Occupying

So I feel like it is time for this blog to actually get used again.  But the Africa stuff has been going so slowly that I think it is time to just jump in and do some writing about life, its peculiarities, and revolution.  During the last five months I have been Occupying.  Frankly, this post is not where I really want to get into the whole of the last five months.  Rather I'm thinking I'll pick up as life is today, and fill in the holes as it all goes.

I'll pick up where I sit right now.  I am in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.  I just had an incredibly interesting evening chatting with a slightly staggered African American gentleman I met at the liquor store.  He was talking to the shop keeper about love, how it existed and why he had it for all people.  This is of course a conversation I had no trouble running headlong into!!  Got my cheap bottle of rum and took the conversation outside - stop and frisk, race relations, whatever.  I love the neighborhood.  I'm not really living there per say.  My girlfriend does.  I'm still wholly about occupation it seems, and I occupy three different places at any given day of the week.  Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, Glenwood Queens, or the West Village in Manhattan.  The park is gone, no more sleeping there for me.  Now its about surviving in whatever way we can on our own.

I've just started a job.  This is where I've decided I really needed to start writing here again.  I am working for a relatively obscure political party that focuses on progressive issues and campaigns topush legislation through on these issues (raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, over turning corporate personhood, anti-fracking, etc).  The shock and awe of life back in the "real world" has been amazing.  But not how you'd think it would be.  One of the beauties of Occupy has been its horizontal structure.  Everyone has an equal voice.  Conversation is dignified and egalitarian (for the most part).  People wait their turn, use non verbal communication to engage in the conversation while still not being intrusive.  On the whole, everyone is equal.

Now though, I work in the "real world", where corporate structures and hierarchical forms of doing things reign.  It is truly eye opening.  To think that this was the way that things seemed normal to me 6 months ago.   To have a boss, a chain of command, a pecking order, egos fixated on seniority, and a staff of "arms lengths" type.  I feel like I'm in a reverse culture shock like when I came back to the US for the first time after living in Prague for two years.  It's like everything that seemed so innately normal has suddenly been flipped upside down.  That world seems so ridiculous now.  To think that we have these structures in society that completely and purposely segregate us.  Completely make some voices so much more important than others.  We sit there and act as if this is about merit, about hard work; but there are so many factors - history, education, socio-economics, etc - that dictate these relationships in a way that occupy has completely flipped on its head.  I mean, why is it that everyone does not have an equal voice in a corporate structure?  Why is it that I - even as a white male - feel even more emboldened to speak i this setting?  I don't so much at Occupy, where I feel less emboldened to speak as I try to "step back" at times, in an effort for every gender, ethnicity, race, creed, socio-economic and education level to have more of a voice.  In the context of this conversation though, and having more voices involved and heard, I feel like more people should be speaking, more voices heard.   

At Occupy, everyone in theory (and even in attempt I feel), is on the same footing: the millionaire and the homeless, the black and the white, the male and the female, the employer and the employee.  Now granted, it does not always work smoothly.  People still feel innately ostracized at times, but at least at Occupy it is more about history and the effects of growing up in our current society, rather than the current day's fixed institutionalized structures and social patterns that reinforce those same old power dynamics so daily.

This is the work world we live in, fully hierarchical, wholly marginalizing, completely disheartening.  I miss Occupy already.  Not that I am gone, but at even the first taste of that "real world", I am still yearning for that other life.  A new occupation.  What an amazing culture shock.  I wish everyone could feel the empowerment of actually having a voice, only to have it suppressed again.

Setting up a Non-Profit in Sierra Leone

So I've done a decent amount of research on setting up a non-profit here in the US and there is of course a great deal of information on it.  It isn't going to be difficult at all.  Incorporate, write the articles of incorporation and bylaws, set a board, apply for tax exempt status, etc.  No big deal.


Surprise surprise!!  Seems to be a bit more challenging in Sierra Leone!!  Actually, I must admit that it was almost just as easy to get information on Sierra Leone as on the US, until the one file I needed couldn't open.  The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ICNL) has a nice little library on Sierra Leone, and I later found a bit more dated one at doingbusiness.org.  But of course the one perfect document I need the Revised Non-Governmental Organizations Policy Regulations from 2009 has some problem with the file and it won't open.  So it looks like the initial cursory searches are going to need to be expanded upon.  Of course, not living in Sierra Leone makes it all a bit more difficult as well.  One week on the ground and these things would be simple.  But it is a good idea to know what the parameters of doing business there are like, which I have read some legalese about in terms of registering a business (fun reading!).

Ease of...	Doing Business 2010 rank	Doing Business 2009 rank	Change in rank
Doing Business	148	156	8
Starting a Business	58	58	0
Dealing with Construction Permits	171	168	-3
Employing Workers	166	167	1
Registering Property	175	165	-10
Getting Credit	127	147	20
Protecting Investors	27	53	26
Paying Taxes	161	162	1
Trading Across Borders	137	135	-2
Enforcing Contracts	144	144	0
Closing a Business	147	147	0

I've gotten the constitution of the country, and lots of stuff on doing business there.  Amazing that if you want to start up a limited Liability Company to start a profit making business you can, but non-profits seem to get no literature.  Money! Money! Money!  Go figure, where are all the self-less people of the world!?!?  It seems that the country is one of the hardest countries in the world to do business in.  This is of course not much of a surprise.  If it was simple to do business there, everyone would and there would be little need for more!!  And what fun would that be?!  (or perhaps I should say, but then would there be as much need for assistance?)


However, these ease of business indicators are set up by people focused on making money, not on providing for the local populace.  Measures of things like 'ease of employing workers' are usually measuring how quickly and easily you can hire and fire workers, and whether employees have much (if any) rights to unemployment compensation or to unionize. These are of course things that typical for-profit employers don't want, but an employer looking out for the local populations welfare as the top priority do not only not hamstring them, but actually embrace.  So these figures are not all bad.  They just raise the challenges.


I put in an email regarding that document, and hope that the ICNL will be able to fix the problem they have with their document.  The form say 7 days for a response, but I'm not gonna hold my breath and keep looking.  I obviously can't afford to pay for anything.  Fact of the matter is that there will not be much I can do about this type of intelligence until I get to the point where I am speaking to people in country or on the ground there.  A great deal of things keep coming back to finishing my NGO list for prospective cooperation and contacts.  Will be working a bit this evening on the Non-Profit set up in the US, we'll see how that goes...