building with waste plastic_2 - The Monday Morning Memo

We have also started an e-mail exchange with an NGO out of Australia called Classrooms of Hope. They have built 5 schools on the island of Lombok using a new technology called Eco Bricks. They are bricks made of plastic waste.

Classrooms of Hope has opened a new factory to produce these bricks in Lombok which is only 2 islands over from Flores.

Its honestly miraculous because every other company I’ve contacted said it would be years before they would be able to bring the technology to Indonesia or the facilities already producing construction materials made of waste in Indonesia have not been tested and approved. I am hoping to build our school in Flores out of these Eco-Bricks.

I’ve attached a short video of the school in Lombok and I’ve also attached the Power Point I discussed with architects last week regarding phase one of building. Phase one will probably not begin until September or October. We are clearing and preparing the land and still raising funds. (hence the video).

Thank you again for all you’ve already given to this project and thank you for your offer to help with the making of the video.

Misi Parrish
Flores, “the Island of Flowers,” Indonesia

“I have quoted from the Bible and have told you that I used to be a newspaper man. Why are those two things important, and how are they linked? Many years ago I was reading a biography of one of my literary heroes, the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, and I learned that when he was asked by an admirer—I think it was Edmund Gosse—what he read that underlay his extraordinary perception of life, he replied that he read nothing but the Bible and the newspapers. Gosse saw a well-worn Bible in the great man’s workroom, and it was known that every day of his life in Oslo, Ibsen dressed himself impeccably, walked to his favourite restaurant, and sat at his favourite table in a corner; and there all the day’s newspapers were brought to him and he sat for two hours, drinking aquavit, and reading, and peeping over his paper at the other diners. He read all the papers from end to end, including the advertisements, and he read not only the serious dailies but also the comic papers.

It was here that he gained his profound and wide-ranging insight into human life, it was here that he found his plots, and when he went home he identified what he had read in the daily news with what had been written so long ago by those Hebrew chroniclers, and found the same stories about the three great subjects of all literature—Love, War, and Death.”

- Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 354