I'm Traveling to Nepal

After being involved with the Nepalese Canadian Association of Ottawa (NCAO) and Canada Foundation for Nepal (CFFN) throughout the past decade, and getting to know many of the Nepalese families who have moved to Ottawa, I finally have the opportunity to see Nepal for itself. While I’m there, I will get to see some of the capital city, Kathmandu, as well as the countryside where the best way to get from one village to another is to trek.

It all started about a month ago when a friend of mine wanted me to go to Japan to visit a mutual friend. This trip was feasable - and how often will I get an invite to Japan? Just as I was about to make that happen, it was brought to my attention that the Non-Resident Nepali Assocation is holding their every-other-year conference around the same time as the Japan trip. At this confence, I would be able to present an update to a project that I’m leading on behalf of CFFN. Also, I could see CFFN’s Community ChildCare Centre first hand, and also work on the Open University venture. Since I’d already be halfway around the world… Why not go the extra mile (well couple thousand miles)?

The decision to do both Japan and Nepal complicated the purchase of flights. It was prohibitively expensive to do an Ottawa-Nagasaki-Kathmandu-Ottawa round, and it would take far too long and require too much coordination to do round trips between Ottawa-Nagasaki and Nagasaki-Kathmandu. All the discount flight and trip websites were really starting to stress me out. That’s where Baba came in!

Baba, from Himalayan Travels & Tours in Toronto is the person to go to when you want to fly to Nepal. Everyone that I spoke to said she has helped them and recommends her. Baba was able to put together an itinerary for me at a cost much lower than I could myself. All people and things considered, she was the most important - I would say that Baba made this trip possible for me. For that, I am absolutely grateful to her. Plus, I really enjoyed telling people that I had to call my travel agent!

Now that I’m less than 2 days away from flying to Japan, packing is my greatest obstacle. I have to pack light, but enough for my trip. If I leave or forget anything, it’ll be 6 weeks before I can get it. Knowing me, I should probably glue my passport to my forehead!

The Super Continents (Pangaea)

By Reshma Dahal

The aim of this article is to inform readers about the process in which the continents of the globe drifted to their current positions explaining the geological discovery and its impact to human kind.

The Earth is a truly extraordinary planet. There are rivers, the lakes that flourish onto the beaches. There are colossal mountains which stand strong and proud marking their territory. The hills, the forests, the seas; they are all remarkable puzzle pieces that unite to create the spherical globe, which we call Planet Earth.

Our planet is astonishing and beautiful. But it is also very mysterious. Unlike in the past, now in the twenty first century our understanding of our planet has grown significantly due to the numerous discoveries scientist have unravelled. It is clear that, in the early days, the reasoning of natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were not properly understood. Even the most famous geologists in those times could not begin to comprehend the cause of these occurrences. Why would the ground shake so abruptly? What was the reason for gallons of water to splatter and sweep away the precious lives and essential resources? These all questions which deserve evidence based answers, but none were given until the year of 1915.

Professor Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, was always fascinated in geophysics. He accumulated evidence to answer the question as to why the land masses on earth stand where they are today. For example: why Australia is situated near the South Pole and not the North Pole. There are four principle evidences^1,2 which Professor Wegener accumulated that gave birth to the “Pangaea” or “Super Continental” theory. They are:

1) There is a close fit between the coastlines of Africa and South America (see Figure 1).

2. There are identical plants and animal fossils found on opposite sides of the Atlantic, on South America and Africa.

3. There are the same types of mountains on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the Appalachian mountains of Eastern North America and the Scottish Highlands, and the distinctive rock strata of the Karroo system of South Africa are identical to those of the Santa Katarina system in Brazil.

4. 250 million years ago there was ice that covered south Africa, India, Australia and South America. The only way these warm climate countries, could have had ice is if they were closer to the

South Pole.

The basis of Pangaea theory is that about 300 million years ago, the continents had formed a single mass, called Pangaea (See Figure 2). Though slowly, Pangaea begun to split (See Figure 3-5), and now rests in the position of our current continents (See Figure 6).

He also has reason to believe that even until now, the shape of the Earth surface is still changing, and it will be forever, as long as the mantle underneath the Earth's crust gets heated and convection currents in the magma keeps dragging the plates. When the Pangaea theory was first proposed, it was treated with much scepticism, but since then, there have been many forms of evidence to support Wegener’s Theory^1,2.

Our Earth is a fascinating Planet, and as the years go by we discover more and more information about the construction of our Globe. Alfred Wegener, made a significant contribution in 1915, and it is due to his theory and reasoning that scientists have now expanded on this theory and have proven that the Earth’s present continents were once together as Pangaea.

What impact has this innovation made to Global Society? Firstly, it has expanded our understanding on the gradual change of the continental positions, which lead to the drastic change of weather from region to region thereby forcing inhabitants to adapt according to their respective environment. Secondly, this innovation influenced urbanization, the development of scientific technology, global communication, and transportation. However, this innovation has also increased the risk factor of possible natural calamities due to the continuous change in the shape of the earth’s surface.

Sources:

1. Miller, R. 1983. Continents in Collision. Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia.

2. Hughes, P. 1994. The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution, Vol. 47, Weather-wise.

CFFN-Related Wallpapers for you!

As a nice extra to go with those pins in my previous entry, I have made available a few of wallpapers that you can use on your desktops! The first one is from last year, while the other three are brand new. It's interesting for me to see just how many of the assets that I've created that I can use and alter again and again. For example, the third wallpaper is heavily based on the CFFN scroll I made a couple of years ago!

Having new assets is also important. The CFFN letter design (second wallpaper) is completely new... but it was first used to create the buttons. The last one is also brand new, but is based on the AGM flyer from this year.

All these little things help to create a visual vocabulary for us as an organization.

Enjoy!

CFFN Buttons

We have made some buttons in anticipation of our Annual General Meeting here in Ottawa on May 8 and Open University Workshop in Houston, TX on May 28.

The design process was a lot of fun, and the company that made them for us, Six Cent Pres was a delight. Two of the designs were very simple and used samples from our ever growing asset library. The third one allowed me to be a bit more creative with the design:







Be sure to show your support for CFFN and pick up a button! There aren't too many - the blue and letter designs are much rarer as there are less than half as many as the standard one.

UHSA Presentation

USHA: Ushering Shared Aspirations

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This is a presentation given by CFFN's Executive Director at the 4th NRN Global Conference, hosted by the Non-Resident Nepali Association on October 14, 2009. It is in Nepali, though. We'll be sure to upload an English verison soon!

Newer CFFN Radio Site

As one of the people responsible for the Radio project, I have thought about how to grow it in terms of content, quality, internal and external interest, and audience over the next year. One of the easiest steps in this regard was to make the main page, http://radio.cffn.ca, more functional. When we had first embarked on this Radio project, it was only one show, Yuba Sanchar. The Web site at the time was adequate for that, as there was little explanation or extra pages needed. The blog-style built specifically for podcasts worked.



As we expanded the scope of the project to include several show types and wanted to add written content in Nepali, the template became more cumbersome than useful. Even uploading content had become a chore.

What I've done is moved everything over to the more powerful Blogger tool. The first benefit is that everything is customizable, so any extra content pages we need blend right in. Also, integrating Nepali is easy because it supports unicode. Uploading content should also be a bit easier, especially since people can do it with their own Google accounts. Perhaps the most important benefit of the new system is that visitors can get to the content they need in fewer clicks - this is especially true of older archived content.

CFFN is due for a full redesign, so I don't know how long we'll use this particular set-up... but for now, it's an improvement!



It looks like a subtle change, but there's a lot more here than meets the eye. Please check it out and leave any feedback you have! While you are there, listen to the programs! The most recent show is an interview with Michael and Tineke Casey, two bright and delightful people making a great contribution to Nepal.

And in the midst of all this change, I managed to design a logo for Epilogues/Yatra Nepal show. It was heavily influenced by a badge I saw for a wilderness park. The yak, though, was my idea.

Making Presentations Available Online

There are a number of presentations that CFFN members have given over the years and I would very much like to make them available for viewing online. So far, I have come up with a couple of solutions, both of which come with their strengths as well as their shortcomings.

The first solution comes from AuthorStream. They allow users to upload presentations with animation, timings, and narration. It then converts it into a viewable movie format. For a fee, you can turn it into a watermark-free video, upload to YouTube, etc. This seems to be a great way to share a presentation (Aside from the audio quality, that was recorded at a poor quality level on my part and has nothing to do with the site) - easy to share and embed, nice full-screen option, comments, etc.

The difficulty here is that the narration is done in one take (audio can be recorded per slide, but that becomes hard to keep track of) in PowerPoint and is difficult to edit or redo. Also high quality audio might start to balloon the file size.

CFFN Logo Presentation

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(Ed: Note, this presentation was deleted, but the second test presentation still exists below.)

The second option is to make a movie using the presentation and uploading it to YouTube. This takes a lot longer to do and you lose all the transitions and animations in a PowerPoint presentation in exchange for static slides. The advantage is that the narration is easy to edit and the slides are the right length (i tried to use a free PPT to Video converter where the slides had to be the same length). Because of the conversion process, you don't get a nice quality when the video is made full-screen. Also, there's that pesky 10-minute limit that YouTube imposes on its videos.



In writing up this list of pros and cons, I thought about whether blending the two options would work. We would use audio software to record the narration, save each slide narrative as an MP3 file to pop into the slide show, and then upload that show to AuthorStream. I think this may be the balance between work and quality payoff.

Of course, you can't embed .mp3 files in PowerPoint presentations because... I'm not sure why not. Fortunately, there are ways of tricking it into thinking an mp3 is a wav file. If only it was that easy tricking kids into thinking vegetables are chocolate!

CFFN Logo Presentation 2

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