AdGuyManifesto.com

Some phrases stay with forever for reasons we’ll never fully understand.

“Whither goeth thou America, in thy big black car, in the night.”

Some phrases make us laugh and get used over and over again.

“You fucked up. You trusted us.”

“Yes Madam, I am drunk. And you are ugly and tomorrow I will be sober”

And some phrases we’d give anything to have authored.

The job of an Ad Guy is to understand this and be the dark soul that comes up with this magical drivel.

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I sold out. I sold The Ad Ranch.

My baby.

My ad agency.

That thing that defined who the hell I was (well, kinda).

I had the agency for more than a dozen years.

A dozen years.

A dozen years. Had to repeat that.

For an Ad Guy, that is several centuries.

We Ad Guys have very short attention spans. We can’t survive any other way in this business. Or maybe it’s the other way. The Masters of Concentration do other things. They design bridges or financial plans or own insurance companies. They can love One Thing and feel good every day doing that One Thing.

Us Ad Guys cant live like that. Sorry.

And not that that is bad. Big world. Need all the talent we can get to keep it spinning.

But us Ad Guys have short attention spans. We can dive deeply into a thing and know enough about it to somehow, in a short time, to feel it in our souls. Feel it enough to find that thing hidden inside that will make people care about it.

And if we didn’t have that skill to move quickly in and out, we couldn’t survive this bizarre business.

One day we’re selling medical equipment.

The next day we’re selling urinal cakes.

The next day we’re selling software.

That afternoon, we’re selling cookie dough.

Who knows, maybe urinal cake cookie dough is next.

And if we had to only care about ONE of those things for any length of time (day, week, month, 40 years)… We’d implode like a poodle in a microwave.

We’re an odd race.

But we’re fun at parties and the world needs us.

That’s why “in house” ad agencies die.

You just can’t expect great ad minds to care about the same shit every day. They dry up and whither and blow away like so much fireplace ash.

Wait. What did I start writing about…

I was talking about selling out.

Back to the beginning.

I sold The Ad Ranch. Sold it to an Austin company called Catapult Systems. I actually took a Real Job.

My first Real Job in those dozen years.

Where to start.

Catapult.

They’re a Microsoft consulting company based in Austin with a half dozen offices and around 300 people. They build Microsoft systems, customized for big companies. Sharepoint is a big one. They also build custom apps for companies need to solve a problem that nobody else has.

An odd company to buy an ad agency one might think.

But maybe not. They work with some pretty impressive technology from some pretty impressive companies. They build huge sites, both internal and external facing.
But everything they do is based on a marketing problem. Every web site is there to be a marketing tool, even if only your employees see it.

So it was a good fit. And it’s been a blast to make the transition.

After a dozen years as a stylin little boutique agency, moving to becoming a part of a large company has been an interesting transition. And one I’ve enjoyed very much.

So I’m looking forward to the next couple years. Change is good. Good change is better. I’ll be writing about this transition more and more unless I’m working 30 hours a day.

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OK. I’ve never been a football fan. Never got it. Who cares. It’s a game. Games are silly wastes of time. The world will keep spinning if we win or lose. I’ve just never been competitive that way.

Blame my upbringing I suppose. I grew up in LA. A city of several billion without a pro football team. I grew up not on the Pop Warner field, but riding my bike to the beach to surf or heading to karate practice. Not big team sports.

So football was something other people cared about.

That was till TCU came along. My daughter is now a sophomore there and her first semester, TCU came up out of nowhere to become one of the nations top teams. Many thought THE nations top team. A little private university in Ft. Worth with only 7000 students was suddenly on the national stage. Last year they had a perfect season to land a spot in some obscure bowl named after greasy snack food.

I don’t pretend to understand the whole BCS, BCS Buster, Bowl thing. Beyond the boundries of my life. I should care now, but there are plenty of other people out there to care so I don’t have to.

But little TCU has been relegated to the back of the Bowl Bus. The big guys don’t want to deal with them. Hows it going to look when a school just twice as big as my fricken high school beats a monster program like UT.

So little TCU got ignored. So did Boise State and a few others.

But TCU will not be ignored. And for the Horned Frogs to go to the Rose Bowl and come home winners with true class, was amazing.

But back to that “why I’m a football fan and I get it” thing.
And why an Ad Guy would finally get it.

It’s GREAT marketing!

Marketing is seduction. Seduction starts in the mind and works it’s way down to the pants (which, in this case, means the wallet).

Since TCU started this big-stage football rise, their place on the national platform has risen dramatically. Everyone loves a winner. Everyone wants to BE a winner. And football is our modern day gladiator. Not as bloody or full of lions, but the same thing. (I found NASCAR to be the same thing… amazing experience. Louder and bigger and more likely to explode).
Now their applications are through the roof. Suddenly this little obscure “Christian” school is a destination. Big programs don’t want to tangle with them. Purple and white are great colors to be seen in.

The idea of Horned Toads isn’t, well, whatever the hell it was before. (OK, quick aside here… I grew up with a Horny Toad as a pet. They are extinct or something now. But you could buy em in pet stores when I was a kid. They were flat lizards that sat there till they sprinted off and vanished and you had to bug your Mom to buy you a fish or hamster or something. Well, they do have little horns, but they’re not really toads. They’re lizards. And toads are NOT frogs. Toads are toads. So they were misnamed from the start. But nobody ever called them Horned Frogs… They’re NOT frogs… THEY’RE LIZARDS!

Someone explain this to me.

Trivia. Horny Toads can squirt blood from some little duct in their eyes. Probably a good reason why they’re extinct or something.)

Had to get that off my chest.

Back to this football thing.

As I crawl through my 50’s, I become aware of many things. This must where enlightenment comes… or something.

I’ve learned to accept football and sports in general as a “spectator” thing. I never felt I had time or mental capacity to waste on that crap.

But now that I’m paying for the damn team, and I have a dog in the hunt (Texas phrase. Sorry), I care.

Not care enough to get in a fight, or watch every game, but I can appreciate the whole experience. And watching my Horned Frogs WIN the rose bowl (row 11, right behind the far right tuba in the TCU band baby) was an amazing experience.

To me that is the equivalent of a religious experience.

That same “we’re all ONE against whatever (satan, the other team, whatever)” thing is powerful juju.

And great marketing.

I just spent a couple thousand dollars to join that church. And on my flight back to Austin, I’m proudly wearing my ghastly purple TCU baseball cap. And I high-fived others wearing purple. I bought Southwest cocktails for 20+ others wearing TCU garb. I got the “horny toad fingers” from an old lady in a wheelchair and purple shawl (loved that… moment of silence please).
Hell, I love the whole concept and I didn’t even to go school there.
I went to school at Cal State Long Beach.

We don’t even have a damn football team. Women’s volleyball is the Big Sport there.
Mmmmmhmmmm.

So I get football. I get baseball (went to see the our Texas home team win) and watched TCU in the College World Series.

Hell, I even appreciate rugby.

I’ve moved beyond my “screw everything” LA Surfrat Thing.

I do have friends who shake their heads and wonder if I’ve been possessed by demons. I’ve always been the guy that poked holes in whatever they cared about. But now I’m starting to care about stupid shit.

Go figure. Guess it’s Middle Age. But really, at 52, this aint the middle. This is the Home Stretch. Guess everything tasted good eventually.

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OK. So I never actually MET Hunter S. Thompson. So he’s not actually a “friend,” not even in the Facebook kinda way.

But I’ve always admired how he though and how he communicated his thinking. His communication skills always amazed me and I’ve read nearly everything he’s ever written. I think had he not been who he was, he’da made a great Ad Guy.

A friend sent me this link this morning and I had to share it with whatever world is out there reading my blatherings. This is a cover letter HST wrote back in 1958… The year I was born…

He sent it to the Vancouver Sun looking for a job. I don’t think he GOT the job, but it’s the best cover letter I’ve ever read. I get cover letters from prospective Ad Types all the time and for the most part they are college course drivel… “My goal is to work in a team environment blah blah blah cutting edge blah blah empowered to excell… gag me now…”

It’s about guts. If you’ve got guts, you’ll do unsafe things. You don’t have to be stupid, you just have to have guts. HST had guts… And he did a lot of stupid things, but he had the guts to have an idea and jump over the cliff with it.

That kind of thinking makes great advertising.

If you’re afraid of offending someone or standing out, stay the hell out of this business. Go work in a bank here safe matters more.

The letter.
————-

TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN

October 1, 1958
57 Perry Street New York City

Sir,

I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.

Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.

By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers.

If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.

The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.

Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.

I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.

I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.

It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.

If you think you can use me, drop me a line.

If not, good luck anyway.

Sincerely,

Hunter S. Thompson

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If you’re an Ad Guy you probably know about this ad. I remember reading it back in design school somewhere back in the early 80′s. It inspired me and, really, has been the driving philosophy for everything I’ve done since. So I got to thinking that maybe I could find the original piece that I’d badly quoted for the last thirty years.

Well, I did find it. And it reinspired me all over again. I dont know if Bud is still with us or not, but I raise my hat to you sir. Your words have helped me create genuinely effective advertising for the past thirty years. Thank you. If we ever meet, beers are on me.

“Looking for the Capo d’astro bar.”

By Bud Robbins

Back in the sixties, I was hired by an ad agency to write copy on the Aeolian Piano Company account. My first assignment was for an ad to be placed in The New York Times for one of their grand pianos. The only background information I received was some previous ads and a few faded close-up shots…and of course, the due date.

The Account Executive was slightly put out by my request for additional information and his response to my suggestion that I sit down with the client was, ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those? Can’t you just create something? We’re up against a closing date!’

I acknowledged his perception that I was one of those, which got us an immediate audience with the head of our agency.

I volunteered I couldn’t even play a piano let alone write about why anyone would spend $5,000 for this piano when they could purchase a Baldwin or Steinway for the same amount.

Both allowed the fact they would gladly resign the Aeolian business for either of the others; however, while waiting for the call, suppose we make our deadline.

I persisted and reluctantly, a tour of the Aeolian factory in Upstate New York was arranged. I was assured that ‘we don’t do this with all our clients’ and my knowledge as to the value of company time was greatly reinforced.

The tour lasted two days and although the care and construction appeared meticulous, $5,000 still seemed to be a lot of money.

Just before leaving, I was escorted into the showroom by the National Sales Manager. In an elegant setting sat their piano alongside the comparably priced Steinway and Baldwin.

‘They sure look alike,’ I commented.

‘They sure do. About the only real difference is the shipping weight—our is heavier.’

‘Heavier?’ I asked. ‘What makes ours heavier?’

‘The Capo d’astro bar.’

‘What’s a Capo d’astro bar?’

‘Here, I’ll show you. Get down on your knees.’

Once under the piano, he pointed to a metallic bar fixed across the harp and bearing down on the highest octaves. ‘It takes 50 years before the harp in the piano warps. That’s when the Cap d’astro bar goes to work. It prevents warping.’

I left the National Sales Manager under his piano and dove under the Baldwin to find a Tinkertoy Capo d’astro bar at best. Same with the Steinway.

‘You mean the Capo d’astro bar really doesn’t go to work for 50 years?’ I asked.

‘Well, there’s got to be some reason why the Met uses it,’ he casually added.

I froze. ‘Are you telling me that the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City uses this piano?’

‘Sure. And their Capo d’astro bar should be working by now.’

Upstate New York looks nothing like the front of the Metropolitan Opera House where I met the legendary Carmen, Rise Stevens. She was now in charge of moving the Metropolitan Opera House to the Lincoln Center.

Ms. Stevens told me, ‘About the only thing the Met is taking with them is their piano.’

That quote was the headline of our first ad.

The result created a six-year wait between order and delivery.

My point is this. No matter what the account, I promise you, the Capo d’astro bar is there.”

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I love tea. I drink gallons of the stuff. Mostly green tea but lately a lot of those girly herbal mixes.

So a couple years back I discovered those electric teapots. Fill it full of water, set it on the base and it cooks your water up. Great invention. Given them away as gifts and have one at home and at the office.

Well, the office teapot gets a LOT of use and it finally died. I took it apart, couldn’t fix it. Realized I had to find a replacement for my favorite appliance. I was at World Market buying other stuff and found one. Clear glass, pretty classy unit, liked the idea of watching the water boil. Purchase made and took it home to make a pot of tea.

All was great till I took it out of the box and opened it. It smelled like swim fins inside. That weird chemical silicone/rubber smell. Not very appetizing and probably not adding a lot of important vitamins and minerals to my diet. I cooked some water. Same smell. Added baking soda, same smell. Added white vinegar (two drops deodorize a skunk!)… Same smell.

Sadly, I realized it was a badly designed product in my kitchen. I grabbed the receipt and put it away till I could make the trip back to World Market to return it. Because it’s out of my way, it was hard to get back to return it, but yesterday I did.

There was some confusion but eventually, some kid came out from the back and said I couldn’t return it because it didn’t have the box.

The box?

The box was fine. It did it’s job. But the product stunk.

I was pretty appalled. The box? What the hell? What does the box have to do with anything? They sold a lousy and possibly toxic product and I’m stuck with it forever because I didn’t bother to bring back the box.

I’ve spent literally hundreds if not thousands of dollars at World Market. I’ve bought furniture, wine, most of the dishes in my house, gifts and food at World Market. Now they’re going to dis me because I didn’t keep a box?

I was pretty disgusted. I just left the toxic teapot on the counter and walked away. My final purchase at World Market.

This is bad policy. And what happens when bad policy meets good communication.

Social Media. Blogs. Web site comments. Word of mouth. Bad JuJu.

We all have that power now.

It kinda reminds me of that 80′s movie Ragtime. The African American guy gets pushed around by the local morons in a fire department and he destroys the place. That was within his power to demand justice. But we dont need to go that far (but a lot of people do, look at that nutjob here in Austin that flew his plane into the IRS).

We have a new equalizer. The Web. When a corporate entity does us wrong, we can take to the Webwaves and tell the world. Corporations are aware of this and do everything they can to negate this. Good corporations allow comments on their web sites about the products they sell (a local Austin company helps this… Baazarvoice.com). That’s a great idea. When you see a company that openly allows their customers to honestly interact, you know you can deal with that company. You know they’ll be honest because everyone is looking.

As for the power we all have (and should use), I’m using it.

I’m blogging. I’ll Tweet. I’ll Facebook. I’ll tell my friends. Maybe I can cost World Market tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Maybe executives in charge of policy will start having bad dreams. Maybe their restaurant meals will come out bad and the waiter will say “Bummer dude, you already tasted it. We can’t sell it to someone else now…”

As a famous ad guy once said, “Great advertising is the fastest way to kill a bad product.”

I did a little research and found the CEO of World Market (the Web means there is no place to hide.) He’s making $800,000.00 a year with a bonus of double if he performs (doesn’t say what kind of performance he has to do though).

I also found a lot of negative press about World Market. Darest I share the links? Oh heck, why not.

http://www.rainforestrelief.org/Campaigns/Outdoor_Furniture/Cost_Plus.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/cincinnati/549164-decline-fall-world-market.html

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Cost-Plus-RVW192382.htm

http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2009/01/05/daily55.html

I connected to Barry Feld on Linkedin. He’s the CEO of World Market. You should too. Here’s the link

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/barry-feld/7/500/74a

Or email him at barry.feld@cpwm.com

I’ll tell him about his policies and the fact that they are selling products that nobody tested. Hell, they’ve probably got a dozen containers of the stinky little teapots shipped from some poison spewing factory in China. Something tells me he’s not using one in his office though.

Did I go too far with all this? Well, for one I was bored this morning. Woke up at 7AM on a Sunday morning and had nothing else to do. And I do have a strong sense of justice. We all know when we’ve been dissed and we all want justice. The web is a great place to demand it. It equalizes us all. It gives us all power to be heard.

So next time you get a bad policy tossed into your lap, or have a corporate decision wack you upside the head, make some noise. It’s your right and your responsibility to bring about justice.

Even if it’s for a stupid little $60 Toxic Teapot.

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Yes, for years I’ve been the guy that always said vegans should be shot. I always found it pretty irritating. People would make a big deal about having a label and make everyone around them cook something special at Thanksgiving.

What a pain.

And all too often they were wearing leather shoes.

Then I did a bunch of research on what happens once we stop eating meat.

OK. I was convinced. Then I gave up meat, fish, all dairy etc. And I have to say, it’s been pretty easy:
- It’s easy to order in restaurants. Instead of having to decide which of the delicious meals you can enjoy, you realize that if you’re really lucky, there is ONE thing you can eat. So you order that.
- It’s cheap. No lobster for $25 a pound. A pile of carrots costs a LOT less.
- You eat a lot more.
- You lose weight.
- You get to act snooty at restaurants and ask the waiter if they have any vegan approved meals… While you hide your new leather shoes under the table.

Try it. You might really like it. It’s been three weeks for me so far and I’m not lusting after a big steak yet. We’ll see.

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This is the THIRD time I’ve had to start over in the Ad Biz.

I graduated college in 1981 and was already working in an ad agency. My job was doing layouts, lousy illustrations, specing type, pasting up ads and shooting stats.

And yes, I used some words that some of you have never heard.

Specing type? Stats?

Then Mac came along in 1984 and within a couple years there was a computer on my desk. My felt markers died a slow, painful death and eventually did their final drying death in a trash can.

Wave One.

As an Ad Guy, you no longer had to draw up your ideas. You were free to toss your Lucygraph (look THAT up!) and your felt pens and your press type out forever. Everything you did went through a crude computer but it was a big leap. That meant we all had to learn new skills. But it also meant we could do a lot more work in a lot less time and higher quality.

Then I moved to Austin in 1994 and within a year, had another computer on my desk connected to the Internet. Email landed at my desk. We started building Web sites for big tech companies. Imagine now, if you will, a multimillion dollar technology company without a web site? So now we had to relearn everything because there was a powerful new tool to market with. The Web kicked in the door and you either went with it or you sold real estate.

But our traditional marketing tools still worked and if you were smart, you could combine the Web with your other marketing tools and you could generate decent response numbers.

That was Wave TWO.

Now, Wave THREE.

Everything has changed again. And I admit, I was not really interested in this wave till I jumped in and used and liked the results.

But now I guess I’m one of those overbearing ex-smokers who grouses at a whiff of smoke.

The Third Wave is 99% science and tools. It’s using Twitter, Facebook and all the diagnostics to find your audience and cuddle up next to them in all the places they lurk online. The tools are now so good you can find people who dont think they can be found. And because everyone is now such an exhibitionist, it’s easier and easier to find them.

When I was growing up, the idea of putting every thought, idea, activity and hobby up on a billboard for everyone to see was not even considered. Our thoughts and opinions and fears and joys were ours to keep, share with a few friends or lock away in a diary.

But the current generation is compelled to get instant celebrity with everything that’s ever crossed their minds.

Personally, I think it’s a little weird. But as a marketer, I see how that leaves everyone open to friendly prying by clients.

That’s just how it is kids. You throw your soul to the winds and the angels will sell you shit.

I see it for what it is. A great, powerful marketing tool that has ultimate efficiencies. No point in wasting marketing messages on audiences that will NEVER buy your product. LIke you wouldn’t spend a lot of money advertising shampoo at a bald guys convention. Social media marketing lets you narrowcast your marketing messages to an audience that will care.

But it is a bit sad for us creative types. It means what we do best isn’t as important as it used to be. There is still a need for good creative thinking and messaging, but it’s not the linchpin of success.

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I’m starting to think so.

Here’s a great example. A Marketing VP I’ve known for years called us to help him brand a new company. We met, we got a lot of great ideas and wanted to do a full brand treatment. He loved the idea and offered us about a quarter of what we normally charge.

Huh?

He figured he’d CrowdSource it. Put it out to the world and see what happened. He offered a fraction of what it would cost and got a LOT of great work. I was really impressed. It was cheap and there were some really good ideas.

So is it the death of The Great American Ad Agency?

Consider this too. All the traditional tools us Ad Guys have used the past 30+ years are dead. Direct Mail? Bury it. At least for a lot of products and industries. The cost has always been high but the response numbers keep getting smaller. Telemarketing? Ouch. BIG expense. Little return.

As an experiment, I dove headfirst into Social Media Marketing to see what would happen. We operate HeroBracelets.org out of our office here at The Ad Ranch. So I figured I’d see what could be done.

30% more traffic to HeroBracelets.org in two weeks.

I’m now a believer.

The power of great creative has diminished in importance to the science of plugging your brand into every social media and weaving your way through the web into every possible blog and news site.

It’s tedious, boring and very effective.

What’s happened is that the marketing TOOLS have gotten so good, the creative doesn’t matter as much.

To me, this is the second wave of this process.

The first came in the early 80′s when all of us Art Directors and Designers let our markers dry out as we traded up into having a Mac on our desk. It was a great thing, but it changed the creative output. Now anyone who could use graphics software could produce beautiful (or at least colorful) work. I started to see a lot of design that depended on technical expertise and less on true conceptual thinking.

Pretty, but no substance.

Personally, I’ve always railed against this kind of thinking. That’s why for years I present my ideas as hand drawn roughs. If my lousy drawings on big sheets of paper can move you, then it’s a great idea.

If you have to depend on visual fireworks to make your point, your point is pretty dull. When you combine great visuals, great design and great conceptual thinking and marketing power, you’ve got effective work.

But back to the death of creative.

It’s dying folks. Now monkeys can market well if they grew up wasting their lives on Facebook.

I can prove it. When I look at my response numbers to the HeroBracelets.org Web site, the story is plain as day. Social Media Marketing works.

Some day all we’ll hear in the creative departments of The Great Ad Agencies of The World will be the gnashing of teeth and the angst of trolls.

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I will never forget my visit to Dali. We were spending a few days in Torscha in the southern part of the country. It’s a good 8 hours south of Addis, half of that on dirt roads. It’s a bit of a brutal trek to get there, by Texas standards anyway.

So we spend a lot of time going through the mountains. Some of the most beautiful scenery you could even imagine. Dali was up in the top of the mountains.

We traveled up there with the local Governor, the man who managed the district. He seemed to garner a great deal of respect everywhere he went.

So we get to the actual village and there were a lot of people milling around. We were taken into a local cafe for a bite and a warm local beer. We start noticing a bit of a commotion outside and we learn “they are waiting for us…”

We had no idea what we were in for.

We went out to a hundred or so people and local musicians in the back of a pickup. They were dressed in traditional ceremonial white and were playing long bamboo horns. We follow them a mile or so and then we see it. There is a greeting committee of thousands. How many thousand, I’ll never know. I estimate at somewhere between 3000 and 5000 people. There were dancers, musicians, priests (with those awesome purple velvet parasols), choirs, old people, little children… you name it. Thousands of people, singing, dancing, total flood of joy. They filled the dirt road for probably a mile. We got out for a brief ceremony and then made our way through the crowd.

It really was overwhelming.

We went to the school, over 2000 children going to a crumbling mud walled school, sitting in the dirt to learn.

Then we hiked down a hill to a watersource. An unprotected spring that came out of the mountain. The water was being collected in a muddy pool by a handful of women, scooping it up and pouring it into plastic buckets for the trek up the hill. As we stood there, a cow wandered into the same stream and, well, added TO the stream.

The link below takes you to a video of the village and our welcome there. You’ll also see Eric at the water point, clearly taken aback by what we had just seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7JxXi1Bk9U

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