Sara,

Great to hear from you. We look forward to talking to you at 9:00 tomorrow morning. We had a wonderful ham, orange roll, frog-eyed salad "Christmas" dinner last night with Roice, Sarah, Sarah's brother John, Melanie, Colby, Audrey, Rob, Rachel, and Matt. Tonight we will have another "Christmas Dinner" with Audrey, Rachel, Matt, and the missionaries in our ward. Then we will piece the rest of the week. My swallows count has gone through the roof since I got the word about Todd & Michelle. Oh well!

I was disappointed in the unnecessary salty language in the general e-mail, and I guess it hurts because this has been an issue I have always struggled with. Oh well! I included your message below to hopefully show you what we receive. The special characters (bold, quotes, apostrophes, underlines, seem to take out words or maybe lines of text), and so I encourage you to send plain text messages with nothing but alphabet and numbers in the future.

You sound good. I'm sorry to hear you can not write CD's. Hopefully you won't loose the photos and other things you have collected with a hard disk crash. Can you do a zip or other type of backup? Can you buy zip drives or other devices like that there? I would love to fund this type of expenditure, and maybe it would make up for us not sending you a Christmas gift, other than a phone call. We look forward to calling you at 9:00 on Christmas morning at the number you provided.

We look forward to your Christmas gifts. We do have a Christmas gift for you, which we are going to keep here until you return. It is a 72 hour emergency kit, with food, water, first aid kit, and all kinds of stuff. For the three grandsons I printed out my two Grandkidlet stories to date, which you can review on-line, or maybe by next Christmas or when I visit you there will be enough pages to justify writing a CD and sending/bringing it to you. I am also starting to move our genealogy on-line, and over then next couple of years hope to add as many life histories and family anecdotes as I can find, in addition to pedigree charts, family group sheets, and documentation of data on these sheets. You can access this work at http://www.walden3d.com/Nelson/genealogy.

You sound like you are arriving at similar conclusions to mine regarding entitlements and the dole. I believe the NGO's and their equivalent were, for the most part, set up by good hearted people. However, they are not based on eternal principles. Nature teaches us that parasites can never exceed certain limitations of their hosts. NGO's and entitlement programs encourage participants to be parasites.

I have spent immense amounts of energy attempting to build a framework for new cities, believing that this can make the world a better place for you, your siblings, and other descendants and loved ones. In a sense these frameworks are like NGO's, and some friends, like Todd Staheli and Corwin Slack, have pointed out they are an attempt to "force" sustainable stewardship. This type of forcing has certainly never been my intention, just as it was never my intention in your family of origin to "force" you all to participate in the Church. A quote by Ezra Taft Benson in Stephen R. Covey's book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" has haunted me and my framework ideas ever since I first read it. The quote is:

I don't have enough information to understand much about your circumstances, what you do each day, who you interact with, and what your goals are. However, as I read your three e-mails yesterday and again today, I came up with a picture in my mind of what I would do in a similar circumstance.

I would start "The Entrepreneur's Newsletter." I would spend a month identifying what the hot buttons are, things that will get people to talk about the newsletter. It is important to create controversy, by doing things like pointing out how NGO's turn the population into parasites, because until there is emotion, there is not energy to make the changes necessary to improve the situation.

I would identify some folks with businesses that are interested in promoting this type of discussion and who are willing to pay for advertising. I would identify someone who is literate and interested in the newsletter business. Then I would use my salary, advertising prepayments, and whatever NGO money I could get, to start publishing a weekly newsletter. I would do this as a business, and recover all of my personal expenses and a profit out of the business, before turning it over to a local person to run on an ongoing basis. I don't know what the rules are with the Peace Corp about you making a profit, and it might be the only profit you make is painting your office, getting first class decorations, paying for lunch meetings for budding entrepreneurs, and other things which demonstrate a successful business. The only way to really teach entrepreneurship is by example.

This newsletter would be THE basis of my two year assignment, and the key communication device with my constituents. I would work to make sure it becomes a permanent, self-funded, ongoing way to reach out to the population I am serving. The key is to identify a "Benjamin Franklin" who is in touch with the local population, who understands their needs and wants, who is interested in going out into the rest of the world and capturing and sharing Best Practices, and who can create controversy so folks will really think about and internalize the need for change. Benjamin Franklin's newsletter was one of the frameworks that made America what it is.

I would use the newsletter to set up literacy clubs, getting folks to talk about big ideas, business clubs, like Rotary and Kwanis and Lions (and these business clubs in the US would probably be the source of cash and training and exchange programs for local businesses) getting folks to network and talk about how they can create viable growing businesses, and music clubs, getting folks to tap into the spiritual drive that accompanies music. Maybe your first profit from the newsletter is a harp, which you could use to hold concerts, and then teach classes in harp, and then leave with your best student so they can continue this business.

I would use the newsletter to teach business and entrepreneurial principles. I would contact The Covey Leadership Center and get them to send training materials and Franklin Planers, and I would establish regular business training courses based on these materials. I would charge for these courses, and I would identify at least two apprentices to learn how to teach these courses. These courses would become the second for profit business I establish. People would have to pay to attend, and payment might be to clean my cement floors or provide me a chicken. Between the newsletter and the courses I would strive to generate enough cash to pay for guest columnist and for lecturers to come and teach business principles. MIT and other universities now make all of their course materials available over the web. These materials can be downloaded, and can be the basis for someone teaching business principles.

Anyway, I am possibly way off base with the kind of advice you need. For instance, Andrea pointed out, what if people there don't know how to read? Hopefully some of these words will be useful as you look at how you are going to improve Save. I hope you have a good Christmas and that as you contemplate the true meaning of Christmas, you will think of a baby in a manger in a country without toilets nor garbage dumps, and the impact He has had on the world by the way He has changed men from the inside out, including your Dad.

I love you. I am very proud of you. I pray for you daily, because I am also worried about you.

Love,

Dad