80 percent of Pinterest users are women

Pinterest is taking over the world with pretty pictures on virtual bulletin boards, and the user demographic is mostly female. Digital crack for women was the Washington Post’s verdict. You’ve heard of football widows and Assassin’s Creed widows, but the first half of 2012 is all about the Pinterest widower. Message boards across the world groan under the weight of Pinterest complaints to the tune of: ‘my wife is addicted to Pinterest’, or ‘my girlfriend has dumped me for Pinterest’, or ‘my daughter isn’t doing her homework and it’s all the fault of Pinterest’.

Take for example this miserable fellow writing on the Disconnect blog under the heading My girlfriend is addicted to Pinterest:

I don’t know when Jen found Pinterest, but I first noticed close to Christmas when I realized we hadn’t spoken to each other in about two weeks. We lived together. We ate together. We worked together. But it was clear that I was no longer the apple of her eye. All of her time was spent pinning. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, good for you. No good can come of it.

It’s time to redress the balance. While your lady lovingly tends her Pinterest boards, you can console yourself with these 5 reasons why her Pinterest addiction is a Good Thing.

1. Gift ideas for you
   Never be stuck for a birthday present or stocking-filler again. By lurking on your wife’s pinterest board you can learn all you ever wanted to know about her secret wishes. BPE (Before Pinterest Era) I would never have known that Charlie hankered after an organic cotton teatowel printed with a seasonal guide to British Fruit and Veg
2. Craft ideas for her
   Craft is all about spending lots of time making something that you could have bought for less. Or is it? When we move house next month, we won’t be buying lampshades. This Spring, we will be making lampshades out of lace doilies. Ha. And Charlie will be hanging her earrings on a cheesgrater. Meanwhile, Kirsty in New Zealand has gone one step further, doing one Pinterest-inspired craft-or-cooking project every day for a year.
3. A Boost for the Family Business
   Pinterest guides more traffic to your website than Twitter, and it’s better quality traffic because the mouseclickers are genuinely interested in your product. Visitors to Jamshop (spread the love with fairly traded products made by hand in Burkina Faso, ahem) have trebled since Charlie got pinterested in Pinterest.
4. Free Rein with the TV Remote
   “Charlie, I was hoping to watch ‘Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekend’ tonight, but would you rather watch ‘The Voice’?”
   “I don’t mind, so long as I can watch TV and work on my Gorgeous Cushions Pinterest board at the same time.”
   “Okay.”
5. Curb your spending
   Recently spotted on Charlie’s Horsey pinboard. “Oh Hermès. We can’t afford your $3275 Steeple bag with riding crop handle. We’ll just have to do with pinning it instead.” Those who have criticized Pinterest for encouraging greed and consumerism are missing the point. Beauty is God-given, and pointing out beauty in the world around us is an important part of being human. Aloysa pointed out a couple weeks ago that Pinterest does not lead to mindless spending. Quite the reverse, it leads to more focussed and deliberate spending. In this interesting blog post, she explains why Pinterest is a good substitution for retail therapy.

If those 5 reasons aren’t enough for you, here’s one last one. Occasionally, just occasionally, your wife will unearth something on Pinterest that will knock your socks off. Seeing these sheep sculptures made from retro telephones has absolutely made my day.

Isn’t it time you introduced your wife to Pinterest?

Our friend Brian the ventriloquist was round the other night. He was telling us about how he got into ventriloquism and about the man who first inspired him, Arthur Worsley. Britain’s Got Talent is good this year, but none of the acts have a patch on Worsley. Here he is going through the alphabet in the cockiest and most technically brilliant way imaginable. 2:15 to 2:25 is magic.

Download An Introduction to Social Justice

This is a powerpoint presentation which I used recently in teaching the subject of Social Justice on the Equipping for Service training programme at the Centre For the Nations in Llanelli.

This is a Powerpoint presentation in ppt format. I hope it can be of some use to group leaders or teachers who want to introduce Christian Social Justice theory in an accessible way to young people or adults. The presentation contains a Christian view of Social Justice theory, including some biblical foundation (owing much to John Stott) and some inspiring examples from history (such as the Clapham Sect, William Booth and Martin Luther King). I have included suggestions of video clips which would complement the presentation throughout.

Download An Introduction to Social Justice

I was pleased to learn today that my latest teen book OUTLAW has been shortlisted for the 2012 Hampshire Book Award. The result will be announced in June.

So here is the Hampshire Book Award 2012 shortlist:

• Burning Secrets – Clare Chambers
• Outlaw – Stephen Davies
• Reckless by Cornelia Funke
• Theodore Boone – John Grisham
• Half Brother – Kenneth Oppel
• Angel – L.A. Weatherly

Spring is here and tangerine is the hottest accessory colour out there. Or so Charlie Davies reckons in her infectiously enthusiastic post about SAHEL design’s new range of tangerine bags. Profits go towards the installation of a much-needed water pump in the leatherworkers’ village.

Also worth clicking this morning is an amazing wordpress giveaway from Cudazi. This guy is the best WordPress coder in the world (or so I concluded in my popular post 10 best wordpress themes for authors). So here is the special offer: a fantastic premium wordpress theme, yours for the price of a tweet.

Author visits to schools are invaluable, and arranging for an author to visit your school is easier today than it has ever been. Author visits give students the opportunity to meet a children’s author and ask them questions about their work. The author visit can be part of a programme of events like Book Week or World Book Day, or it can fit into a scheme of work. In my experience schools often have an Africa week or some sort of engagement with the developing world, so my Africa-based books fit in well with students’ ongoing study.

As I blogged earlier, I am available for school visits this summer and autumn, and have been getting in touch with English teachers and librarians to start arranging bookings. Living in Africa, it is very rare for me to be able to visit schools in England and Wales, so I am enjoying this opportunity. The Stephen Davies author page on Contact an Author is now up, and it gives details of my various talks and workshops, as does my school visits page on this site.

Click to visit my profile on Contact an Author

There is plenty of advice available online about how to arrange an author visit at your school, including this excellent and thorough guide from the Society of Authors: a guide to organising an author visit. The guide deals with things that teachers will want to consider before, during and after the visit.

Popular sessions include: How to write an exciting adventure story, Where to find ideas, Creating believable characters, Research, Travel writing and Using your experiences as a basis for fiction. I also teach workshops for all ages on the subject How to write a picture book.

Like most members of the Society of Authors, I charge day and half-day rates of £350 and £250 respectively, plus expenses, or a fee of £150 for a single session. I am based in Chichester but willing to travel anywhere in England and Wales. I am going to be working on a new novel between now and December, but hope to fit in at least one school visit a week. If you are an English teacher (primary or secondary) or a librarian (or Learning Resource Centre Manager!) please do get in touch to discuss the possibility of an Africa flavoured author visit.

If you’re on Facebook, here’s a public photo album of my last school visit. Great fun!

A creative writing workshop in full flow

From May to December 2012, I am available for school visits in the UK, both primary and secondary. Read testimonials and lesson plans on my school visits page.

Amanda Craig’s Easter recommendations in the Saturday Times contained a pleasing review of THE GOGGLE-EYED GOATS. Some lovely-sounding words in there. Ebullient, anybody? Rumbustious?

—-

“Easter always brings a fine clutch of tales about chicks, pups, lambs and eggs. While the list of classic picture books remains small, good new ones are as welcome as spring. They need to withstand repeated rereading so don’t go for the obvious.

The Goggle-Eyed Goats (Andersen £10.99) is an ebullient tale by Stephen Davies and Christopher Corr. Old Al Haji Amadu lives in Mali with three wives, seven children and five extremely naughty goggle-eyed goats that munch, gobble and chew whatever they can find, which includes his wives’ clothes. Getting rid of the goats, classic embodiments of a child’s interest in food, becomes pressing. But the children protest and follow their father to market. The book’s rumbustious, rhythmical feel for language, packed with internal rhymes, makes it a pleasure to read aloud, and the colourful pictures of the Amadu family and their surroundings have the unselfconscious charm of primitive art. The ridiculously long-lashed goggle-eyed goats have a small surprise to spring on their exasperated owner. One of the best new picture books published this year, it should be read before the Easter Egg hunt, not after!”

Back in January I blogged about the launch of SAHEL design, an exciting new craft label which is both traditional and innovative. ‘Style with roots’ is the tagline for the label. The techniques used for producing West African reins, girths and tassles are centuries old, yet the applications Charlie Davies has found for them are fresh and contemporary. Over the past few months I have come to appreciate the thinking behind the SAHEL label, and to realize its relevance to anyone wanting to produce or sell African crafts.

So here are five dos and five don’ts for doing business the SAHEL way:

• Don’t make talented African craftspeople produce tourist tat
• Don’t teach techniques which are alien to local culture
• Don’t use materials that are not locally available
• Don’t limit retail to fair trade shops, charity shops and churches
• Don’t use sob stories to generate sales – there is little dignity in ‘pity purchases’

• Do spend time finding out what crafts are traditional in a particular area
• Do find modern uses (and therefore new markets) for traditional skills
• Do pay a fair wage for work (more than artisans would be getting ‘locally’ but not so much as to skew the local market)
• Do create incentives for elderly craftspeople to teach younger generations, so that knowledge is not lost
• Do reinvest profits in projects which will benefit not just the craftsperson but an entire community

In the words of founder Charlie Davies, “SAHEL design is about discovering, celebrating and reviving traditional craft techniques. It’s about learning from and respecting the people who make them. It’s about seeing the continuation of skills into future generations by making them profitable today.”

Enough philosophy. Have a look at look at the products themselves, now available on Charlie’s new online shop JAM shop. If you see anything you like, please do click the Facebook ‘Like’ button on the individual product page.

Don’t click ‘Like’ because it’s a good cause. Click ‘Like’ because it’s a beautiful product. We are excited about the future of this business, and Facebooks ‘Likes’ do help to spread the word.

Houses built by Avocet to accommodate displaced people

This is the fourth and last article in my series on Avocet’s Inata gold mine. In case you missed them, here are the others.

Part One: Introduction
Part Two: Environment
Part Three: Employment

‘Burkina Faso as a country does benefit from our presence here,’ says Richard Gray, Avocet’s Vice President of West Africa Operations. ‘Part of our job is to make sure that the social benefit of the mine outweighs its nuisance value, the increased traffic and the dust and so on.’

In the bad old days a gold mine could operate without much regard for the people on whose doorstep it was parked. But today such thoughtlessness earns companies disapproving glares and metaphorical parking tickets. Here are some of the areas in which Avocet try to sweeten the mining pill for the people of Inata and beyond.

1. The Djibo-Kongoussi road

The road from Djibo to Kongoussi (en route to the capital Ouagadougou) is in a terrible state. It is unsurfaced, rutted and potholed. People blame the President of Burkina Faso for breaking his 2006 election promise to tarmac the road, and they blame the mine lorries and tankers for their daily contribution to the road’s worsening state. In March last year they took direct action, blocking the road for two days and demanding that the government and the gold mine find immediate funding for a hundred kilometres of tarmac. It was an excellent non-violent protest, and I wrote about it at the time for the Guardian Weekly. Last week, twelve months after the original protest, the government announced that it had allocated funding for the new road. This is very good news.

2. The Gomde dam

The village of Gomde, 7 kilometres from Inata, used to have a pond. Then the Inata miners arrived. They built a dam at Gomde to contain rainy season rainfall and provide water for the mine. In the place of the old pond is a vast body of water which at full capacity measures a staggering 120 million cubic metres.

Half way through my visit to the Inata mine, we drive to Gomde to see the dam at close quarters. Its clever ‘spillway labyrinth’ and giant pump house are pointed out to me and I make appreciative noises. In the middle of the reservoir, the roof of a school and the minaret of a mosque can be seen poking above the water, and I cannot help wondering how the schoolteachers and the local imam felt about the construction of the dam. ‘They were fine about it,’ says André, Inata’s Community Relations manager. ‘We built them a new school and a new mosque on dry land.’

There is more water in the dam than is needed for the mine, so various irrigation projects are in view. Year-round market gardening is one idea. A three-hectare ‘forest’ of fruit trees is another. Banana trees in the desert – I can’t wait to see it.

So is anyone unhappy about the dam? ‘Some Fulani herders grumble,’ says André. ‘The never-ending water supply has attracted herders from miles around, so the locals have more neighbours now than they were previously used to.’ He shakes his head and chuckles. ‘Those people are never happy.’

3. Pumps

Providing clean drinking water for communities is a sure-fire shortcut to White Knight status. Avocet have installed three pumps in Gomde, one in Sona and one in Inata. Four of the five are powered by solar panels, the last one is powered by teenage girls jumping up and down. Here is one of the solar ones.

4. The Foundation

Avocet’s charity work is organized by FAB – Fondation Avocet pour le Burkina Faso. For every ounce of gold that Avocet take out of the ground, they drop a dollar into the Foundation’s piggy bank. Last year they mined 160,000 ounces, so the Foundation had $160,000 to spend on philanthropy. They bought an ambulance for Aribinda hospital, refurbished a school in Filio and started planning a clinic for Gomde.

An ambulance for Aribinda - photo from Avocet website

The committee which allocates Foundation cash is composed of miners and mayors – specifically the mayors of the three nearest towns, Aribinda, Koutougou and Tongomayel. They receive begging letters from all over the country, but prioritize local projects.

‘We are open to the advice and suggestions of local voices and local NGOs,’ says Richard Gray. ‘As for transparency, you are welcome to come and sit in on a meeting of the FAB committee, if you like.’

The conundrum

‘Alla andinaay gujjo de bangi munaafiki,’ goes the Fulani proverb. Literally, God did not warn the thief that he was marrying a gossip. It is a proverb about uneasy alliances, and alliances don’t come much uneasier than those between NGOs and mining companies. There is nothing like a marriage proposal from the corporate mining sector to make a development worker lose her sleep. ‘Is this an opportunity or a sellout?’ she mutters to herself as she turns her pillow once again onto its cool side. ‘Is this a new humanitarianism or an old heresy? Is this positive influence or probable influenza?’

Samantha Nutt poses the dilemma neatly in her article Should NGOs take the corporate bait? Here is a quote:

The central tension is whether NGOs are serving as bagmen, advancing Canadian mining interests by appeasing local communities with gifts of health care and education, or whether they are simply piloting a new model of co-operation that might positively influence corporate behaviour overseas while simultaneously addressing development gaps.

I tend towards pragmatism in such matters. As things stand, miners and mayors are meeting at Inata every six months to dispense hundreds of thousands of dollars in development aid. They (the miners) are ‘open to the advice and suggestions of local NGOs.’ So they should be. And for their part, experienced local NGOs should engage with this challenge rather than spurning it. Not because they need the cash, but because the cash in a funny sort of way needs them.

‘You can not antagonize and influence at the same time’ (John Knox). I hope that nothing I have written in these four articles has been unnecessarily antagonistic and I hope to keep channels of communication open to all those who live and work at the Inata gold mine. If they have any corrections or comments regarding any of these articles, I will weigh and update as necessary.

May God bless Inata and all who dig there. May God bless and protect the land, the birds, the wildlife and the water. His will be done, on earth as in heaven.