Tiny Village Research Articles

‘a fine university for women engineers’: a Scottish munitions factory in world war I

In a tiny village in south-west Scotland, a model factory was established during World War I, not just to produce munitions ‘for the duration’, but with the expressed intention of continuing as ‘a fine university for women engineers’. In an attempt to keep the enterprise going after the War, the factory was converted to the manufacture of motor cars. The Galloway – ‘a car made by ladies for others of their sex’ – was the result. This article considers the factory as a focal point for a network of material conditions and discursive claims within which the women of the Galloway Engineering Company sought to shape new technologies in their own terms, and so establish a permanent place for themselves in that masculine world.

A case of urbe in rus?

In this paper, I report and illustrate an attempt in an integrative manner to juxtapose a customarily urban institution in a markedly rural location. The institution – a medically orientated research centre – is sophisticated in the techniques its members deploy and in the skills on which they draw. The setting – at the tiny village of Somkhele, northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa – is quite the reverse; it is even-paced, physically scattered, decidedly pre-industrial. The two principal means employed in seeking social, emotional and physical integration with the local communities are described: (i) an effort extensively to enlist community participation in the planning, architectural design, construction and symbolic decoration of the new buildings that accommodate the institution and (ii) widespread use of traditional and/or indigenous methods for erecting the buildings. The report is concluded by a discussion of what has recently come to be known in architectural circles as ‘critical regionalism’ and, then, by a briefly outlined journey through the main building. The paper comprises subjective impressions; it is neither a critique of nor an independent assessment of the project.

A case of urbe in rus?

In this paper, I report and illustrate an attempt in an integrative manner to juxtapose a customarily urban institution in a markedly rural location. The institution – a medically orientated research centre – is sophisticated in the techniques its members deploy and in the skills on which they draw. The setting – at the tiny village of Somkhele, northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa – is quite the reverse; it is even-paced, physically scattered, decidedly pre-industrial. The two principal means employed in seeking social, emotional and physical integration with the local communities are described: (i) an effort extensively to enlist community participation in the planning, architectural design, construction and symbolic decoration of the new buildings that accommodate the institution and (ii) widespread use of traditional and/or indigenous methods for erecting the buildings. The report is concluded by a discussion of what has recently come to be known in architectural circles as ‘critical regionalism’ and, then, by a briefly outlined journey through the main building. The paper comprises subjective impressions; it is neither a critique of nor an independent assessment of the project.

The Pedagogy of Mud: Turning a Coffee Byproduct into a School Building and Remaking a Community

Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.1 (Spring 2003) ISSN 1546-2250 The Pedagogy of Mud: Turning a Coffee Byproduct into a School Building and Remaking a Community 1 Darcy Varney University of Colorado Citation: Varney, Darcy. “The Pedagogy of Mud: Turning a Coffee Byproduct into a School Building and Remaking a Community.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(1), Spring 2003. Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye. Keywords: school design; community participation; children’s participation; rural poverty Ten years ago, getting to the mountain hamlet of Palzoquitiqupan in Veracruz, Mexico, was tough, even by four-wheel drive. Businessman Bill Fishbein remembers the “impossible road” leading up to the tiny village where families eked out a living growing and harvesting coffee beans in a dying market. “I’ve rarely seen a community so poor,” says Fishbein, who had traveled to Palzoquitiqupan as a representative of Coffee Kids, the nonprofit organization he founded to improve the quality of life for children and families in coffee-growing communities around the world. Oversupply had forced coffee prices to an all-time low, and workers could barely survive on the pennies they made from each pound of beans. Children lived in dirt-floored shacks without running water, electricity or latrines. Disease was rampant. When he returned to the village this past February, Fishbein scaled the newly cleared mountain road with ease and found the place transformed. The coffee market has not improved, but the economy of the village has grown, thanks to the support of Coffee Kids and the creativity and ingenuity of the residents themselves. Mothers have begun growing nutritious mushrooms to feed their families and have started a mushroom-cultivation business to generate income. Village families have planted vegetable gardens. And, while a good number of the children still go without shoes, many now have clean composting toilets at home and a plan for the future. It all began with the construction of a school building made of coffee hulls. 374 Coffee Kids staff works with the residents of coffee-growing communities to help them take stock of their assets and develop projects to benefit their communities. In Palzoquitiqupan, Fishbein met with families and learned that their first goal was to build a school on land left vacant by the demise of a coffee farm. They had already found a teacher, but the children had nowhere to meet. The families had priced building materials and knew that they needed $2,200 to build two elementary schools, one in their village and one in a neighboring hamlet. Fishbein thought the amount a pittance, not enough for two new buildings. But the residents had a plan. On their own, a group of women in the village had figured out how to turn an abundant local waste product into a valuable building material: pergaminoadobe. Inside each ripe coffee “cherry” is a pair of green beans that turn a rich chestnut brown during the roasting process. Each raw bean is surrounded by a natural parchment, an aril orpergamino, which is discarded as the beans are processed. The enterprising women had noticed piles of pergamino at the local coffee processing plant and negotiated a deal with its owner to turn the byproduct into adobe bricks. He agreed, and the women began their work. Village residents needed money for the rest of the school building supplies: windows, doors, light fixtures. Fishbein recruited his coffee-business supporters to donate the cash, and the village rallied to build its new school. Teenagers participated in the construction with gusto as their younger siblings offered moral support. The result was a beautiful structure that soon became the center of village life. Now, children attend the school in official uniforms and delight in their activities. The school also functions as a community center, as older youth and their relatives meet there to develop new ideas and work on the mushroom-cultivation project. Coffee Kids supports alternative income projects to help families survive the instability of the volatile coffee market throughout Mexico and Central America. Women’s savings programs have spawned new community-based businesses: beauty parlors, pigfattening enterprises, midwifery services, and other small 375 enterprises have supplanted coffee as the main...

Who was Cajal?

After a brief introduction, a series of Cajal's own thoughts and recollections of his difficult childhood and adolescence are literally transcribed. They clearly represent the astonishing achievements of an equally astonishing child who was born in a tiny village of the Pyrenees mountains. Even today, visitors find it very difficult to understand how it was possible for a child to free himself from a medieval atmosphere and climb to the highest scientific level: to be awarded with the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Implications of Grameen banking system in Europe: prospects and prosperity

The philosophy of Grameen (rural) banking system was invented by a maverick economist (Dr Yunus) in a tiny village of Bangladesh in 1976, with the aim to eliminate poverty and improve the socio‐economic condition of the rural poor. The bank provides loans to poor people who are unable to provide collateral and indoctrinated in Grameen social values, known as the “sixteen decisions”. Grameen borrowers also vow to observe the bank’s “four basic principles”, and they are the owners (92 per cent) of the bank. Grameen bank began its operations by giving a small amount of money ($30) to 40 people. Today, it employs 14,000 staff and has disbursed more than $1 billion dollars of loan among two million rural people in Bangladesh of which 95 per cent are women, and the rate of its loan repayment is 98 per cent. The Grameen is functioning not only in Bangladesh but also in 50 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and in the USA. Moving onto the implementation of Grameen‐type micro‐credit systems in Europe, or elsewhere, the differences in socio‐culture, economics and politics (between Bangladesh and the region concerned) should be considered. Thus, this paper is an attempt to investigate the prospects of the implementation of Grameen/micro‐credit banking system in European socio‐economic and cultural contexts.

Camillo Golgi's Scientific Biography

Born in Corteno, a tiny village in the province of Brescia, Camillo Golgi studied at the University of Pavia where he graduated in medicine in 1865 under the guidance of the psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso who sparked his vocation to study the brain. Golgi then began to learn histological techniques under the direction of the pathologist Giulio Bizzozero. In 1872 he moved to Abbiategrasso as chief of a hospital for chronic diseases. In a rudimentary laboratory he developed the silver-bichromate staining technique, the ‘black reaction’, which was a breakthrough for nervous tissue structure research. While in Abbiategrasso Golgi demonstrated the branching of the axons, and observed striatal and cortical lesions in a case of chorea. He returned to Pavia as Professor of Histology and General Pathology, and made a series of important discoveries that still bear his name: the Golgi tendon organ, the Golgi-Mazzoni corpuscles, another Golgi method to stain nerve cells based on the use of potassium dichromate and mercuric chloride, the canaliculi of the parietal cells of the gastric glands (Müller-Golgi tubules), the Golgi-Rezzonico myelin's annular apparatus (or Golgi-Rezzonico horny funnels), the cycle of malarian parasites (Golgi cycle), the relationship between recurrent malarian fever bouts and the multiplication of the Plasmodium in the blood (Golgi law), the relationship between the vascular pole of the Malpighian glomerulus and the distal tubule, the Golgi's pericellular nets and finally, and most importantly, the cytoplasmic ‘internal reticular apparatus’ (Golgi apparatus). In 1906 Golgi was awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine or Physiology. He died in Pavia on 21 January 1921.

A várossá nyilvánítás elvi kérdései, potenciális városok az Északnyugat-Dunántúlon

In Hungary the network of the towns has not yet developed fully, making the declaration of another 50-80 settlements as towns justifiable in the coming 10-15 years. Most of the settlements to be declared as towns can be found in regions dominated by small and tiny villages, i.e. in North Hungary and Northwest Transdanubia.

Client and site characteristics as barriers to service use by homeless persons with serious mental illness.

Clients entering the Access to Community Care and Effective Services and Supports (ACCESS) program for homeless mentally ill persons in 18 U.S. communities identified barriers to service use. The most frequent barrier was not knowing where to go for a service (encountered by 32.4 percent of the 1,828 clients). It was followed by not being able to afford it (29.5 percent); experiencing too much confusion, hassle, or waiting to obtain it (27.1 percent); and having been previously denied the service (16.5 percent). Differences in the program site (that is, the 18 communities) explained two to three times more of the variance in encountering barriers use than did individual client characteristics.

Women’s response to violence in Guatemala: Resistance and rebuilding

While neoliberal ideology treats the elimination of the peasantry as an essential step to modernization,1 Guatemalan development from the ex pansion of coffee estates in the 1870s to the cotton boom of the 1960s has been built on a dual economy for peasants. Driven to the most marginal Highland areas by the plantation-building of the elite, they were permitted to retain relatively autonomous communal life reflecting their Mayan cul tural heritage on lands too marginal for economic self-sufficiency. Goaded by poverty and national labor laws requiring the poor to enlist as laborers on fincas or plantations, the indigenous became seasonal estate workers who subsidized their role as a rural proletariat by their efforts as hillside farmers on tiny village plots.2 Development strategy in the 1980s and 1990s has combined coffee and cotton production with an expanded "non-traditional" farm sector?vege tables, fruits, and flowers for the North American winter market?with tex tile assembly, each component based on the "comparative advantage" of cheap and compliant labor and politically-based access to the U.S. market under favorable tariff and quota arrangements.3 This development strategy has coincided with an impoverishment of the majority of the population. Between 1980 and 1987 the portion of the population living below the pov erty line increased from 79 to 87 percent; the extremely poor?those unable to secure a minimum diet?increased from 52 percent in 1980 to 72 percent by 1990; not surprisingly, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population earned 57 percent of the national income by 1987.4 Two percent of the farms oc cupy 65 percent of the country's arable land, while 80 percent of the farms are crowded into a mere 10 percent?the worst land distribution pattern in the Americas.5 Forty-six percent of the population is illiterate, 66 percent

A Dél-Dunántúl a piacgazdasági átmenetben

The large region covering four counties (Baranya, Somogy, Tolna, Zala) concentrates about one tenth of the Hungarian economic potential. According to indexes that reflect the economic situation the region has a economic state comparible with the national average in the early 1990s. Its situation is much more favourable than that of the Eastern and Northern part of the country, but less favourable than that of North Transdanubia and the central region, including Budapest. This position is justified by many economic indices: division of new enterprises, joint ventures and their economic indices, taxable earnings, unemployment form the base of analysis. By all these, through factor-analysis we can show the presence of both economic modernisational tendencies and of the traditional economic structure. In South Transdanubia we can find small regions with totally different economic characters. County seats emerge in all the counties in matters of economic strength, this is especially true of Pecs, the most important centre of the region, a zone clearly specialised for tourism, besides Lake Balaton. The agrarian regions with many tiny villages are also dominant. The region has a special economic enclave, Paks, where the only Hungarian nuclear power station was sited. The Mecsek Hills coal mining (Komlo) shows features of features. The long term regional development concept of South Transdanubia would be made up from the concepts of the specific small regions. The region cannot rely on a substantial central state support in the future, either, and this give the local initiatives and innovation the most important role.

B.A. Griffith (Biographies)

I was born on November 16,1908, in Hamilton, Ontario. I was only three years old when, for the betterment of my father’s health, my parents sold their home in Hamilton and bought a small farm in the Niagara Peninsula, near the tiny village of Fruitland, some 10 miles east of Hamilton.

Evaluation of the Influence of Illiteracy on Neuropsychological Performances by Elderly Persons

The aim of the present study was to verify the role of the primary notions acquired in early school in the formation of a general strategy in elaboration of information. For this purpose we selected a tiny rural village in southern Italy which comprises a substantial number of elderly persons having very little formal schooling. These subjects were screened using a test battery composed of classic neuropsychological tests and reaction-time tests. In the subjects studied we observed a significant correlation between the amount of education and the neuropsychological performances, although no such correlation existed for reaction times. Subjects having little schooling (up to 3 years) performed better than the illiterate persons on the Constructional Apraxia test and on the Raven Matrices. However, the reaction times were similar in these groups. On this basis we claim that reaction-time tests might form a basic tool in evaluating cognitive performances of persons with very little schooling. Further, the primary notions learned during the first few years of schooling induce an improvement in mental strategies that is well-preserved in the normal aging process.

‘A Bumping Pitch and a Blinding Light’: Henry Manning and the Other Religion

Henry Manning first settled in Sussex when he became John Sargent’s curate at the tiny village of Upwaltham in 1832. A year later Sargent made him his curate at Graffham and Lavington. When John Sargent died in May 1833, his widow presented Manning to the two livings. On December 24 1840, he was appointed Archdeacon of Chichester. He was to remain in Sussex for eighteen years until his resignation from all these preferments in December 1850, and shortly afterwards, in his own words, Manning became a Catholic ‘off his own bat’.

Los Angeles: Communication and multi‐ethnic growth in a pacific megalopolis

This paper examines the factors affecting the rapid growth of Greater Los Angeles, from a tiny village to a Pacific megalopolis in the brief span of 200 years. It describes the immigration and growth patterns of different ethnic minorities drawn from the Asia‐Pacific region. The paper examines the role of communication in the growth of these communities and links with their home countries, factors that have contributed to making Los Angeles the ‘Gateway to the Pacific’. It examines the communication patterns in the context of the recent riots in Los Angeles, illustrating the need for greater inter‐ethnic communication and reduction of economic disparity.

Településhálózat-fejlesztés és településrendezés Romániában

In March 1988 the secretary general of the Romanian Communist Party announced an overall program for village network development and village planning („sistematizarea) which sentenced 8000 villages to liquidation. Later, due to international protest, the plan of destruction was not mentioned by the Romanian propaganda but it was not rejected either. The present paper deals with the background of this program, its historical and conceptual antecedents and its relationship with the program of agricultural development. Within the strongly centralized system of decision making in Romania where a citizen must not freely decide where to live or work where family house construction is hardly licensed, where generations are confined to move into blocks of buildings, it is hard to imagine anything else than a strongly selective development policy which favours large settlements. Units of agricultural production are also concentrated, possibilities for individual and household farming are limited. This development model follows Soviet ideas of the late 1950s which gained adherents all over Eastern Europe but when the drawbacks of overconcentration in production and in settlernent development were becoming obvious, this model was more or less rejected. The acts of 1968 and 1974 on settiement network development were the antecedents of the above mentioned program in Romania. A project of developing small towns, included in these acts, was struck off from the agenda in the mid-1970s then it cropped up again in 1986. From a study of the Romanian village network it emerges that the planned tiny villages can be found on the southern slopes of the Carpathians. Nevertheless, it was not here where the execution of the program started, but it did around Bucharest and in four-five model villages in each county. All forms of modernization, but particularly socialist industrialization which is controlled from the top and striving for prompt results, find themselves opposed with endeavours to preserve local communities. The nationalization („etatization) of society is gaining larger and larger dimensions and the possibilities of individual life are getting ever smaller in Romania in the 1980s. Earlier the peasantry was mainly exploited by economic means — the reorganization of its home place is a new phenomenon.

The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake

I N the spring of I774, a young Englishman named Nicholas Cresswell crossed the Atlantic, entered Chesapeake Bay, and came to safe anchorage on the Rappahannock River. From there, three black oarsmen rowed him north on the bay as far as the broad mouth of the Potomac River, then upriver along the shores of St. Mary's and Charles counties, Maryland. On the afternoon of May 2I, Cresswell reached his destination, the tiny village of Nanjemoy in southwestern Charles County.1 A week later, as he was becoming acquainted with the sights and sounds of the Tobacco Coast, Cresswell attended what he called a Negro Ball near Nanjemoy. Sundays being the only days these poor creatures have to themselves, he wrote, generally meet together and amuse themselves with Dancing to the Banjo, a four-stringed gourd something in the imitation of a Guitar. Some of the slaves also sang droll music indeed, songs in which generally relate the usage they have received from their Masters or Mistresses in a very satirical stile and manner. The newcomer pronounced the music and verse Rude and uncultivated, the dancing most violent exercise ... irregular and grotesque. With a hint of disbelief he concluded that the slaves all appear to be exceedingly happy at these merry-makings and seem as if they had forgot or were not sensible of their miserable condition.2 Cresswell's account is the kind of infrequent literary evidence that historians of the black experience in early America cherish for its clues to

Eighty years of electricity from geothermal steam

Exactly 81 years ago electric energy was produced for the first time from geothermal steam. The first experiment was, in fact, conducted on 4 July 1904 at Larderello, a few tens of kilometers south of Florence, when Prince Piero Ginori Conti lit 5 bulbs with the electricity produced from a small dynamo driven by geothermal steam. The few watts generated that day have, years later, increased to the roughly 3000 Megawatts that are currently being produced throughout the world from the geothermal source. The tiny Tuscan village of Larderello was the cradle of the industrial development of geothermal energy, both for electricity generation and the so-called ''non-electric uses''.

Syrian-Lebanese Women Tell Their Story

An old Arab proverb says that a daughter is born, the very threshold of the house weeps forty days. I read that in a book and asked my mother about it. She confessed that, yes, there was such a proverb, but it was only a proverb, only a saying, and parents certainly didn't mourn forty days over the birth of a daughter. It was more like a week. I was sorry I had asked. Nevertheless, for many years I continued to read about and ask about Arab women, especially those who emigrated from Syria and Lebanon at about the turn of the century.1 After interviewing my mother who came from Mt. Lebanon to America in 1907, I went on to relatives, friends, and friends of friends, mostly in the Boston area, but a few in St. Paul, Minnesota. When I tried to confirm their testimony by consulting written histories, I soon discovered how little had been published on Arab-Americans and how much less on Arab-American women. But even that scattered documentation seemed, in important matters, to support the varied recollections of the women I had interviewed. In addition, it reinforced my own judgment that women born into the traditional, patriarchal cultures of the Near East had experienced radical social and economic change in coming to America and that, as a group, they had adjusted to that change with remarkable success. The story of these women and their daughters, as the two generations told it to me, is the subject of this paper. Of the twenty or more women I interviewed at length, ranging in age from fifty-five to ninety, eight were born in America; most of the others had been brought here as children. Thus, they are almost all, then, the daughters of the generation who made the decision to emigrate. That pioneering generation, now almost extinct, cannot speak for itself, but through the recollections of the daughters we learn something of the mothers and of the life they left behind in the mountain villages of Syria and Lebanon. One woman, who was twelve when her family emigrated in 1910, remembered life in her tiny village and the house she was born in.

The Church in Bolivia

Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.