Just before you arrive at the village center of Ngomano a small side road to the left takes you a hundred yards to The Clay International School.  This school was developed by PEI Kenya as an innovative way to teach, and in order to create a sustainable community.

I like that PEI Kenya is trying to work themselves out of a job, and the villagers like it too.  While initially skeptical, and who could blame them with the numerous abandoned or partially finished buildings put up by western groups seeking to ‘help’, the community is a shareholder in this process.

Some of the amazing accomplishments that I’ve seen:
- A women-owned cooperative in the village make beautiful traditionally woven baskets for sale locally and internationally
- The village now has access to clean drinking water after a long struggle with drought
- The school grows a variety of crops that are native, provide a balanced diet to the students, and are more resilient for when ‘the rains fail’

But the question remains, what does it take to help a rural village in Kenya to become truly sustainable?  While the answer is still in the process of being developed in Ngomano, it is clearly on its way.

I send my heartfelt congratulations to the first graduating class of The Clay International School!

Why?
DEM Collective monitors the entire process of production, from the picking of the cotton through the dying of the fabric and the assembly of the clothing.  Owner Annika Axelsson is on the ground in Sri Lanka and knows what’s happening every step of the way and is therefore able to make sure that no one is mistreated during the process.  Owner Karin Stenmar manages operations in Sweden.

Waste
Excess from the manufacturing process is currently turned into reusable bags that customers are given to take their purchases with them.  What about when the t-shirt’s life is over? Well they can be returned to the store and recycled into the same bags or other products that are in development.

To me, the justice in the working environment is evident in this creative and fearless development process.  You see, the factory workers are the ones who come up with additional ways to re-use extra scraps.  While at the store Annika showed me two repurpose possibilities.

And why is this important?
Because most of clothing produced today takes advantage of the workers and pollutes the environment.  Before you say – pollution and injustices on the other side of the world don’t affect me, think again.

But back to DEM Collective…
Annika had her life change on a trip to Sri Lanka to visit a penpal at age 13.  While there, she visited a factory while bringing her penpal’s sister lunch at the factory because she couldn’t leave the factory to eat.  The factory’s poor conditions inspired Annika to revolt against the clothing industry in colorful and not so colorful ways over the years eventually landing her as the owner of her own factories and business in Sweden.

One in a thousand…
The hot, new, handwoven, numbered jeans that DEM produces were brought to existence after some frustration that Annika couldn’t own a pair of new jeans without doing harm to the environment or others.  The jeans they sell are currently the only environmentally friendly pair available.  The dies are non-toxic indigo and the pants themselves are handwoven.  Possible the coolest part about them is that the reason they are numbered is so that their sustainability can be tracked through a local university.

So is DEM Collective a fair trade company?
No, they consider themselves more than fair and don’t think the fair trade standards are enough.

And DEM? It stands for Don’t Eat Macoroni an anti-fast and junk food slogan from Jamacia.

Currently available in New York at Ekovaruhuset it appears that with effort you can also make purchases at DEM Collective’s online store (no Swedish language skills necessary.)

In case you are interested in more…
An article on Treehugger talks about where this company was in 2007.
An appearance by the Company in EcoChic Magazine which goes more into some of their great practices.

When I decided to change my status to ‘In a relationship with…’ I was thrilled to be in the beginning of a new relationship.  Happy and in love, I had no problem sharing this information with my Facebook friends via social media.

I had never felt upset changing something I had publicly posted, until it the breakup.  The relationship crashed with little warning and one of the first things I had to confront was the change my public status.  It was so early on that the last time anything had been said, I was happy.  UGH!  I don’t want to have to publicly dump myself!  But I certainly wanted to be the one in control of the process and get to it before he could.

My first line of attack, I decided to go from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘Single’ and immediately erased the update so that I could keep my hurt as private as possible.  Then I realized that I could just make the relationship section go away and not have to say single by setting the status to (blank) so I went in to make that change.

Instead of the desired quiet and solitude I started getting comments like  “Congrats! Who’s the new person in your life?” or “Ooh do tell!”  It was then that I realized that when I changed my status from Single to nothing at all, Facebook sent out something to my friends saying that I was no longer single, which they interpreted to mean that I was in a relationship.  In a panic that my private breakup was getting very public I erased the update as soon as I could.  Fortunately, this quickly made additional well wishers go away.

I was ready to get over it on my own, which is what I wanted in the first place, and then every time I logged in the feed from my ex’s page would pop up.  His friends kept saying how sorry they were to hear.  They assumed he had been dumped and were comforting him.  It made me want to scream “He dumped me!  He shouldn’t get condolences for being an idiot!!”  but I held back.  Post after post.  They wondered if I had worn crocs (a major fashion faux pas to him.)  Everything I had tried to avoid in erasing my status update was still in my face.  If we were no longer friends I could have turned away by unfriending him, but I didn’t.

In the end I coped by hiding his updates and erasing the update that said I was no longer single.

If you too want to have an extremely private, public break-up here’s what you have to do:

How to hide the jerk’s updates (don’t worry this can be undone in the case you make the mistake of getting back together)

1) To the right of an update from the the person who you are trying to block there is a box that appears that when you scroll over it.

2) Click on the word ‘Hide’ and then again on ‘Hide (person’s name)’

How to change your relationship status so that none but a Facebook stalker might know.

1) Go to the box on your profile on the left that says ‘Information and click on the pencil in the right corner.

2) Go down to and click on ‘Edit Information’

3) Under Relationship status change the line to be blank.  This will hid your relationsip status in the Information portion of your profile.

4) Finish editing/ save changes

5) Go to your profile and next to the update that touts your new realtionship status a ‘remove’ button will appear to the right when scrolled over  (just like the ‘Hide’ feature). Click on it.

Now go buy some fair trade chocolate, read a good book or go for a hike and move on.  He/she wasn’t worth your time in the first place!