I will put forth more effort to change the way I live and hope by my example, others will follow.

I will put forth more effort to remind my Zaadz community to stop purchasing low price clothing from retail stores. The only way it can be low priced and still make a profit is through the exploitation of the laborer who made the item. Laborers in the Third World are literally paid pennies per hour to produce the majority of the clothing in the USA.

I / we must all think a little greener. I'm not sure what or how it happened, but since I put forth more effort to conserve electricity at home, my current electric bill that was generally about $60.00 a month is now $40.00. 90% of the lights in my house are compact florescent.

I will not let perfectly good water run down the drain when I am brushing my teeth.

I will not let water run down the drain when I am shaving. Stopping the sink and adding a little water to rinse the blade is good enough.

I will drink more water and less unhealthy beverages, like sodas.

We are all one global family and we must take better care of our underprivledged brothers and sisters.

This morning I was checking my Zaadz email and I noticed one of my "friends" previous emails all had that generic smiley face in place of his usual icons. I also noticed he was no longer listed in my friends list. He had accidentally deleted me from his list on Sunday night and restored me a short time later. I thought he may have done this again, but no, this time he was completely gone. He had removed himself from the Zaadz community.

We always shared lively and entertaining emails covering a range of topics, till over the weekend he had started to write in a more serious tone.

He had one person in his network that he never mentioned by name. She had a series of nice photos of herself and they exchanged many an email. He enjoyed her “transparency” and candor. He found her on another social networking web site with photos of a considerably older woman. Yes it was the same woman. On Zaadz, I guess she just wanted to be young again. My friend was very upset about that one. I won’t suggest there was a romantic link or intention; he was more upset that she would pretend to be someone she is no longer and lead him to believe the same.

He had another friend in his network. She was in mine too. We both accepted her invitation to be her friend. I wrote her a well thought out email thanking her for the invitation and I never heard from her again. My friend suggested that this woman was nothing more than a pretty face attached to one of the Swami’s within the community. Her job was to spread his word. Sex sells he reminded me. He guessed she was selling / promoting the Swami’s book. Her profile has not changed sine the first day she became a Zaadzster, no blogs, two photos, nothing more.

It took a very long time of emails back and forth, before he actually confessed to being a Catholic, as if that equates to having full-blown AIDS and not wanting to risk infecting anyone else. He observed that the Zaadz Community seems to have an “Eastern” faith majority and perhaps it was best to keep his Catholic position in the shadows.

Sunday night he sent me an email and asked me to look over his newly rebuilt profile page. He made it very clear that he was a Contemplative Catholic and a regular attendee of the Mass.

Lord knows what happened next. His entire profile was gone sometime between Tue and Wed. I never had any other contact info, so now that his Zaadz email account is dead, I guess so is my friendship with him. 

Transparency was important to him, so if Transparency is important, and I would tend to agree, I thought it best to be as transparent as possible, so as to not offend or mislead anyone.

• I’ve been a Zaadz member for nearly a year.
• My Yahoo email account and Zaadz are the only web sites I visit daily. If Zaadz were to fold up and disappear, I’d hate to think Craig’s List and MySpace would be all that’s left.
• My profile name is “jeffsfo”. The SFO part is not the airport code for San Francisco International Airport, although SFO is the correct code. SFO for me stands for Secular Franciscan Order. I have been a Franciscan since 1990. I don’t live in an Abby and I don’t wear a brown Habit. I am a Franciscan that lives and works among the laity. I actually can’t stand that word, laity. It’s a divisive word in the context of Clergy verses Laity. I was a cop once, and in that world there are Cops and Civilians. Cops never get close to “civilians”, you might have to arrest one someday.
• I live a very simple life. Since I became a Franciscan, I have learned the truth that you can become possessed by possessions. I don’t want to live like that again.
• I live in what is commonly known as a “trailer park”. My home lacks wheels, tail lights, and a hitch, but it will forever be known as a trailer and I will forever be known as “trailer trash” by those with narrow fields of vision.
• My family earned less than $12,000.00 last year.
• We live one day at a time. Can’t afford to get sick. No health insurance, like most of the American population that simply won’t admit it.
• Three years ago I quit a job to go off and start a software company with Alex. I wrote about him in my blog about lies. He is the reason my family was so financially devastated last year. I have not been able to land any form of employment since. Nearly 50-year-old guys are not in high demand these days
• I have an industrial sewing machine and an industrial overlock machine. They have not been in heavy use over the years until now. I recently started a web site where I offer made to order drawstring pants at an affordable and fair price. I can’t stand how commercial clothing manufactures are exploiting Third World laborers, paying them pennies per hour to make the cloths we buy in any retail store. The profit margins are huge when your labor cost is near zero. I would like to cause a "Tipping Point" and change the industry.
  

This is me, flaws and all. I have a PhD from the School of Hard Knocks. I have failed more times than I have tasted victory. I have a basic trust in all people. I’m open minded and non judgmental.

I’ll miss my friend.

You may have heard that the City of San Francisco has banned the use of plastic shopping bags. To some this may sound like a really crazy idea, but this kind of stuff is what San Francisco is all about. I predict it won't take long before plastic shopping bags become a thing of the past. This shopping bag issue was one of the stories on Good Morning America today.

Some of you already know that I make custom draw string pants from eco-friendly materials. One of my goals is to stop the exploitation of Third World labor in the clothing industry. Women and girls all over the world are paid literally pennies per hour to produce clothing for the "First World" This is a subtle form of evil and I personally don't like it.

I am in the process of designing a 100% cotton canvas shopping bag for the Zaadz community. Stay tuned for more information. I'll have a finished bag on my page shortly. I strongly support this idea of reusable shopping bags. It's not much of a choice when I go to my favorite grocery store where they have organic foods and natural teas and suppliments and bulk nuts and seeds and when I get to the register, my choice is paper or plastic. Gee...paper = dead trees or plastic = 100+ years to decompose in a land fill.

That's not much of a choice.

I have been a Zaadz member for about a year. Quite frankly I see plenty of people talking about "Changing the World" but I 'm not reading any blogs about people actually doing it. It was in the early 90's when I got the "call" / inspiration / sensitivity to combat poverty. 17 years later I too can not really say I've done much to reduce it.

I have a fish tank with a small collection of tropical fish. Some people have said over the years, "why do you keep them locked up in a tiny (40 gal is not tiny) fish tank when you should let them go free. I never really had a good answer till one day I recalled that many of my fish were born in the tank and that 40 gal tank is the only world they have ever known. They are safe from predators and are quite happy, or at least it seems so to me.

As much as a 40 gallon tank is the only world many of my fish have known, my entire life has been that of challenge and struggle. Old cars and tiny balance bank accounts are all I have ever known.  Old cars and small bank balances do not make me an unhappy person. I enjoy every day this life of ours has to offer. I can't fly to Europe for a grand vacation, but that does not mean I'm unhappy. If I could go anywhere, I would travel to Auschwitz and photograph every square inch of it. It's hard for me to understand the level of hatred the Nazis had for Jews, Gypsies, Catholics and all the others who were put to death just for being different. My mother's side of the family is Polish and I would love to visit Poland someday and see if any of my ancestors could be found. The chances are slim to none, since the Nazis had a bad habit of blowing up City Halls where all the vital records were kept. I'm sure many of my relatives died at Auschwitz. They were not Jewish, but all you had to do to join the condemned, was to offer help and shelter.

Enough about me...

Over the weekend, I had time to reflect once again on the simple methods Robert Schuller used to build the Crystal Cathedral. I live close to it and I visit the grounds from time-to-time, but I have never been there for a church service. The place is very inspiring and beautiful. The cathedral was literally built by selling every piece to the congregation and supporters. A window costs $2500.00, a chair, $500.00, a single brick, $1.00 and so forth. People could contribute to the construction, based on their financial abilities and a one dollar donation was just as needed as a $10,000 donation. The Tower of Hope was built in the early 60's for one million dollars. Robert needed a single one million dollar donation, or he needed 1000 people with $1,000.00 each or five thousand people with $200.00 or 10,000 people with $100.00. The math was simple. I like his math.

I visited Honduras in the early 90's. I had it in mind to become a medical missionary. It never happened. Every agency I contacted (this was before the Internet was born) was happy to have me, if I could find financial sponsors. I thought the job of a missionary agency was to send their missionaries abroad and let them work, while the agency supports them. How wrong I was! They devoted full time efforts to fund raising to pay for the fat salaries and high overhead of the operation. If ten cents of every dollar donated actually went to the Mission Statement, that was a small miracle.

I came back from Honduras with a new respect for indoor plumbing and running water. In Honduras, if you have this, you are considered one of the wealthy. One home I had dinner at was about 12 feet by 20 feet. One room. There was no refrigerator, no running water, only a 55 gal drum of water I would never consider drinking. The restroom was out back, a hole in the ground with an elevated seat available. This family actually had electricity, but no TV, no radio, just a single bare bulb hanging from the center of the fiberglass roof. There were no glass windows, just window frames, covered by wooden shutters. We ate rice and beans and tortillas and some kind of cheese that would not spoil from being stored at room temp. The water that filled my glass was cloudy and had a dead ant floating in it. I hoped no one would notice I was not thirsty. Everyone had a job at a local clothing factory, but as you may know from my other blogs, I have a serious problem with exploitation of the laborer by USA based companies. These people were paid just enough to stay poor and just above the level of starving. They were never going to escape this vicious cycle of poverty.

Things don't have to be this way.

Did you know that it's possible to build a small home (think studio apartment) for just a few hundred dollars?

• Start by framing and pouring a concrete foundation
• Come back a few days later and construct the house out of foam core board. Cut out the window and door frames with an Exato knife. Run electric wires along the surface and connect them to outlets. Do the same for the water pipes.
  
• After framing the house out of the foam core board, spray every surface with Grancrete. About five hours later the Grancrete will be as hard as concrete, yet flexible, so it won't crack if high winds come to visit.
  
• A small group of people can build a very nice home in one day for a few hundred dollars.

A 600 square foot house, (and this would be considered majestic) would cost about $840.00 for the Grancrete. All that remains is the cost of the foam core board, electrical wires (if electricity is available) water pipes and a concrete foundation. Less than $2,000 for sure.

What this means is this, $2,000 divides into...

• 20 people at $100 each
• 40 people at $50.00 each
• 60 people at $33.33 each
• 90 people at $22.00 each
• 180 people at $11.11 each

$11.11 will buy a fast food meal for 2 people. If a 180 people give up a fast food meal for 2, a family in the worst imaginable poverty can have a new home to live in. If a few more gave up a fast food meal for two, a solar array could be placed on the roof of the house and that would power the pump that leads to the water well we could drill for a few hundred dollars more...

I have no financial interest in Grancrete. I wish I did! Here is there web site

http://www.grancrete.net/index.cfm