People that make me happy
I thought today I'd share two news stories that made me really happy in the past couple of weeks.
First, an eleven-year-old Masai boy from Kenya named Richard Turere. He's invented a cheap low-tech lion repellent -- a way to keep lions from chowing down on his family's herd of cattle. Lion predation on livestock is the number one reason locals kill them (Kenya's lion population has dropped from 15,000 ten years ago to about 2,000 today), so anything that keep them away is good for the cattle, good for the humans, and really good for the lions, though they may not know it. He wired up a bunch of LEDs to an old car battery powered by a solar panel, and the moving lights make it look like somebody is out roaming around and the lions stay away. Is that brilliant or what?? Many other villages are now installing these things, and it's working like gangbusters. He's now 13, and the Kenya Land Conservation Trust has gotten him a scholarship to go to school and study engineering. Yay!!
Second, the men of Phi Alpha Tau at Emerson College in Boston. They fund-raised on IndieGogo to help one of their brothers pay for his gender change from female to male, when his insurance company declined to cover the surgery. A fraternity, can you believe it?? They raised $16K; the extra is being donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which helps fund sex change surgery (they call it "gender-confirming surgery" -- new phrase? never heard it before) for those who can't afford it. You guys rock, man. Best fraternity ever.
It's things like this that give me hope :)
First, an eleven-year-old Masai boy from Kenya named Richard Turere. He's invented a cheap low-tech lion repellent -- a way to keep lions from chowing down on his family's herd of cattle. Lion predation on livestock is the number one reason locals kill them (Kenya's lion population has dropped from 15,000 ten years ago to about 2,000 today), so anything that keep them away is good for the cattle, good for the humans, and really good for the lions, though they may not know it. He wired up a bunch of LEDs to an old car battery powered by a solar panel, and the moving lights make it look like somebody is out roaming around and the lions stay away. Is that brilliant or what?? Many other villages are now installing these things, and it's working like gangbusters. He's now 13, and the Kenya Land Conservation Trust has gotten him a scholarship to go to school and study engineering. Yay!!
Second, the men of Phi Alpha Tau at Emerson College in Boston. They fund-raised on IndieGogo to help one of their brothers pay for his gender change from female to male, when his insurance company declined to cover the surgery. A fraternity, can you believe it?? They raised $16K; the extra is being donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which helps fund sex change surgery (they call it "gender-confirming surgery" -- new phrase? never heard it before) for those who can't afford it. You guys rock, man. Best fraternity ever.
It's things like this that give me hope :)