It's Only the Beginning, Inshallah.

It's been a long week of trying to do wrap up on our field work in Jalalabad. With dozens of people wanting to see you, piles of mail to get through, and all the distractions of everyday life (such as the pile of laundry in my dining room) pulling one in every direction focus is hard to come by, but I still find myself motivated by the need to maintain the tremendous momentum we built on the ground over the last two months.

The lack of attention paid to sustainability by most NGOs and the Military in Afghanistan is nothing short of infuriating -- any reconstruction effort that is doomed to vaporize the moment the contractor's contract ends is little more than a handout, which has a myriad of negative social and economic repercussions. I believe that FabFi can, and will, be more than just a handout.

The Fab concept of enabling local ingenuity and self/peer-directed learning breaks the mold of a typical reconstruction project and, I believe, has real potential for sustainability and growth, but right now the locals need a hand-up (as opposed to a hand-out) to keep it going. For this reason, the FabFi team has been hard at work standing up a web-presence to showcase how exciting this project is in the hope of securing real funding to solidify the both the human and physical infrastructure, and set the stage for rapid self-growth. We are working on a packaged system distribution, real-time link stats, and more. There might even be a journal article or two that comes out of it all...

Check it out at http://fabfi.fablab.af (Thanks to Smari M. for the DNS and low-level geekery, Amy S. for the non-fabfi content, Ryan T. for sprucing up my diagrams, and Kenny C for the file conversions). There's still a week or so of work in it, but we'll get there.

Now back to work.