many people living from AIDS, and with the all the social stigma surrounding being HIV positive, I can hardly think of better way to regain one's dignity than being capable of staying independent. With AIDS being so often dismissed as being a ''women's disease'', and female patients' lifestyles being pointed out as the cause of its evils, it is interesting to see how the idea of fair trade (and the business and marketing side it involves) can contribute to alienate this bias. More on this later.