Back to the Middle East

Good luck meeper. Keep your meep out of the dirt.

Bring me back a falafel.

Bring me Arab scalps.

Throw some camel pewps and dead terrorist into your compost . That should help bring up the nitrogen levels a bit.

Good luck and grow weed man

Do you like Jordan? I seriously enjoyed the middle east. I felt safer walking the streets of Dubai, and Bahrain and the Emirates than I ever did wandering my hometown.There is something very indescribably different.Enjoy. Will you be able to post from there?

Yeah, Jordan's nice. It's a fair amount safer than the dirty south, and definitely more than NY or Chicago. And I enjoy it, but its highly westernized, so a lot less local flavor than say Damascus, Rabat, or Cairo. Still, its a good time. The emirates in general have supposedly gotten much more dangerous because of the drop in investment/economy.

Salaam, mothermeepers. I'm in Amman, very nice but cold and rainy. Lots of contingency planning and exciting meep. So if ya'll have any crazy ideas about recycling or composting send them my way-we're really desperate for outsider perspectives.

Dear Fellows,

Currently I am in the middle of Beirut, in the Hamra district near AUB. Lebanon is pretty cool, and beautiful. Developing very fast as well, as is Syria. When I went to Syria in 2008, it was quite grungy. Now its all got all this slick advertising and the streets are sort of cleaned, they also upgraded the border from their DOS processing systems. They even instituted a smoking ban, which no one will follow, and which I plan to break if I pass through Damascus again. Outside of the main drag in Beirut they are dozens of cranes, doing some pretty rapid building. Dozens and dozens of huge developments, I wonder where the money is coming from. There were soldiers circling around the parliament building-maybe its in session? Anyway, cool place. Ya'll should come visit. Syria is quite safe for foreigners, as is Lebanon-unless Israel bombs you. According to the King of Jordan, his majesty Abdullah, heir to the Hashemite dynasty, war is "imminent" between Israel and Hezbollah (lebanon). Its always comforting to hear something like that.

Anyway, there is some great stuff here, pretty rocking bar scene. Food, if its anything like Syrian food (it is) should be amazing. But last night it was some fantastic thai.

Tell us about the composting business.

Do they play a lot of beer pong there?

It's going well. Apparently there have been lots of NGOs before us hoping to do composting. All of them have failed, and one of the companies we are working in fact won't work with them on principle because pretty much when their funding dries up they disappear. So it looks like its going well, basically, and we've basically figured out are methods. So now the big barrier to overcome is the fact that no one really knows what it is or why it is useful. Even professionals, people running large, very large farms, don't actually know what it is. All of this stuff will end up eventually getting used for carbon credits so there are a lot of speculators out there, seems like, looking to invest in stuff like this. So yes, dirt making is going on.

My suggestion, as always sigh is to use algaes for composting/digestion. This eliminates mondo toxins, creates silage and biomass, and breaks down literally tons per dozen kilos of compost. Downside...needs effluent, or other outflow. Upside...is actually a crop. Next best thing to earthworms.

Algae is nice, but not for a country with no water.

I thought contractors in that part of the world were just supposed to bang on meep with a hammer until the planeload of money showed up to take them home?