Esteemed Jokemaster (ah, thank you, thank you--JM),

I have taken offense at one aspect of your most recent installment of Jokeline. How dare you title the analogies section "worst analogies." Speaking as a writer (and a damned fine one at that) those are some of the best analogies I have had the pleasure of reading (with, of course, the notable exception of Tom Robbins, the analogy king.) I wish the ink would drip off of more high schoolers' pens like freshly spilled oil from the wings of an Alaskan sea-bird, rendered flightless by the unwilligness of men to open their minds.

Kevin Frank

3 Sep 1996

Those words come from the freshly dripping and flightless keyboard of a fellow fraternity brother at Dartmouth who to no regret subscribes to Jokeline. And to the rest of you, feel free to send in your letters to the Jokemaster.

Well this week, serious stuff went down. Fran the Hurican killed 17, Bill Clinton missiled Iraq, and Emmit Smith got injured. So in honor of these events, today Jokeline will relay only serious and TRUE stories. Just when you thought you'd never see such a crazy and unbearable theme like truth, here it is before your very eyes. Never accuse Jokeline of being anywhere but the cutting edge of innovation!

SAFETY FALTERS

-It's so hard to find good help these days...

For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the same bed every Friday morning" a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. "There was no apparent cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning system, and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues."

"However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths.

It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove

the plug that powered the patient's life support system, plug her floor

polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had

finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and

leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She could not, after all,

hear the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her

polisher.

"We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question.

Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an

electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of

this incident. The enquiry is now closed."

from (Cape Times, 6/13/96). Headline was, "Cleaner Polishes Off Patients."

Submitted by Andrew Smith, a computer science graduate student at Yale.

SAFETY FIRST

In a recent issue of "Meat & Poultry" magazine, editors quoted from

"Feathers," the publication of the California Poultry Industry

Federation, telling the following story:

It seems the US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for

testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun

that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately

the speed the plane flies.

The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass

impact, it'll survive a real collision with a bird during flight. It

seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a

windshield on a brand new, speedy locomotive they're developing.

They borrowed the FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired.

The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, went through the

engineer's chair, broke an instrument panel and embedded itself in the

back wall of the engine cab.

The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if

everything was done correctly.

The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:

"Use a thawed chicken."

Submitted by Jennifer L Silverman, a Dartmouth classmate at U of Minnesota, training to be a psychologist. Don't think twice about it, Jen! Thanks for the submission.

SAFETY IRRELEVANT

Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London was observing the construction one day.

He approached a mason and asked him what he was doing. The mason replied, "I'm putting bricks together to make this wall."

Then Christopher Wren asked his assistant what he was doing. "I'm mixing mortar so we can put the bricks together to make the wall."

Then Christopher Wren went over to a carpenter and asked him what he was doing. "I'm fixing the hinges on the door."

Christopher Wren turned to an artesan. "I'm soldering pieces of stained glass together."

Christopher Wren then saw a small boy lugging rocks to the site. "What are you doing, young man?" The boy threw down the rocks and said, "I, sir, amd building a great cathedral."

Moral: Let's not lose sight of the goal even though our contribution might seem small.

This story was told by my Peace Corps director in Costa Rica. It was meant to inspire us volunteers to continue on our small task-big goal development process. After that a lot of volunteers went into masonry.

SAFETY PUSHED TO THE BRINK

Since so many people asked about my summer research the following is a report (actually a page out of my web site) of my adventures. I added a few comments denoted by parentheses and asterisks to aid in your understanding of the situation. This article appeared in my home town paper. But before you go, remember keep those submissions flowing!

Foxboro Man Jumps Into Volcano With Three Beautiful Women To Save Community From Immediate Destruction (**The tabloid version of the title**)

In 1918 at the far side of the volcanic crater Pululahua in the central

Ecuadorian Andes, a large rock bluff buckled and exploded. As the boulders

flew, lava poured out and rushed like a tide downhill charbroiling a small

lime-mining community. Of the few survivors came the descendent families

Murminacho and Chipantasig. They moved to the front of the crater, took up

the hoe, founded the community of Pululahua, and sowed the seeds of a bitter

division that would be burning even when I (***and the beautiful women***) arrived over 70 years later.

In the 1920s, the Jesuits established the Hacienda (like a pre-Civil War

southern plantation) Pululahua (Pu-lu-LAU-wa) in which a Chipantasig

eventually in the 50s became the cruel taskmaster and a Murminacho became

the abused worker. Aside from the thermal waters and occasional toxic gas

emissions in hidden locales, the volcano lies dormant and cool, but the hot

division in the community between one Chipantasig and one Murminacho still

smoldered as my international team and I began work in June.

The Pululahua Geobotanical Reserve now constitutes the nearest protected

area to Ecuador's capital city, Quito, and boasts a beautiful geologic

landscape and a unique botanical assemblage of orchids and other mountain

species.

But I went to work neither with the rocks nor the plants (***In fact, I really didn't want to work at all***), but with the community

oddly enough at the bottom of the crater, where the soil was once quite

fertile. I had been invited by an Ecuadorian conservation organization along

with my team of three women from Florida, Canada, and Panama -- to study the

feasibility of a community-operated zoo in the old, crumbling hacienda

building.

Soon enough we would realize the identification of a possible tourist zoo

would not be the challenge (***sleeping on a hard wooden floor with a dog trapped and howling the entire night from the basement was more challenging***), but how to gain the participation of a community as united as north and south Korea.

"This is one of the toughest communities," Park Director Guillermo Romero

kept telling us (***while trying to bite off a chunk of undercooked meat from a bone***). "The leadership is so divided." In the park building at the

bottom of the crater, we waited for the vice president of the Improvements

Committee (***He name was not Al.***). Two primary community groups carry out community activities in

Pululahua, the Improvements Committee and the Association of Agricultural

Workers. The Association formed in order to take control of the best

agricultural lands after the government expropriated the hacienda in the

1970s and distributed land to the ex-laborers.

First we were to talk with the president of the Committee, but he was off

driving his taxi (***didn't take much to get him off***), surely, no where near the community over which he

supposedly presided. So we went to visit the vice president. While we waited

for him, the clouds enveloped the crater as they always do late in the

morning, dropping a cool mist (***we thought were in a shampoo commercial***). We saw through the window a short wrinkled

man with a small top hat (characteristic of Andean farmers with indigenous

blood). He bobbed back and forth and hid something behind his back as he

entered the room. He tried to stash the crystal bottle of fire water behind

a chair.

That was Miguel Chipantasig, descendent of community founder, former

taskmaster, occasional wife-beater and drunk, and virtual leader of the

organization in charge of community development whose flagship project was

the construction of a vehicular road that would pass right through the steep

wall of the volcanic crater (***And yes, that is as difficult as it sounds***). This would allow farmers to easily get their

products to market which they can do now only with pack animals and by

climbing a steep mountain pass. Despite his less than complimentary

description, Miguel was the most learned member of Pululahua as well as

perhaps the person most driven to improve it. While generous with us, his

person clashed with many community members, especially with Humberto

Murminacho, descendent of community founders, abused hacienda worker, and

probably the most respectable person in the community.

Humberto's wife turned into a resume of evil deeds every time Miguel's name

surfaced (***It got a little annoying after the 50th time***). She recounted how he once, while drunk, threw her husband in jail

for three days and zero reasons; how he would wake them up at 3 am to make

them work; how he would pull down Humberto's heavy pack while he tried to

carry it; how he made the workers work seven days a week; the list goes on.

In light of this stand off, the community has been left nearly powerless to

organize, and organization was the key ingredient that our plan called for.

"Oh sure," the president-taxi driver finally assured us, "We can call a

general assembly," even though Miguel, his vice president, didn't like the

date. The president then waited until three days before the day to come

riding down on his glorious white taxi to alert his people to the coming of

the assembly. But Pululahua has some 80 households scattered across 2-3

square miles of crater floor. There are no phones, no heralds with trumpets,

not even smoke signals to indicate to people working out in their fields

that word needs to be spread. Thus the snail race began, and the president

forgot to bring the convocation notices as well. He asked us to help but our

arrival at people's doors just rang of the same problem of the last 40

years. (*** deja vu***)

Ever since World War II, teams of "experts" from developed countries have

been arriving at Third World countries like Ecuador to tell local people

what their problems were and what their solutions must be. In hindsight most

development projects have failed in some measure because the local people

really had no interest in the problems and solutions that were supposedly

theirs, had little stake in the outsider-administered projects, or had no

local institutions to carry on the project after outsider money dried up and

the outsiders went back to whence they came. (*** Generally very nice houses.***)

Our goal then was to carry out a participatory rural appraisal by which we

introduce some activities like a community map, institutional diagram, (***tiddly winks***) and

problem identification, and the local community does all the work and

produces all the information -- only they know, after all, their real

concerns and resources. Once assembled into a workshop proceeding, the

knowledge can be used by the people themselves, the government, and outside

institutions who are interested in helping, like my conservation group

interested in finding out about a local zoo which was never mentioned

throughout the entire process.

Obviously the general assembly never happened according to plans (nothing

does in the hinterlands); fortunately that morning Humberto and the

Association were working their communal potato fields where we joined them

and persuaded them to stop off at the school to meet and discuss our project

proposal. Some other people showed up as well and we addressed some 20

people, a far cry from the 300 or so people in Pululahua. (***We also bribed them to come with the offering of lunch.***)

Mediocre participation marked the next eight days of activities. We thought

several times that the project would stall to a stand still, go into code

blue, and never start up again. The clouds would dance and swirl first

around the tip of the crater and then white out everything like a snow

squall. And we would wait for participants who, if they came at all, despite

what they might have told us, would come 1-2 hours late -- but time in the

countryside moves and even crawls at a pace disgustably foreign to a person

from northeast USA. Patience becomes the most valuable resource, not money,

not food, not even a good pair of shoes. (***Also true if you are a doctor.***)

The methodology called for three days in the field but we were out for 12.

On the very last day, the culminatory moment struck. In search of hidden

community problems, we had done the background activities, like the

community transect, historical tendencies, and community calendar. Again

taking advantage of a semi-community meeting, this time to pay their water

bills which they all do at once, we had 43 people (our offer of lunch surely

caressed their interest in coming), the largest concentration of community

we would ever see. (***They were all thinking very hard.***)

We now had a list of problem areas and the people had to vote to prioritize

them. To the most prioritary, we could apply a series of activities that

clarify root problems and viable solutions for the community. Of the 14

areas, 35 votes came in to deal with the road, six for poor community

organization, four for lack of a health center, and 0-3 for each of the rest

(some voted more than once).

The envisioned road entranced them like capturing the Roadrunner does to the

Coyote. Almost nothing else entered their minds, no other problem was of any

real concern next to their near inability to carry their agricultural

product out of a deep crater to the outside world. The Improvements

Committee had been waging a hopeless battle. To construct a road for cars

would require the dynamiting of a very popular overlook and elimination of

huge portion of the crater wall. The possible consequences of such a road

such as the accelerating of current problems -- robberies, outsiders buying

up the land, outmigration of youth, parkinglotization -- were never

considered. There had never been a public forum to discuss the issue, nor

did it interest the park service who would never allow such a wild

alteration of a protected area. The irony of the road was that it may have

been the single issue that unified the community's thought and in that there

would be no compromise, no discussion (*** To the DEATH!***) of any other alternative even though

our methodology was clear in this case: in the face of the impossibility of

alternative numero uno, what other alternatives would facilitate the

people's getting out the product efficiently?

Unfortunately there was no unity in action. The community's lack of

organization aggravated the obstinance like a baby who has not yet learned

any other problem-solving tactic other than crying; Miguel said he would

fight for the pass even if they had to blast a tunnel under the crater.

Humberto, having worked for the park service, said nothing. He knew that

what our Panamanian colleague said was true, as she repeatedly smashed her

fist into her palm (***We had to bandage it after the meeting.***): "Trying to build the road is like pounding your head

against a wall, again and again and again. To accomplish the road, you would

need to change the definition of a protected area, to change the law, which

can only be done by the congress of Ecuador. Can you organize yourselves and

get them to do that?" This community cannot even get many of its members to

pay the water bill.

We tried to lead the people into a discussion of alternatives such as better

care of and equipment for pack animals or arranging for frequent busing

along a long utility road in the back of the crater, or having cheaper taxis

wait for people at the top of the crater. They had no patience for this,

they were busy people, and wanted to know just one thing: how they could get

their road built. When we didn't tantalize their ears with the tune of

impossibility, they got up in fives and tens and headed straight for the

door. The exodus was a volcanic cloud -- within five minutes the meeting had

exploded in hot air and ash... and ended.

This communal passion, now reflected in the proceedings to some degree,

should be highly instructive to the institutions that want to work in

Pululahua. We actually considered the study a major success, the methodology

worked and came to an estimable conclusion. It was like driving along a

highway and you're trying to see the vista of a canyon on the other side of

a wall of trees. Suddenly the green barrier opens, you get a flash of the

canyon's magnitude, and then the trees close up again (***As your car drives over the edge...***). We witnessed our flash of Pululahua's mentality. (***Does that make sense, Jen?***)

After all done and written, my counterpart at the conservation organization

whose dream was to work in a zoo finally asked, "Jon, I didn't ask you

before because I didn't want to interrupt the process, but what about the

zoo?"

I sat for a second and replied, "Considering the qualities of the crater,

I'd recommend a rock garden."

end