Worlds Touch

Delete a Page in Facebook

I looked online and found not much, and what I found has already changed. So here it is:
A Facebook Page a good way to have an extra "web site" to promote your organization and what you do to make the world a better place. However, sometimes you want to delete a page you've created. Here's how:

This assumes you are the creator, that the page was created by you so that you are the administrator:

Facebook

Ads and Pages in left column

Edit Page

Manage Permissons

Permanently Delete this Page

If you don't have a page, you might want to consider it. Lots of people have Facebook on their PHONES! This is one way to reach out to people to talk about what you do, the people you are helping, and offer suggestions on how they can support your work.

How I Got into This

My friend and colleague Jean Pudlo asked me how I got started in my international work, and it dawned on me that others might want the same information. Here's what I told her:

It's pretty simple. I emailed the wife of one of my very old friends here in Nepal and told her I had just finished a set of IT support courses and was there anything I might be able to do for her. She said, Come to Nepal and we'll see. It took me three years to get the money together for the airplane ticket.

That contract lasted a couple of years. I custom-designed a database for Lajana's NGO and made some suggestions about other tech improvements they could make. But they weren't really open to thinking strategically about technology. They persisted with the idea that I provide some kind of standalone product that they wouldn't do anything about except somehow "have" it.

I met my current clients while visiting the various members of my Peace & Travel organization, Servas. I came over to Bhaktapur just to meet them, the same way I had the orthopedic equipment salesman earlier that week. Surya, the executive director of RCRD, is a really forward-looking guy, very quick to see possibilities and immediately he peppered me with questions about his database dreams.

The following year, I worked directly on a database design for him, and this year, five years later, he proudly showed me the nationwide database of disabled persons that has been the result.

In 2006, my husband Jean-Francois had a sabbatical and so we spent 10 months going around the world-- a dream of his since our far-flung traveling days 30 years ago. Wherever we went, I tried to contact NGOs to offer my Worlds Touch services.

I stress that I don't work for nothing, that I am not a volunteer. I request each organization I work for to provide me with room and board. In Cambodia, that meant actually paying me for my hotel room. In New Caledonia, the executive director (like many NGOs in developing countries with foreign visitors and volunteers and interns and fellows, etc.) had an extra apartment in town and offered it to us to stay in while I worked on research for their web site.

In Darjeeling, the Rotarians suggested the Jesuit-run charity that I am involved with.

I'm somewhat dismayed to see these agencies spring up that purport to do all the work of connecting volunteers with organizations. All you really need to do is walk in the door and make them an offer, the same way we do it in the States! I understand American parents' fears and trepidations and desires to have insurance and medical evacuation coverage and all that. I've thought Worlds Touch should get some of that business-- it's quite lucrative. People pay plenty of money to go wash their clothes in a bucket and eat rice and lentils and sleep on thin mattresses these days. It could be a good income stream.

And then I think...Naaah...That is not what we do. And it's not what I believe in, either.  I believe in reaching across the barriers that divide us, even to the problem of finding clients who want what I have to offer. I've been quite fortunate that the places I work with are pretty ethical and honest and diligent and mission-centered.

Work in Nepal vs Work in India

[Bhaktapur, Nepal] The Worlds Touch work in Nepal is significantly different from that in Darjeeling, India. In Darjeeling, I was a volunteer with Hayden Hall for four months in 2006 while on a Rotary Club scholarship to learn Nepali. I had been approved to go to Nepal itself, but then the Maoists were waging war against the government here, so the Rotary Foundation balked at sending me there. Then I learned that the Darjeelingites (?!) are a Nepali-speaking people, so I shot off several emails and finally met with success.

The last time I was in Darjeeling, in 2008, the political situation there was unstable. We managed to participate in one health camp, paid for by a generous doctor friend of mine, and then the town shut down tighter than Davy Jones' Locker. Jean-Francois freaked out at being unable to get outa Daj. My contacts at Hayden Hall said the personnel situation there made it impossible to consider any sort of volunteer work there.

So this time, it was in effect, a totally new world in Darjeeling. My Rotarian friends were all busy-busy-busy shooting a movie and other personal stuff. The guy who was supposed to be organizing a video production workshop didn't get his act together at all. Hayden Hall, on the other hand, has a new director who was thrilled when I showed up because he's been wanting to do this book and there came me to write and supervise three college students to get it done. Father Kennedy didn't tap into my tech consulting capacity until the end of my trip there, but then we did manage to look into the self-hosted version of WordPress. He taught computer science before he became director of a huge social service org, so he could figure out how to set up a local host so he could really play with WordPress.

He was also interested in Tactical Tech's NGO-in-a-Box stuff. I arranged for him to receive one of their free CD packets, but when it came, it was all Linux OS focused (he's running Windows) and still required downloading from the internet. I had thought one reason they provided the CD "in a box" was to facilitate software acquisition by folks with incredibly slow internet connections. We're working on this one.

Is Hayden Hall a client yet? I'd say a qualified yes. Father Kennedy may very well start taking advantage of my talents on subsequent visits. Here in Bhaktapur, though, I've been working with Surya and Ramesh at Community-Based Rehab and its Resource Center for nearly six years. My first encounter, we played with an access database and Surya's dream of having a database that could be disseminated throughout the disability community of orgs so that data gathering about the disabled in Nepal could start taking place.

That database-- after one false start with a local programmer-- is starting to become a reality, "thanks to your encouragement," Surya and Ramesh told me my first day here. On my last visit, in 2008, I built two websites for the two organizations housed here together. The first, CBR-Bhaktapur, provides direct service to disabled people and trains teachers, social workers and others to include the disabled in fully integrated classrooms and social situations. The second, RCRD (Resource Center for Rehabilitation and Development-- sheesh, I would change that name in a heartbeat if I had any control over the branding of this outfit) is a library and training center, aspiring to become the nation's data collection center on disability issues.

We've put together an ambitious program for my monthlong visit. I'll share that information in another post. I'm challenged with questions I have to research, I'm gratified to find people who like what I can do and want my contribution (as I found in Daj with Father Kennedy as well!), and I'm with good friends in a fascinating culture. Win-win-win-win.

Darjeeling, as in, the Tea

After a day of travel in relative luxury (airplane and private taxi) I have arrived at my first work destination, Darjeeling, India. I finally got through to my Rotary Club contact here and he proposed meeting this afternoon some time to discuss prospects and plans.

This is the time of year when lots of people leave town because of the unpleasant weather. Daj is a city of several hundred thousand originally constructed to house about 50,000 that drips down the side of a steep mountain crest. This is the monsoon season, which means that my first purchase today, before coffee, before breakfast, before bottled water, was an umbrella. They have serviceable Korean models here for about $1.50. At home, people are leaving town for either the mountains or the beach to escape the humid, hot weather. It was indeed humid and hot in Delhi, but this is more than humid, it is inside the cloud, and so everything is moist, limp, tending to mildew.

I have four plans for this month, only one of which really NEEDS to get done. I need to get a root canal and a cap. Other than that, I could make videos with a group of nonprofits, or I could work with one nonprofit on home-grown videos. I could work with the local Rotary Club to get a proposal for the international grants that are available internationally. I could head down the mountain a ways to spend time with a nun who does agricultural projects with local villages.

What I don't have are definite commitments. It has ever been thus with my Darjeeling forays. The first time I came here with a Rotary Club scholarship, I arrived with neither lodging, nor Nepali lessons, nor volunteer project arranged. By the end of the first week, however, all three were in place most satisfactorily. I might be one step closer this time by the end of the afternoon.

If i can't get work, then I'll get my teeth fixed and my airplane ticket changed and go back to Delhi to take a plane to Kathmandu. There are lots of corners of Nepal I haven't visited, and if there is no way to organize work, then I will organize play.

You would think it would be possible to arrange specific projects from home. So far, though, this has proved elusive. It's as if I am some sort of mirage or chimera until I'm right here. Then everything can move. Even my first project, with Lumanti, in Nepal, was completely unorganized until I arrived.

In the meantime, this is the home of some of the finest tea on the planet. And it has a kind of faded charm, a quirky beauty. No photos today. I haven't got the system sorted out yet for getting them uploaded.

Trip Preparation, the Easy Way

I have a packing list* that I put together years ago. I'll use that as a kind of template, and then modify what actually goes into the bag based on this year's contingencies.

For example, I'll take even fewer clothes than usual this time because I am planning to stock up on salwal/kameez the minute I set foot on Indian soil. I may actually take a taxi from the airport to Fabindia, just to get myself what I need for my first day.

For the rest, I'm out of avoidance mode and into getting roughly one packing/organizing thing a day done. Yesterday, for example, I bought a pair travel capri pants. Airplane travel requires TOTAL comfort, on the feet, around the waist and across the shoulders. Fashion be damned, if necessary.

Friday, I had a visit to the doctor to stock up on drugs. I got my regular prescriptions for allergies and acid reflux in a two-month packet, as well as sleeping, diarrhea antibiotics, and nasty-pain meds. I'm not doing special shots. I'm not going anywhere where there's cholera or hepatitis rampant. I can get shot there if I need to.

In fact, the general rule is: You can get it there. Don't bother schlepping it. So: Shampoo, hand lotion, hair dye (it is two months, after all...you think this red hair is God-given? Ha!) and even a cell phone-- all this is available in India/Nepal for cheaper and more adapted to the ways of the land. 

*While you're at the road, the road, check it out. It's the first book completely online, made for the internet, that I had ever heard of. I thought I'd invented the genre. Probably not, but still, a great exercise.

Mission Trip

Here in the South, everyone knows exactly what you're doing when you tell them you're off on a mission trip. All the local churches sponsor groups to travel to unfortunate countries where, along with rolling up one's sleeves to build, dig, paint, or just hang out with the women and children, one demonstrates that being a Christian is a good and compassionate thing to be.

So when I tell people that I'm about to leave on a two-month overseas journey, they furrow their brows and look puzzled...until I say that I'm going on a mission trip. Then then light goes on.

I'm not lying, just using the local vocabulary for what I'm doing.

Worlds Touch's mission uses terminology that is outdated now: Bridging the Digital Divide. The old Digital Divide email list, however, is being revived with a new buzzword: inclusion. Even that, I fear, still smacks of how WE are going to make an effort to include THEM. The whole idea of worlds touching is that mutuality-- your world and mine reach out and touch one another.

I get as much out of the experience as you do. And if I do my blogging job properly, WE (the larger audience of the blogosphere) get as much out of it as THEY (in this case, nonprofit organizations in India and Nepal) do. 

The idea is to travel to a part of the world I love-- for the food, for the friendships I have developed there, for the scenery, for the delicious cultural differences-- to offer the services I offer here at home: tech advice and training. I'm interested in tools, in software, specifically in databases and web sites and social media. I'm interested in fund raising and marketing, specifically the storytelling part of it. I'm interested in grassroots video. 

I don't pretend that there is nobody in Darjeeling, India, who can do what I do. Or that I'm going to turn into their remote technology expert. I'm just the techie cousin who enjoys the hospitality of friends and does the stuff that nobody has time or money to get done at the NGO shop.

In Tahiti, I worked with the League of Human Rights to retrieve the web site from Web Developer Disappearance Syndrome. In Cambodia, I researched moving the handmade Microsoft content management system to Drupal for Open Forum, the first public news source after the devastating Pol Pot regime. In Nepal, I created a couple of web sites using WordPress.com and Flickr for twin organizations that work with disabled people and train neighbors and family to care for their disabled folks.

Everywhere I go, people need to get their pictures online. They need to figure out where the Format Table command hides out. They invariably need a decent database and Access is driving them crazy. They never knew that Movie-Maker was on their PCs and they have no idea how to fool with it.

So my latest mission trip is just over a week away. I have started assembling the stuff that's going in my suitcase and I'll be blogging about trip preparation for the next week.

I'm landing in Delhi, where my daughter--ever the chip off the old block-- is interning in her chosen field, proceeding to Darjeeling, to do a digital storytelling project and work with the local Rotarians to craft a grant proposal. After a month, I head to Bhaktapur, Nepal. The disability people, Community Based Rehab (CBR) and Resource Center for Rehabilitation and Development (RCRD) will cook up something when I get there.

Online Fundraising Best Practices

Best Practices for Online Fundraising from Frogloop

This is a great blog anyway, but since I gave my talk about social media, I've been more and more aware that nonprofits are simply obsessed with raising money through social media, despite all the cautionary tales about that maybe being the not so great place to look for dollars.

Along comes Allyson Kapin at Frogloop...well, this is her field and mainly her blog. And her great tips which include:

• Create killer landing pages
• Build a great list
• Cross promote
• Segment
• Measure

By all means totter on over there to see how she explains it all.

Social Media: Good but Long Thoughtful Piece

The Real Life Social Network is a pretty long but also pretty interesting slide show about the theory behind social media and how it needs to be designed to reflect the real ways people interact in life and online. I'd make it a must-read for web and forum designers and folks who want to start online groups.

For those of us who are just working with social media, we also have plenty of food for thought here, including getting real about how large our audiences are and what they are using to construct their idea about our identity.

Making Social Media Work for your Nonprofit

Making Social Media Work for Your Nonprofit

View more presentations from travelertrish.

We made our goal!

I was doing a long-overdue summary report on the donors to our Gimme Five Campaign last spring, and it turns out we raised $2004! That's the largest amount of money I've raised from individuals in my career as a reluctant and hesitant fund raiser.

The movie-making class had its last session on Saturday and now we will gear up for the Gala Premiere Film Festival on June 26. I'm notoriously bad at posting blog entries these days, but I'm going to try to get better at it.