Jakobo.net

If you’re a just somewhat regular reader of this site, you’ll probably know by now that I’ve started a small NGO donating footballs to children in developing countries, thus aiming at spreading joy and peace with footballs.

I am currently in Sierra Leone to carry out the pilot project. Just today, I bought the footballs. I’m ecstatic to say the least. I cannot wait to see the little kids in Bonthe and Makeni run around with brand new footballs, exercising their Right to Play. Kids, mind you, who never get anything from anyone because they live in a part of the country that is completely disenfranchised and has long been ignored by the central government.

Anyways, enough talk. Go visit www.play31.org. I hope I will somehow manage to blog a little in there and post some pics, but I will have to have Eric, the Creative Director of Play31, to sort that out.

Thanks a million to everyone who has contributed one way or another in the process of making this happen!

Play football and make peace!

As many of you have noticed, I really like lists. They can be concerning just about anything: favorite music, books, dictators, football players, flight meals, surgeries, etc. I even think a few ‘friends’ now see themselves rather as ex-friends because of my persistency with these lists. However, here’s a little list of what I like and don’t like at this point in my life (I thought I’d take a little break from the heavy political discussions)

I Like:
-Lists
-That I’m going to DC for the weekend to see all my Humanity in Action friends (click on the link and apply for the awesome program if you’re an undergrad)
-Reading testimonies from Charles Taylor’s trial in the Hague. You can also do it if you click here
-That I now have a bike!! I feels so good to be back on the ‘iron horse’ as we say in Danish. I even have a helmet (mom) (see picture below)
-Reading Modesty Blaise
-Playing football. I have played with both SIPA friends and Jonas (and his friends) the last week. It’s so beautiful. So graceful. Literally nothing I’d rather do on a Wednesday night! (no, really)
-SIPA. Sometimes my school is really cool, and this has been a good few weeks. So many interesting people. And I get to talk to them. Sweet!
-That’s it for now

I don’t like:
-Econ
-Doing Econ homework (although Morten and Clea are so nice)
-Stats
-Doing stats homework (although Merry, Clea, and Morten are so nice)
-That my knee hurts when I play football (I thought I was one of the young guys)
-A few other things that are too indecent to be displayed here
-That’s all

Wow, that was self-centered. Next time it’s back to politics or something nerdy.

After a week in Denmark, one could perhaps imagine different reasons for the title of this post. However, the reason is very American and very political. There are certainly reasons to criticize B. Hussein Obama. I’m not sure I agree with him on issues like trade and health care (he doesn’t like either one as much as I do, it seems). But boy, can he speak. Check out his newest claim to being a true equilibrist with words. And, mind you, not just words, but words with meaning!!

Click here to see his latest speech on race in America.

Have a jolly day

Went to the movies tonight. And saw an amazingly powerful movie: the Counterfeiters. (Oh, before that I took an econ midterm — Booooooring). I wont reveal much about the film, but just say that it was one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen about the holocaust. Particularly, I thought, because it focuses a lot on individual choices. How and why does a person make the choices he/she does when it comes to matters of life and death and ideals? Definitely recommended!

The film made my friends and I engage in a heated debate over dinner (I love sushi more than Popey loves Olivia). When can something be justified because the person behind that action truly believes in the goodness of it?

That again (via mysterious detours) lead us into a discussion on Jewishness. I ended up stating (and I’m actually quite happy with that statement) that I believe in two things: biology and constructivism. Everything will, according to my revolutionary theory, be one or the other. Jewishness (as ‘Christianess’ and ‘Muslimsness’ and ‘atheistness’ and all other believes, as well as nationalities, taste in movies, ‘evil’ and ‘goodness’ and most other things) fall into the latter category (i.e they are purely social constructs). That goes against what many Jewish people and many Muslim people believe. That is, they believe you are a Jew or Muslim by birth and that you cannot revoke that . I completely disagree and am still waiting for someone to ‘prove’ (or just logically explain) to me that there’s is anything inherently Jewish about Jews or inherently Muslim about, well, Muslims. I simply don’t understand (maybe that’s the problem?) what exactly it is that is passed down through either the mother or the father’s blood line? Is it the genes? If not, why can it not be revoked? I’m really trying to understand, but I just cannot accept that something is the way it is (and can never be changed) just because a group of people think that is so. Either it must be a biological fact (i.e Jews and Muslims have different genes than other people) or it must be something that is just a point of view (i.e it can be changed and will be true or not according to whom you ask).

I’m in no way diminishing the faiths or the believes or traditions connected to either religion. (I hope religious readers will not find my writing offensive — it’s certainly not meant to be!) My point is solely that religion is something you choose. Most things are! I would be truly offended if someone came by and told me he found out I was Muslim because my grandfather was, or that I was Jewish because my mother’s mother was (or that I was marxist because my father was). Hmm, I’m ranting on. But it really was an interesting discussion (and one that Richard Dawkins also discusses in his excellent book ‘the God delusion‘. The same discussion can be applied to “ethnicity” all over the world (fx Tutsi, Hutu, Mende, etc. How is being Jewish by blood different from being tutsi by blood? In fact, that will be the continuation of our discussion).

Ahh, how I love a good discussion! Compare it to econ and stats and my life suddenly seems rather sad…

Thought I would post on the fun, fun party at Clea’s the other day. It involved drinking whiskey ’til 6 in the morning and discussing the upcoming election in Spain and other exciting stuff. But I’ll stop here.

If you’re reading this, please do cross your fingers for me on Monday when stats exam goes down.

Tamba

My mind finally revolted against me. For months, I had been feeding it the same five Tom Waits albums and the occasional Nobody Beats the Beats or Jan Johansson…

However, tonight I went to see the legendary Roots Crew. And they were SO good! (or dope, I guess the right nomenclature would be). And my mind was again appeased. They just are legendary. When ?uestlove said that for all the 16-17 years the Roots have been touring, the Apollo Theater is their favorite place to perform, I actually believed him. They played the hits (the Seed was received with loud cheering and they gave a 10min. version of You Got Me) and they even played Bob Dylan’s Masters of War as a protest against the current administration (?uestlove votes Obama, he shared with us:)

It was just cool! My soul is alive again! And tomorrow I may even go see the Magnetic Fields in concert… What a weekend!

I give you the Roots: (a few years dated)

Furthermore, I’ve discovered the National and rediscovered Analogik

I feel somewhat back on track…

Watch out: my next post may turn out to be interesting for everyone interested in children (not in that way), making other people happy, football, saving the world and other fun stuff… Tune in in a couple of weeks.

I don’t think so… I love the Obama song. Yes, I said it. I love it! It almost makes me cry (if I hadn’t been such a tough man)

Check out the whole speech here

It’s kinduva hassle to post pics on this site, so I’ve done it on facebook. I realize that exclude a segment of readers from enjoying the pictures - I’m sorry about that. There are some, in my own humble opinion, quite good ones from Sierra Leone, so check them out on Facebook.

That’s all. I’m ajusting to the stress level of New York. Slowly.

I’m back, back again…
It feels good! Great to see my friends here, although a little sad to leave the ones in Denmark and then the newer ones in Sierra Leone. I guess every time I (and others) go somewhere, they leave somewhere else… Could be cool if you could go somewhere and also stay where you were. Hmm…

Am listening to Mr. Bush state of the union right now. Can’t believe the end of this mofo is actually starting to appear somewhat near. Yeeha!

Ok, rise and shine. I’m still in bed taking care of the daily mailing session (1 of 25

The posts will probably be less frequent and les exciting the next months as my activity will be somewhat restrained to the area around 119th. Hope you will keep tuning in, though- perhaps something interesting could come up.

I spent a long weekend (doesn’t that sound extravagant?) in the most eastern region of Sierra Leone. The program moved to Kailahun, where the war started in 1991. In most of Freetown, any signs of the war has been removed, but in Kailahun, and the surrounding villages, the war is still very much present. Burned down houses are scattered throughout the terrain and every village has horror stories of its own to tell. All this is in stark contrast to the humor of the locals. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with a “Pumui” (”white man”… Wouldn’t go down so well in the states, would it?) and big grins. Yesterday I was even invited for some food (yes, cassava) with a family living next to our guest house. It’s really just the story repeating itself: everywhere I have visited in this country, and that’s not so few, actually, I’ve been greeted with happy faces and warm embraces (sometimes literally, sometimes not). It’s just amazing!

The road to Kailahun was probably one of the worst I’ve ever been on. It makes the dirt road to Hoejgaard look like a golf green. Our car broke down on the way there, which gave us a couple of hours to venture around the area and have some freshly tapped palm wine with the locals.

On the prior trip (Kenema) we spent a night at a catholic convent (or something like that). Incredibly tranquil and with an atmosphere that could almost (I said almost!) make you believe in some sort of supernatural being. I wandered around the huge compound with my iPod listening to the Band of Horses, thinking about sad things in life (at a more personal level than war, amputations, rapes, etc). It really does clean your ’soul’ to delve into it head on at times…

Ok, no more sentimentalities! Leaving Sierra Leone tomorrow (wow), I can now say that I like:
-Cassava (believe it or not)
-Sierra Leonean people
-To be challenged in my believes about the universality of human rights and the application of them (that sounds a little geeky, I realize)
-Mac
-The sound of the generator switching on to let you know that power has arrived and you can charge your essential electronic stuff
-To play football anywhere in the world (Beckham drove by as we were playing on the beach the other morning)
-People who engage in other people lives without having to. Isn’t that what proves that humans are essentially good, although we’re capable of horrible, horrible things?)
-To experience how justice some places in the world doesn’t mean to punish someone for what they’ve done, but to ‘heal’ those who have been injured and start a process making sure the crime wont happen again. (Actually, this should be on the top of the list! It really is just so, so amazing to experience this. It challenges any definition we have of justic in our part of the world!)

All for now. Next time you’ll here from me, it’ll be from the city that never sleeps but definitely does freeeeeeze!

Tamba (my African name

Ok, I have had request for more stuff on how it is to be in Sierra Leone, food, music, etc.

Here goes:

Almost all food has one or more of the following components: rise, chili (always). casava leaves (dont even know how to spell that) potato leaves, groundnuts (peanuts), small fish, meat.
Albert, my room mate, and his friend told me the other day that cat is considered a delicacy. I’m still not sure if they tried to pull my leg, but they described the detail of how you catch, boil, skin and prepare a cat. Yet eating dog is seen as absolutely savage.

I havent heard too much music. No, actually that’s a lie. We’ve listened to a lot on the long trips on the bumby roads around the country, but it has almost been the same rnb stuff the whole time. They like that, and produce it quite well, here.

I’ve become a regular in Sierra Leonean tv and radio. the organization (remember to check the link here) is quite the media darling, and the press is here all the time– they even went to the regions with us.

Here in Freetown, there is not too much work for me right now, so I’m writing on articles for Danish magazines/papers (hoping that they will give me some dinero)

It really is cheap here, I must say. I eat lunch for between 1-2000 Leones (the convergence rate to $ is 1:3000). Sweet juice oranges are typically 100 and mangos are around 500-1000. I like! Of course, down by the beach where the pumui (am not sure how it is spelled) (the white men) hang out, prices sky-rock…

Am still trying to figure the dating scene and the rules out. Just as a anthropological study, naturally! I am still trying to learn the game in NYC and here it makes even less sense to me. My research so far tells me that feminists such as Clea, Katrine and myself would be rather enraged by the basic structures of how it works. Had a longer discussion with Albert, a friend and his girlfriend the other day, but for the sake of peace in the country, I will leave it at that.

Taught one of the boys, Abdulai, from my house to use (and create) emailing today. Internet is not very wide spread and I feel blessed o have easy access at the office. I truly am an addict! Is there anything sweeter than observing someone being robbed of their electronic mail-virginity and thereby their entire life?

Ok, think that must be it. I have a very challenging conversation with a victim of the war later today. Depending on the outcome and the boy’s wishes, I will use the talk in an article, and if that’s the case I will share some of it in here too. Phew, some of the stories from the war are just unbelievable.

The night will be spend strolling on the beach… That;s how life’s supposed to be. Tell me why do people choose to settle in places like Copenhagen and NYC??

Take it EZ