I'm in the process of attempting to call all the Mom's out there who've had an influence on my life, I just want them to know they still mean so much to me and I thank them for putting up with a rambunctious crazy kid from Texas all these years, hopefully all their hard work has paid off. please don't let a day go by without letting your mum know how much you love her.love her the way she loves you and never say anything that one day you're truly going to regret! All my best wishes for you and your family.

In other news check out http://kalahari.blogspot.com
the Kalahari Peoples Fund (http://www.kalaharipeoples.org), a small non-profit founded by anthropologists who felt they should be giving something back to the communities they were researching. It funds primary education and land rights projects, mostly, but as it's small and donations are unpredictable, its personnel is largely volunteer and most of the larger projects they end up working on are separately funded grants. This year, they're project is focused on linguistic training for local people, with ultimate goals of native language materials generation and general capacity building. Along with their trainees, they have recorded and videotaped traditional stories and healing narratives from community elders, then transcribed, translated, and interlinearized them on the computer. Interlinearization is a way of breaking down texts to reveal their structure to linguists who may not speak the language – and of course it's an infinitely helpful learning tool for those of who speak the language badly. For my friend personally, this has meant purchasing and maintaining a hardware system (portable solar panels to high end audio equipment) as well as working intensively with two trainees who'd been filmed and written about their entire lives, but had never actually controlled the technology surrounding them. She also offered some basic computer literacy training to the Village Schools teachers and anyone who showed up during the couple of weeks she could devote to community training.

That, of course, is the official answer.