At least 200 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation in 30 countries. And according to UNICEF, 44 million are girls 14 years old and younger. One group of Kenyan teens is standing up to this archaic so called “right of passage” and offering would be victims a possibly life saving alternative — with an app. Deana Mitchell reports from Silicon Valley.
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Month: August 2017
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the era of nuclear nightmares — of the atomic arms race, of backyard bomb shelters, of schoolchildren diving under desks to practice their survival skills in the event of an attack — seemed to finally, thankfully, fade into history.
Until now.
For some baby boomers, North Korea’s nuclear advances and President Donald Trump’s bellicose response have prompted flashbacks to a time when they were young, and when they prayed each night that they might awaken the next morning. For their children, the North Korean crisis was a taste of what the Cold War was like.
“I’m not concerned to where I can’t sleep at night. But it certainly raises alarms for Guam or even Hawaii, where it might be a real threat,” said 24-year-old banker Christian Zwicky of San Bernardino, California.
People of his parents’ generation were taught to duck and cover when the bombs came.
“Maybe those types of drills should come back,” Zwicky said.
He isn’t old enough to remember the popular 1950s public service announcement in which a cartoon character named Bert the Turtle teaches kids how to dive under their desks for safety. But Zwicky did see it often enough in high school history classes that he can hum the catchy tune that plays at the beginning. That’s when Bert avoids disaster by ducking into his shell, then goes on to explain to schoolchildren what they should do.
“I do remember that,” says 65-year-old retiree Scott Paul of Los Angeles. “And also the drop drills that we had in elementary school, which was a pretty regular thing then.”
Even as a 10-year-old, Paul said, he wondered how much good ducking under a desk could do if a bomb powerful enough to destroy a city fell nearby. No good at all, his teacher acknowledged.
Then there were backyard bomb shelters, which briefly became the rage during the missile crisis of 1962, when it was learned the Soviets had slipped nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba and pointed them at the United States.
After a tense, two-week standoff between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that some believe brought the world the closest it’s ever come to nuclear war, the missiles were removed and the shelters faded from public interest.
Now they, too, seem to be having a revival.
“When Trump took office it doubled our sales, and then when he started making crazy statements we got a lot more orders,” says Walton McCarthy of Norad Shelter Systems LLC of Garland, Texas. “Between now and a year ago, we’ve quadrupled our sales.”
His competitor, California-based Atlas Survival Shelters, says it sold 30 shelters in three days last week. During its first year in business in 2011 it sold only 10.
Bill Miller, a 74-year-old retired film director living in Sherborn, Massachusetts, thinks these days are more nerve-wracking than the standoff in October 1962.
“I think it’s much, much crazier, scarier times,” he said. “I think the people who were in charge in the Kennedy administration had much more of a handle on it.”
Nathan Guerrero, a 22-year-old political science major from Fullerton, California, agrees, saying he learned in history class that the “shining example” of a way to resolve such a conflict was how Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, brokered the tense negotiations.
“But knowing the way the current administration has sort of been carrying itself, it doesn’t look like they are keen to solving things diplomatically,” he said.
“As a young person, honestly, it’s pretty unsettling,” he continued.
Had he given any thought to building a backyard bomb shelter?
“I’d be lying if I said such crazy things haven’t crossed my mind,” he said, laughing nervously. “But in reality it doesn’t strike me as I’d be ready to go shopping for bunkers yet.” Instead, he studies for law school and tries “not to think too much about it.”
Other Americans are more sanguine about the possibility of nuclear war. Rob Stapleton has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, since 1975, and he is aware that Alaska has been considered a possible target because it is within reach of North Korean missiles.
“There’s been some discussion about it around the beer barrel and I’m sure the United States is taking it seriously, but we’re not too concerned around here,” he said.
Alaska is so vast and spread out, said Stapleton, that he and his friends can’t imagine why North Korea would waste its time attacking The Last Frontier.
“I mean sure you’d be making a statement, but you’d not really be doing any damage,” he said.
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Hansaben Rasid knows what it is like to live without a water tap or a toilet of her own, constantly fearful of being evicted by city officials keen on tearing down illegal settlements like hers in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.
The fear and lack of amenities are but a memory today, after she became a community leader in the Jadibanagar slum and pushed residents to apply for a program that gave them facilities and a guarantee of no evictions for 10 years.
“We didn’t even have a water tap here — we had to fetch water from the colony near by, and so much time went in just doing that. People kept falling sick because there was just one toilet,” she said.
“Now that we have individual water taps and toilets, we can focus on work and the children’s education. Everyone’s health has improved, and we don’t need to be afraid of getting evicted any day,” she said, seated outside her home.
Jadibanagar, with 108 homes, is one of more than 50 slums in Ahmedabad that have been upgraded by Parivartan — meaning “change” — a program that involves city officials, slum dwellers, a developer and a nonprofit organization.
Every household pays 2,000 rupees ($31) and in return, each home gets a water tap, a toilet, a sewage line and a stormwater drain. The slum gets street lights, paved lanes and regular garbage collection.
Each home also pays 80 rupees as an annual maintenance fee, and the city commits to not evicting residents for 10 years.
Negotiation skills
A crucial part of the program is the involvement of a woman leader who brings residents on board, deals with city officials and oversees the upgrade.
Nonprofit Mahila Housing Trust has trained women residents to be community leaders in a dozen cities in the country, including more than 60 in Ahmedabad.
“Women are responsible for the basic needs of the family, and most also work at home while the husband works outside, so the lack of a water tap or a toilet affects them more,” said Bharati Bhonsale, program manager at Mahila Housing Trust.
“Yet they traditionally have had little influence over policy decisions and local governance. We train them in civic education, build their communication and negotiation skills, and teach them to be leaders of the community,” she said.
About 65 million people live in India’s slums, according to official data, which activists say is a low estimate.
That number is rising quickly as tens of thousands of migrants leave their villages to seek better prospects in urban areas. Many end up in overcrowded slums, lacking even basic facilities and with no claim on the land or their property.
Yet slum dwellers have long opposed efforts to relocate them to distant suburbs, which limits their access to jobs. Instead, they favor upgrading of their slums or redevelopment.
Earlier this month, officials in the eastern state of Odisha said they would give land rights to slum dwellers in small towns and property rights to those in city settlements in a “historic” step that will benefit tens of thousands.
In Gujarat state, as Jadibanagar is on private land, it is not eligible for the city’s redevelopment plan.
“These homes are all illegal, but that doesn’t mean the people cannot live decently,” said Bhonsale.
“With redevelopment, there is demolition and a move, and that can take longer to convince people of, with the men usually making the decision. But with an upgrade, the women make the decision very quickly by themselves,” she said.
Bottom up
Elsewhere, in Delhi’s Savda Ghevra slum resettlement colony where about 30,000 people live, nonprofit Marg taught women residents to demand their legal right to water, sanitation and transport.
A group of women then filed Right to Information petitions, to improve their access to drinking water, buses and sanitation.
“The women bear the brunt of not having these amenities, and are therefore most motivated to do something about the situation,” said Anju Talukdar, director of Marg.
“The leaders are the ones who show up for meetings, are engaged and keen to learn how to use the law to improve their lives,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Contrary to perceptions that slums are run by petty criminals who resist efforts to redevelop or upgrade, women leaders in Jadibanagar and Savda Ghevra are actively engaged in bettering everyone’s lives.
Leaders often emerge from a bottom-up process, with reputations for getting things done — in particular, resisting evictions and securing basic services, according to research by Adam Auerbach at the American University and Tariq Thachil at Vanderbilt University.
“They are themselves ordinary residents, living with their families and facing the same vulnerabilities and risks as their neighbors; they, too, want paved roads, clean drinking water, proper sanitation and schools for their children,” they said.
Women leaders, while still a minority, are “rarely token figures” serving male heads of households, and are “just as active, assertive and locally authoritative as their male counterparts,” they said in an email.
Rasid in Jadibanagar, whose two sons and their families live in homes alongside hers, is certain her leadership helped residents improve their homes and their lives.
“Everyone wants security and nicer homes, and they are willing to pay. Someone just has to get it done,” she said.
“I am illiterate, I cannot read, but I know now how to talk to officials and the developer and tell them what we want, and make sure they deliver,” she said.
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Forty years after blasting off, Earth’s most distant ambassadors — the twin Voyager spacecraft — are carrying sounds and music of our planet ever deeper into the cosmos.
Think of them as messages in bottles meant for anyone — or anything — out there.
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of NASA’s launch of Voyager 2, now almost 11 billion miles distant. It departed from Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1977, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager 1 followed a few weeks later and is ahead of Voyager 2. It’s humanity’s farthest spacecraft at 13 billion miles away and is the world’s only craft to reach interstellar space, the vast, mostly empty space between star systems. Voyager 2 is expected to cross that boundary during the next few years.
Each carries a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record (there were no CDs or MP3s in 1977) containing messages from Earth: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, chirping crickets, a baby’s cry, a kiss, wind and rain, a thunderous moon rocket launch, African pygmy songs, Solomon Island panpipes, a Peruvian wedding song and greetings in dozens of languages. There are also more than 100 electronic images on each record showing 20th-century life, traffic jams and all.
Tweets, photos
NASA is marking the anniversary of its back-to-back Voyager launches with tweets, reminiscences and still-captivating photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune taken by the Voyagers from 1979 through the 1980s.
Public television is also paying tribute with a documentary, The Farthest — Voyager in Space, airing Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. EDT.
The two-hour documentary describes the tense and dramatic behind-the-scenes effort that culminated in the wildly successful missions to our solar system’s outer planets and beyond. More than 20 team members are interviewed, many of them long retired. There’s original TV footage throughout, including a look back at the late astronomer Carl Sagan of the 1980 PBS series Cosmos. It also includes an interview with Sagan’s son, Nick, who at 6 years old provided the English message: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco — who joined Voyager’s imaging team in 1980 — puts the mission up there with man’s first moon landing.
‘Iconic’ achievement
“I consider Voyager to be the Apollo 11 of the planetary exploration program. It has that kind of iconic stature,” Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
It was Sagan who, in large part, got a record aboard each Voyager. NASA was reluctant and did not want the records eclipsing the scientific goals. Sagan finally prevailed, but he and his fellow record promoters had less than two months to rustle everything up.
The identical records were the audio version of engraved plaques designed by Sagan and others for Pioneers 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973.
The 55 greetings for the Voyager Golden Records were collected at Cornell University, where Sagan taught astronomy, and the United Nations in New York. The music production fell to science writer Timothy Ferris, a friend of Sagan living then in New York.
For the musical selections, Ferris and Sagan recruited friends along with a few professional musicians. They crammed in 90 minutes of music recorded at half-speed; otherwise, the discs would have held just 45 minutes’ worth of music.
How to choose from an infinite number of melodies and melodious sounds representing all of Earth?
Beethoven, Bach and Mozart were easy picks. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven represented jazz, Blind Willie Johnson gospel blues.
Chuck Berry
For the rock ‘n’ roll single, the group selected Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode.” Bob Dylan was a close runner-up, and the Beatles also rated high. Elvis Presley’s name came up (Presley died four days before Voyager 2’s launch). In the end, Ferris thought “Johnny B. Goode” best represented the origins and creativity of rock ‘n’ roll.
Ferris still believes it’s “a terrific record” and he has no “deep regrets” about the selections. Even the rejected tunes represented “beautiful materials.”
“It’s like handfuls of diamonds. If you’re concerned that you didn’t get the right handful or something, it’s probably a neurotic problem rather than anything to do with the diamonds,” Ferris told the AP this week.
But he noted: “If I were going to start into regrets, I suppose not having Italian opera would be on that list.”
The whole record project cost $30,000 or $35,000, to the best of Ferris’ recollection.
NASA estimated the records would last 1 billion to 3 billion years or more — potentially outliving human civilization.
For Ferris, it’s time more than distance that makes the whole idea of finders-keepers so incomprehensible.
A billion years from now, “Voyager could be captured by an advanced civilization of beings that don’t exist yet. … It’s literally imponderable what will happen to the Voyagers,” he said.
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U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will not attend an annual ceremony at Washington’s Kennedy Center honoring the lifetime achievements of select artists to avoid distraction, a White House statement said.
“The president and first lady have decided not to participate in this year’s activities to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction,” the White House said.
The Saturday announcement came after two of the five honorees, singer Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade, said they would boycott the traditional White House reception that is held in conjunction with the ceremony.
The 86-year-old de Lavallade issued a statement Thursday announcing her decision.
“In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House,” she said.
In addition to Richie and de Lavallade, singer Gloria Esfefan, rapper LL Cool J, and TV writer Normal Lear will be celebrated for their lifetime contributions to the arts at the December 3 ceremony.
The White House announcement comes just days after members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities resigned in protest of Trump’s controversial remarks this week following last Saturday’s violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The latest developments are indicative of Trump’s contentious relationship with the arts world. After his election, Trump had a difficult time finding entertainers to perform at his inaugural gala in January.
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Recruiting for Jihad is a Norwegian expose on the practices extremist Jihadists follow to recruit young men to fight for ISIS. During filming, Adel Khan Farooq, one of the two filmmakers, had unprecedented access to a radicalized network of Islamists in Europe. He met them through Norwegian-born Ubaydullah Hussain, a notorious recruiter, currently serving a nine-year sentence in a Norwegian prison.
“In the beginning, he was very charming,” Farooq told VOA, describing Hussain. “He was easy to talk with, and I never felt like he was a threat directly against me or anybody else for that matter, but when the attacks against Charlie Hebdo in France occurred and he was praising ISIS and then praising the attacks on Copenhagen, I certainly felt like that I did not know him after all.”
Still, Farooq kept filming Hussain.
“I wanted to find out why he became that way, why did he become so extreme, because there are some pieces of him that he used to be a referee in soccer and he was a bright child and did OK in school,” he says. Farooq accompanied Hussain to underground meetings and workshops among radicalized Islamists in a number of places in Europe, trying to learn what was behind the radicalization of people like him.
Farooq learned that most of the radicals are born in Europe but are culturally and psychologically displaced and vulnerable to the idea of close-knit radicalized communities.
“At least in Norway, 99 percent of Muslims, the majority of Muslims, are integrated in society. They work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, police officers, and have a Muslim background. But there are some, the minority, that have these extreme views. It’s not only in Norway, it’s in Sweden, Denmark, UK, France, Belgium, you always find a small minority of people who don’t fit in even as Muslims, they don’t fit in, they are marginalized, might struggle or have some struggles at home, hard time finding work.”
These types of people, Farooq says, are radicalized by leading Islamists such as Anjem Choudary, a British citizen, who supports the existence of an Islamic state.
Before his six-year incarceration for supporting Islamic State, Choudary was holding workshops throughout Europe advocating jihad. During one of those underground meetings, Farooq captured chilling footage of him preaching to a group of men, women and children in a basement room. His lecture, advocating that Islamic values are superior to British values and the British constitution, was also being recorded and distributed to thousands over the internet.
In 2015, Islamic extremists waged a series of attacks in Paris, first against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and months later, at a concert hall and football stadium, killing 130 and injuring 368. Afterward, Farooq says Hussain told him on camera that he did not know the attackers in Paris, but he knew people who knew them.
“These extremist groups,” Farooq said, “are really small, but they are strong because they work together. They either visit each other, have so called sessions, where they have seminars of sort.”
Though their ideas don’t represent the majority of Muslims in Europe, Farooq said, they impact the Muslim communities by fueling hatred against them.
“This radicalization is not a Muslim thing,” he says. “You find radicalization in America, too. Right wing extremists, they are radicalized; criminals, they are radicalized.”
One of Farooq’s last filming sessions of Hussain showed the Islamist recruiting a young Norwegian to fight for ISIS in Syria. The 18-year-old recruit was apprehended at the airport just before he boarded a plane with a fake passport. Hussain was arrested, and Norwegian police forces confiscated footage from Farooq and his co-director, Ulrik Rolfsen as evidence. The filmmakers’ fight for freedom of the press became a story in itself. Farooq and Rolfsen took their case all the way to Norway’s Supreme Court. They won.
“The key issue is that for any democracy, it is very, very vital that journalists and media are separated from authorities,” Rolfsen stressed. “My power is to tell stories and expose things that happen in society to educate the public, and I think it’s important that we don’t step on each other’s toes.”
When asked whether such a documentary can fuel fear and mistrust against Muslims, Rolfsen said that audiences’ reactions overall were positive, but he admitted it is a tough subject to tackle.
“We have a lot of people hating Islam, we have a lot of people pro Islam, the whole refugee situation is in the middle of that. Publishing the film felt like walking through a fire with a big balloon filled with gasoline and you know it’s going to blow up in your face if you don’t hold it high enough and you don’t walk fast enough.”
Farooq, raised as a Muslim, feels the film was close to his heart because he wanted to expose how these cells operate on the fringes of society.
“That was very important to me and Ulrik. Because most Muslims are not like these guys,” he said. “They are normal people.”
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‘Recruiting for Jihad’ is a Norwegian expose on the practices extremist Jihadists follow to recruit young men to fight for ISIS. During filming, Adel Khan Farook, one of the two filmmakers, had unprecedented access to a radicalized network of Islamists in Europe. Farrook and his partner Ulrick Rolfsen spoke to VOA’S Penelope Poulou on the growth of Islamist organizations in Europe.
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On Monday, Aug. 21, for the first time in 99 years, a solar eclipse will march across the United States from west coast to east coast, and excitement is building across the nation. Experts advise that people wear specific, protective eyewear to view the eclipse, but as VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, finding the special lenses is becoming a difficult task.
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How does a former stay-at-home mom become an employee of a tech company that could be worth more than $1 billion?
For Ellein Cheng, mom to a 5½- and a 2½-year-old, the answer involved a “returnship.”
So-called returnships are internships that target men and women who have been out of the workforce, either for childrearing or other caregiving. It gives them a chance to retrain in a new field.
In Cheng’s case, the former math teacher and tutor took a returnship at AppNexus, an online advertising company.
For companies, returnships are an opportunity to tap into more mature and professionally diverse talent pools. For participants who may be out of the workforce, it’s a chance to refresh their networks, learn new skills and try on new roles.
Beneficial arrangement
For both parties, it’s a low-risk, low-commitment arrangement. Companies can achieve their goals to make the employee ranks more diverse. Job seekers can potentially find full-time work.
Cheng’s returnship was set up by Path Forward, a New York-based nonprofit that works with tech companies to coordinate 16-week, paid assignments for those who have been away from the labor market for two or more years because of caregiving.
The organization partners with tech companies that range in size from 30-person startups to behemoths such as PayPal, which has more than 10,000 employees.
“What these companies of every size in the tech sector have in common is rapid growth, and also not enough talent to fulfill their needs,” said Tami Forman, executive director at Path Forward.
Women re-entering the workforce often struggle to explain the gap in their resume and find employment harder to come by, Forman said.
“They often get feedback from companies and recruiters and hiring managers that makes them believe that they’ll never be hired, that no one will ever overlook their gap,” she said. The organization says it gets results — 40 out of the 50 women who have gone through the program were offered ongoing employment at the companies in which they interned.
Teaching background
In her job search, Cheng applied for teaching positions but was also open to other fields. The product support work struck a chord with her in its appeal for candidates “passionate about learning and teaching.”
The program gave both managers and participants the chance to see if a long-term opportunity would be the right fit for them.
It also provided a dose of inspiration.
Other employees were “inspired to see people stepping out of their comfort zone, taking a big risk, working on something they haven’t done before,” Lorraine Buhannic, senior director of talent acquisition at AppNexus, said.
For Cheng, the inspiration came from a more personal place — her daughters.
They are growing up “in a world that is changing so quickly with technology, and I just want to be part of that,” she said. “I want to grow with them, I want to learn with them.”
In the end, the match worked. After the returnship, AppNexus hired Cheng as a product support specialist.
Now working in the fast-paced world of online advertising, Cheng says she doesn’t feel she has left her old self behind.
“I’m still obviously learning a lot, because I’m switching careers completely, but at the same time, still bringing the teaching element part of it every day to work,” she said.
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President Trump proposes to make big cuts in spending on global health research that could affect work to end malaria, AIDS and protect against other infectious diseases. Although the president’s proposal is essentially a wish list and Congress doesn’t have to go along with it, some see it as part of a disturbing trend. Carol Pearson reports.
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The lack of women and diversity in the tech industry remains a headline issue, but so-called “returnship” programs are giving companies the chance to tap into a new talent pool — former stay-at-home moms and dads. How do their skills translate in the tech world? VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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Scientists are drilling down through kilometers of Arctic ice to read the world’s climate history as a way to predict the planet’s future. VOA’s Steve Baragona visited Greenland to see what you can learn from a hole in the ice.
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An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S do not have a limb, according to Rice University in Houston. While existing prosthetics allow amputees to regain some of their abilities, there are very few devices that provide sensory feedback for the users. Researchers from Rice University, the University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology are working to allow amputees to better perceive what their prosthesis is doing. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Houston.
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A Los Angeles judge has denied the impassioned plea of Roman Polanski’s victim to end the criminal case against the fugitive film director.
Judge Scott Gordon ruled Friday that Polanski must appear in a Los Angeles court if he expects to have his 4-decade-old case resolved.
Gordon’s ruling follows a fervent request by Samantha Geimer to end a “40-year sentence” she says was imposed on both perpetrator and victim.
Polanski pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with Geimer when she was 13. He fled the country on the eve of sentencing in 1978.
Polanski’s attorneys have failed to persuade judges to sentence him in absentia for the 42 days he was incarcerated for psychological testing before he fled.
Geimer has long supported Polanski’s efforts but made her plea in court for the first time in June.
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Every private member of the U.S. presidential advisory committee on the arts has resigned to protest President Donald Trump’s response to white nationalist violence in Virginia.
Seventeen members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities said in a resignation letter Friday, “The false equivalencies you push cannot stand.”
The letter was in response to Trump’s comments Tuesday that “both sides” were to blame for the violence at last Saturday’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Three people died in connection with the rally, and 19 others were injured.
James Fields Jr. was charged with several felonies, including second-degree murder in the death of Heather Heyer. He allegedly used his car to run over a group of protesters.
The arts committee is an advisory body on cultural issues composed of 12 federal agency heads and 17 scholars and artists. The members who resigned included actor Kal Penn, artist Chuck Close, and author Jhumpa Lahiri.
“The administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill,” the letter reads.
“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” it said. “Supremacy, discrimination and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values.”
The advisory panel was created by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982. All of the current private members had been appointed by former President Barack Obama.
The resignations followed the disbanding of two presidential business advisory councils Wednesday after most of their members left in protest against Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville.
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Fitch Ratings has upgraded Greece’s credit rating from CCC to B-, a one-notch improvement that still leaves the bonds issued by the crisis-battered country well below investment grade.
The ratings agency said Friday that the outlook of the Greek economy was positive and that it expected talks with the country’s international creditors to be concluded “without creating instability.”
A Fitch statement added that other European countries using the euro currency were expected to grant Greece substantial debt relief next year. It said that would boost market confidence and help Greece finance itself directly by issuing bonds after its current bailout program ends in a year.
Fitch said Greece’s political situation had become more stable and that there was “limited” risk of a future government reversing bailout-linked austerity and reforms.
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More public backing for innovation, more idea exchanges to nurture global trade and more stability. That’s what two transnational entrepreneurs hope will result from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s travels this week to Latin America, where he has promoted prosperity, security and democracy for the Americas.
Liliana “Lili” Gil Valletta, a Colombia native and naturalized U.S. citizen, described Pence’s trip to her homeland, Argentina, Chile and Panama as “a good thing” that highlights bilateral trade.
Valletta co-founded and runs CIEN+, a marketing and analytics firm based in New York and Medellin, Colombia. “We’re doing our mini-version of trade, giving jobs on both sides,” she joked.
Nathan Lustig, an American entrepreneur, said he hopes Pence’s visit reinforces the benefits of trade and competition — for the entire hemisphere.
“Many Latin Americans limit themselves” because they lack confidence that they can compete in global markets, says the 31-year-old managing partner of Magma Partners, a wide-ranging seed-stage investment fund with offices in Los Angeles, California and Santiago, Chile. “What we see on the ground is that they actually can.”
Pence, speaking at a business dinner in Santiago on Wednesday, said that U.S.-Latin America trade “totaled a stunning $1.6 trillion” last year and that the United States wants to see it increase: “We want to bring even more of our business culture of entrepreneurship and innovation across Latin America.”
Trading ideas
Lustig and Valletta suggested Latin America also can export some valuable approaches to entrepreneurship.
Lustig is a beneficiary of Start-Up Chile, an international model for public investment in entrepreneurship.
In 2010, the Chilean government launched the so-called startup program for business startups to encourage entrepreneurs and define the country as a global hub of tech innovation. Selected applicants from around the world get at least $10,000 in funding, a one-year work visa, office space, plus months of training, mentoring and networking with potential investors. In exchange, they stage workshops or provide mentoring for local residents, creating a ripple effect.
As of last year, the accelerator program had helped at least 4,000 entrepreneurs from 79 countries boost 1,400 fledgling businesses, according to Start-Up Chile’s website.
Lustig, who started two businesses as a University of Wisconsin student, got $40,000 and a foothold in Latin America via Start-Up Chile’s pilot round of training.
He said that beyond the accelerator, Chile has introduced other ideas worth emulating to boost innovation. For instance, a 2013 law streamlined the startup process, enabling entrepreneurs to incorporate businesses online, in a single day, for free.
“When I first got here [to Santiago], it would take 60 to 70 days to open a company and take several thousand dollars” for incorporation fees, Lustig said.
Ruta N in Medellín
As Valletta sees it, “there’s a lot for us to learn in the U.S. about the agility and ability” of public-private partnerships to meet entrepreneurs’ needs for guidance and capital.
She pointed to Medellín’s Ruta N as another model.
The city’s government and civic leaders set up the business accelerator for technology, science and innovation in 2009. Set in a special innovation district, Ruta N has created “nearly 3,000 jobs with an average monthly income of $1,300,” executive director Franco Restrepo wrote in Americas Quarterly earlier this year. Colombia’s labor ministry said minimum-wage workers earn about $250 a month.
Both Start-up Chile and Ruta N face challenges.
Many of the Chilean program’s startup companies tank without additional government aid or they relocate “as soon as they’ve finished taking advantage of Chile’s generosity, low costs and relatively light tax burden,” the website TechCrunch found in an analysis.
Colombia, too, has had setbacks that could hamper its program. The country risks a cut to its BBB credit rating after “overly optimistic forecasts by the government,” Reuters news agency reported in July, citing factors such as low oil prices and weak economic growth. It said the finance minister planned to cut the next year’s budget by 5 trillion pesos ($1.65 billion).
Business essentials
A good entrepreneurial ecosystem requires talent, experienced mentors and willing investors, Valletta and Lustig agree.
Immigration is one source of talent, said Valletta, who came from Colombia at age 17 “with a suitcase and a student visa and without speaking a word of English.” She graduated from Southwestern Adventist University in Texas, earned a master of business administration degree from the University of Colorado and rose to become global marketing services director at consumer products behemoth Johnson & Johnson before starting CIEN+.
Asked about the White House’s delay of the so-called International Entrepreneur Rule, which would let qualified foreigners come to the U.S. to develop businesses, Valletta suggested the United States should make room for innovators.
“Unfortunately, everything is so politicized,” she added.
Mentoring roles
Now in her early 40s, Valletta serves as a mentor for the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurs Initiative, based at the university in Palo Alto, California.
She noted that despite the burgeoning U.S. Hispanic population, Latino entrepreneurs — especially women — have limited access to investors. So, she started Dreamers Ventures, an alliance of investors and mentors to bolster minority businesses.
“We’re playing a role as a matchmaker to fill these gaps quicker,” she said of the collaboration with lifestyle-entertainment retailer HSN.
Lustig does mentoring through Magma Partners and shares ideas through his blog and a related podcast.
He has a bit of advice for the U.S. government: Sign a tax-relief treaty with Chile to reduce pressure on small, cross-border businesses like his.
“The U.S. taxes you on your worldwide income and they don’t give you credit for taxes you’ve paid in Chile,” he said, complaining that a treaty to ease double taxation has stalled in the U.S. Senate. The Foreign Relations Committee approved it twice, in 2014 and 2015, but it never reached the full Senate for ratification. He said small and midsize businesses lack the means to find tax advantages that large ones can.
But Lustig pointed out that the United States long has had a major asset: “a stable legal system where you know what’s going to happen.”
Chile, too, is stable; the World Bank says its strong regulatory framework makes it a top performer in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Lustig compared Chile with Argentina, where President Mauricio Macri has been implementing market reforms since taking office in late 2015. Before that, the entrepreneur said, “the business laws could change daily. …
“You can’t build a business foundation on top of sand,” Lustig said. “… As long as you have a set of laws, whether they’re pro-business or not, entrepreneurs are going to find a way to build on it.”
…
As national parks traveler Mikah Meyer wrapped up the last leg of his journey across the western state of Utah, he appears to have saved the best for last — with visits to Bryce and Zion national parks — the last two of the five national parks that make up the ‘Mighty 5.’
Hoodoo! Who knew?
Mikah was one of millions of visitors who are drawn to Bryce Canyon National Park each year. The park is home to the world’s largest collection of hoodoos — giant pillars of rock that were sculpted by erosion millions of years ago.
“What makes this place unique is that it’s not just like one, or two, or three, like you’ll see in many places,” Mikah noted. “It’s thousands!”
“Native Americans believe the hoodoos were former humans that were turned into rock,” Mikah explained. “I don’t know the whole story,” he added, but that was one explanation provided about the ancient formations that rise from the earth seemingly out of nowhere.
Observing the odd-shaped pillars from one of the many overlooks was special, Mikah said, but even better was “hiking down into them and exploring the hoodoos up close.” He especially liked looking up at some of the hoodoos that were supporting massive rocks on top of their thin pillars …
“You wonder at what moment… that giant rock is going to come tumbling down and will I be underneath it when it does?”
Mikah had arrived at the park just in time for the sunset, which gave the surreal landscape a warm, golden glow.
“Man, am I glad I did!” he gushed. “I parked the car… ran out to the overlook and looked at the view and said to myself ‘this is a 10 — it’s a 10 park.’ I mean the view was just so incredible… at sunset or not… it is one of the most other worldly places I’ve seen in the United States.”
During his visit to Bryce Canyon, Mikah encountered an unexpected obstacle: a group of cows standing in the middle of the road, refusing to give way. At one point, he was worried one of the animals was going to charge his van, but instead, it took off, leading away the rest of the herd.
Utah’s first national park
The bovine roadblock was just a momentary distraction as Mikah made his way to Zion National Park, which welcomed almost 5 million visitors last year, making it the fifth-most visited national park in the United States.
Many consider Zion the granddaddy of all the Utah parks.
“I think what makes Zion so spectacular is this combination of red and orange rock, and lush green forests and plants,” Mikah said. “So many places are either lush greenery or stark canyons in orange and reds, but Zion National Park has both.”
Zion Canyon is the main focus of the park, Mikah explained, where “on every side you look, there is another peak that looks like a mountain in its own right, except they’re all together, all lined up on each side of the canyon.”
Angels Landing – a devilish climb
One of the most popular hikes is up Angels Landing, a 454 meter (1,488-foot) tall rock formation that’s considered by many to be the most challenging and dangerous trail in the park.
“What makes it so popular and so well-known is that for the last portion — maybe the last half mile — you are up on a very thin strip of rock; and it’s thin enough that the park service puts a bunch of chains that people can hold onto because since 2004, six people have fallen and died.”
It does look intimidating, Mikah admitted, “because you’re going along this thin strip of rock and either side you look, there’s very quick, dramatic drops all the way to the canyon floor and you see the shuttles driving by and the river passing through, so I think it’s popular because of this risk element that’s added into these dramatic views.”
But Mikah was undaunted, and described his four-hour roundtrip hike as a “very cool experience.”
Patriotic hike
On his second day of his visit, Mikah was invited by a group of experienced hikers on a 4-hour, back-country hike up a high plateau made up of sheer rock face, which had no trail.
“To get there, it was climbing on all fours, it was sliding down sheer rock faces, some of the guys cut their legs and they said, ‘oh, you know, it happens. Now that just proves that I was out here today.”
When he reached the peak, his fellow hikers asked him to sing, which he agreed to… belting out the National Anthem over the canyon.
“These gentlemen I was hiking with, most of them have never heard a Countertenor — which is a male Alto or Soprano — so I think they were shocked and surprised by that,” Mikah said, adding that he was surprised by the echo of his voice bouncing off the canyon walls, “so we all got something unexpected!”
The Mighty 5
As Mikah wrapped up his journey across Utah, he observed that the “Mighty 5” parks — Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks — are especially popular among foreign tourists.
“It’s an incredibly international audience at all these five sites,” he explained. “More so than any other site I’ve been to, tenfold.”
After spending time in those magical places himself, Mikah can understand why.
“The concept of how long nature and animal life has survived on its own without any human interference creating these majestic spaces that have changed by centimeters every year, and we’re witnessing this one speck of time in its marvelousness… it’s definitely a lot to wrap your mind around.”
Mikah invites you to follow him on his epic journey by visiting him on his website TCBMikah.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.