Barco-casa em Amsterdã

Você já imaginou fazer o seu barco de casa? É isso que muitos holandeses fazem. O barco vira residência fixa para muita pessoas, que passam o ano morando ancoradas aos canais. O barco funciona como uma casa normal com eletricidade, gás, aquecimento para o inverno e com acesso à água. Esses barcos-casa são encontrados por toda a Holanda em canais onde a água é calma e navegável. Lá é possível alugar barcos para morar como se aluga apartamentos, uma opção que é viável para muitos pois os alugueis dos barcos-casa costumam ser mais baratos do que os alugueis convencionais. Mas se o barco for luxuoso, o aluguel será obviamente mais caro. Outra curiosidade é que o proprietário do barco deve pagar a hipoteca como pagaria para morar em qualquer casa, sendo que a propriedade aonde o barco está localizada pertence à prefeitura. Normalmente os barcos não saem do canal pois estão ligados à circuitos elétricos de luz e gás, e assim ficam a maior parte do tempo estacionados.

Restaurante "In de Waag" em Amsterdã

    O restaurante “In the Waag” no centro da capital da Holanda escolheu ter como prédio um lugar com uma história bem interessante: o edifício costumava ser uma casa de pesagem no tempo medieval. A casa era de grande importância comercial no tempo em que a cidade Amsterdã começava a se formar, pois era necessário pesar animais, materiais de construção, matérias primas, etc. O fato curioso é que, no tempo da inquisição da igreja católica contra os protestantes, a casa era usada para pesar pessoas que o governo desconfiava serem bruxas. Acreditava-se que as bruxas, por suas características mágicas, não afundariam debaixo da água, ao contrário de uma pessoa normal. A lei era que se uma pessoa pesava menos do que um pato, sendo que patos flutuam, era comprovado que essa pessoa era mesmo uma bruxa, e assim, devia ser enforcada. Na verdade, é provável que a pesagem fosse alterada para provar que protestantes deviam realmente ser bruxas, afinal hoje em dia todos sabem que uma pessoa, bruxa ou não, nunca pesa menos do que um pato.

    Instalado nesse edifício, o restaurante “In the Waag” é muito famoso pela sua comida típica holandesa, e por sua decoração interior medieval. Ele é iluminado com cerca de 300 velas que devem ser trocadas muitas vezes diariamente, velas que aliás, dão um charme especial ao lugar. Quem entra para almoçar ou jantar no restaurante dificilmente pensa em bruxas.

Típica casa holandesa

Quando uma pessoa celebra seu aniversário na Holanda, amigos e parentes devem dar o parabéns para a família toda, incluindo o parceiro do aniversariante (namorada ou namorada). Muitas pessoas chegam até a presentear os membros da família com pequenas lembranças, livros ou cartões,  por causa do aniversário de seu filho ou filha. Os holandeses acreditam que a família toda celebra o aniversário do seu ente, não só o aniversariante, e por isso o parabéns é coletivo.

Outra curiosidade é que o aniversariante muitas vezes trabalha para servir seus convidados durante sua festa de aniversário. Parece que esse povo tem mesmo prazer de servir o outro, então ser educado é para eles um dever pois fazem questão de ver seus convidados satisfeitos.

Click here to listen.

Kumaran Thillainadarajah demonstrating Smart Skin to a group of high school students.

Kumaran Thillainadarajah is one of eight UNB  students and a professor in a small startup company, with one idea that is about to break through: smart skin. After winning 60,000 dollars at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation competition and being chosen to participate in the CBC’s Dragons’ Den, he and his team are ready to go into the real world and sell their product.

“We’re the first people in the world doing this,” said Kumaran Thillainadarajah, creator of smart skin.

Smart skin is a material that is sensitive to touch because it’s made of carbon nanotubes that are conductive to electricity and that can measure the intensity of touch from a light stroke to a hard squeeze.

The students see their product as the next step in the video game industry because smart skin is closer to human skin, and it can make virtual interactions seem real.

Smart skin could be made to fit around a joystick, and when people play sports on the video game they could squeeze and have more functions. Smart skin could tell people if they’re playing tennis wrong, if they’re squeezing the racket too hard.

“This material is the key. Pressure sensors have been around for decades, but the difference between our pressure sensors and ordinary pressure censors is that our smart skin can go right where other materials can’t,”he said.

“A hundred thousand of those carbon nanotubes would fit on the head of a needle. That’s how small it is.”

Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical carbon molecules that are stronger than steel, but also flexible and soft, and they conduct more electricity than copper. These molecules are part of nanotechnology, a science that studies the matter of the smallest existing particles: atoms.

Smart skin started when Thillinadarajah and his professor Chibante were asked to make a glove for the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME), that was stronger and more resistant than the ones in the market. But they realized they could do much more with carbon nanotubes, because they could fit in pressure sensitive sensors into the glove.

The original idea was to apply smart skin to prosthetics, and to give people with amputated limbs a sense of touch, but the students are having a hard time translating the sense of touch from the machine – smart skin – to a human being’s brain.

“Prosthetics is a very small market, it’s something I really hope we can do, but that’s not going to be able to fund this whole operation,” Thillainadarajah said.

Besides the video game industry, students plan to sell smart skin to car companies and to the athletics industry. In cars, smart skin could be wrapped around the wheel, so that it can notice when the drivers are falling asleep and wake them up. For athletics, the idea is to create shoes that are sensitive to touch and that can help athletes practice. It can tell them what they’re doing wrong, if they’re pressing too hard, and it can teach them how to correct these mistakes.

The students came second at the UNB CIBC business plan competition last fall, and they have won the Atlantic Engineering Competition for innovative design and the social awareness award at the Canadian Engineering competition in the end of last year.

The students have recentely cashed in 60,000 dollars in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition for Best Presentation, Best Student Venture, and for the prize of Young Entrepreneur.

They will use the money to build their company, and they plan to be in the market by 2011.

Smart Skin is also going to CBC’s Dragons’ Den in the summer, which is a televised business competition that has entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of Canadian business experts. These business millionaires, or dragons, choose the best company and then fund their projects.

Bakesale at St. Thomas University's cafeteria.

John McKendy, on the far right, and his sociology students.

The man standing in line at the cafeteria has a long beard, the kind you might see monks wear in a monastery. His shoes are worn, stained with a beige hue from years of use. His brown khaki pants hang loosely from his body, matching a plain white t-shirt.

As he approaches the cash counter, he sees someone he knows. Putting his coffee down, he waves his hands and smiles. “How’s it going?” he says. The line has moved, but he doesn’t notice it’s his turn to pay. Then he suddenly shifts his eyes from his friend to the cashier and hands her some money. Taking some change in his hand, McKendy and his friend stroll into the cafeteria, with McKendy listening to his companion and nodding his head.

That’s how I imagine John McKendy even though I never met him. But ever since October 31, 2008, everyone at my university in Fredericton has come to know the bearded man as the pacifist professor who was murdered by his own son-in law. Many people already knew McKendy because of his volunteer work in Africa, or because they had taken a sociology class with him, but now everyone was talking about him – because of the horrible way he died.

But John McKendy’s students want people know who he was, not just how he died.

They want to keep his memory alive, through events on campus such as bake sales, coffee house concerts, and just by talking about what made him the special person he was.

“We all knew we had to do something,” says Karolyn Martin, a former student and organizer of some of the events to honour his memory.

A few weeks after McKendy was killed, Martin and Amanda Jardine started talking about ways they could raise money – and soon they were sharing their ideas with other students who knew McKendy and who also wanted to do something the remember him.

“That’s what he was really about, people coming together, communities coming together,” Martin said.

John McKendy’s legacy is in the students’ hands. It’s their mission to carry on – or attempt to carry on – his social work and his dream of an equal society.

McKendy was planning to return to Africa this summer as a volunteer for the religious group he was affiliated to – the Quakers. Even though McKendy can’t go to Africa, students want to raise money to send someone in his place, or to send money directly to the programme McKendy worked with in Africa.

Through events on campus, students will inform people about the social causes John McKendy supported, his mission in Africa and his involvement with the Quakers, a religion that’s dedicated to peacekeeping.

“I know he was looking forward to returning to Africa, but at the same time sad that he had to leave the students here, to leave his family, but he was really interested in what he was doing over there,” Martin said.

McKendy had volunteered in Burundi, Africa the two previous summers through a Quaker programme called the Africa Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI). In Africa, McKendy helped build Aids clinics for women and he worked on anti-violence projects that encouraged people to work out their differences by talking to each other in circles as equals.

“The people in Burundi are feeling a significant loss with John’s absence right now,” Martin said.

John McKendy’s friends in Africa have gathered to honour him in a memorial service in early November. The children McKendy worked with in Africa have also sent letters to his family saying how much they miss him and how much he meant to them.

Burundi is a small country in Eastern Africa that borders Rwanda. The country is still affected by a12 year long civil war between the two ethnic groups of the region, the Hutu and Tutsi, that took place in the middle of the 20^th century. Today, Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world, marked by corruption and instability.

“A lot of people talk about helping and doing things, but he’s like, you know what I’m going to go there. And not because he wanted to become an advocate for social justice or anything, and not because he thought he was going to save the world, but because he genuinely cared,” Martin said.

Since McKendy was a member of the Quakers, the students decided to give the money raised to the Canadian Friends Service Community (CFSC), an organization that acts in behalf of the Quakers.

The sociology society meets almost every week to plan and organize events for McKendy. The students hope to create an annual event in John McKendy’s honour, held at the same day and at the same time, to let other students know about their beloved professor.

“I don’t want him to be forgotten,” Martin said.

The students raised 600 dollars in their first event, a Valentine Day’s bake sale at James Dunn Hall that had professors, students, and members of the community as volunteers.

“The bake sale was a huge example of how many people were touched by John because every five seconds there was somebody else coming with a plate full of goodies being like: ‘Here take these’,” she said.

Karolyn Martin, one of the organizers of the events, says she got to know McKendy through seminar classes. Students and professor talked to each other in circles and they shared personal experiences, she says.

His classes opened her mind to new ideas and made her look at the world in different ways.

“I don’t think any professor pushed us as much as John did,” Martin said.

Amanda Jardine, former student of John McKendy, was having a hard time dealing with the nature of his death, but helping to organize events in McKendy’s honour has made it easier for her to cope with his passing.

“I could almost hear him saying from wherever he was, you know, don’t be sad about this, you know, I’ve worked for peace my whole life and I want you to carry forth,” she said.

Jardine wants to continue his mission, helping to carry on what McKendy’s causes, but she doesn’t think he’ll ever be forgotten.

“Whether you knew him for five minutes or five days or five years or even five decades like some people had, he always had an impact on people,” Jardine said.

Jardine says McKendy was a funny guy, joking about the clothes he wore and the earring he had on one of his earlobes. He was also a shy guy at times, because he was more of a listener than a talker.

“He was such an awesome energy to have in a room,” she said.

“Some people still feel connected to him because he just had that ability to sort of make people open up and to find a way to relate to them.”

To her, his death was just a reminder that people need to take action and live by McKendy’s example.

“I think his legacy is just to really do unto others,” she said.

In a small city like Fredericton news travels fast, and it lingers. It’s unusual to hear of a murder, and more unusual to hear of a professor who was murdered, and it’s even more unlikely to come across the story of a professor who lived for social justice and died in a violent way.

It’s now four months after his death. These four months have been filled with headlines that said: “RCMP close case in Fredericton professor’s slaying”, “Professor who embraced nonviolence slain,” “RCMP failed to act over threats to professor.” There’s talk of RCMP investigations, and talk over what happened the night of his death, there’s a lot of talk and curiosity.

The air hanging upon the rooms when people say McKendy’s name is still heavy. People’s speech is followed by a pause and a sigh. The community has been in disbelief because no one can push aside the manner in which he died. People forget about John McKendy’s worn out shoes and the double-hand wave he used to greet people.

For McKendy’s family and friends, it’s hard to deal with his death because of who he was.

Dawne Clarke keeps McKendy’s picture in her computer screen so she can look at him every day. She looks up to her screen, whishing she could talk to him and ask for advice. She thinks of sending John emails, but the second she realizes she can’t, she feels the pain once again as the memories of his death return.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over John’s passing, what will happen is I’ll just learn to live with it,” she said.

Clarke is a sociology professor at St. Thomas University and she was one of his students 20 years ago. After she married Steven Pidysocky, a good friend of McKendy’s, she became officially his friend. Both Clarke and her husband are Quakers, and they’re discussing what they’ll do in the future to honour John McKendy. They see their role as communicators, telling others about who McKendy was and why he was special to them.

Clarke imagines that John would be embarrassed by the attention drawn to his death. He wouldn’t want any of that.

“He tried to stay as far away from the spotlight as he could,” she said.

She is still struggling with the irony of John’s death, wondering a thousand times why, and wishing she could have done something to help.

After McKendy’s service, Clarke was talking to his mother Bernadette McKendy. She held Clarke’s hand and said “That’s the price sometimes that you have to pay for putting such a wonderful child in the world.”

When Clarke saw McKendy and he asked her how she was doing, she could never get away with “fine.” With him, she had to tell the truth.

“When you talked to John you knew you were being listened to. He was the kind of person who would never pause when he’s listening to you. When he was there, he was present, he would listen, he would ask questions, he cared. He really cared.”

With McKendy, Clarke felt she could confide all her secrets without fear or hesitation. He would come by Clarke’s office to check on her at times when she was about to burst in tears. “I was just wondering how you’re doing,” he would say to Clarke. It’s like he knew something wasn’t right.

“He was the safest man I knew,” she said.

When Clarke was pregnant with her first daughter attending John’s class, he picked the baby up, burped her and fed her, right in the middle of class.

“I never said anything, I never blinked. I never had that sort of oh, my God that’s my child fear.”

“Actually unselfish to a fault, and this is ultimately what might have lead to his passing. John devoted everything to everybody else,” she said.

Clarke can’t change what happened to McKendy, but she’ll strive to lead a better life following his example.

Theatre St. Thomas' actors, and student actrice Sarah Sovedt on the far right.

With economic crisis and recessions, arts funding is the first to be cut.  Although art is not as essential as health care, it still plays a key role on people’s lives. But what’s the real importance of art? What function does it serve?  I talked to some artists in Fredericton to find out why art is a part of our lives.

Click here to listen.

Marilu Hynes and her son Matthew.

There’s something about Matthew Hynes and Mackenzie Carr. At school, they spend lunch in the classroom, sitting together, hanging out. Sometimes Mackenzie draws, but not always. They’re both shy, often grinning and blushing, drawing their arms forward in an awkward way. They don’t waste words. They talk when they have to – their friendship is that simple.

They’ve been friends since they met each other, five years ago, and now they have more reasons than ever to stick together. Mackenzie – a little ten year-old girl, with bright blue eyes – has a rare type of ovarian cancer, and her friend Matthew is campaigning to help her fight the disease.

The campaign is called the ‘Road of Hope.’ Matthew says the distance from the school to Mackenzie’s house is 56,313 inches. Since a loony measures an inch, he wants to collect that many loonies to cover the distance. So far, Matthew has collected 7,350 dollars for Mackenzie.

“There’s enough people in Fredericton that can spare a loony,” Matthew said.

The money is supposed to help Mackenzie’s parents with everyday expenses, such as gas and food, but it also gives them strength to fight cancer.

“We don’t really care what they use the money for: if they use it to pay their gas back and forth from the IWK [Health Centre], if they use it to call home, if they use it for food. Because we know it’s just helping to take some pressure of their family,” Matthew’s mother, Marilu Hynes said.

Mackenzie was happy, before leaving for chemotherapy, in Halifax, last week. She told Matthew, “I think I beat it this time.” Mackenzie and her parents aren’t afraid to drive to Halifax anymore.

“What Matthew has done for Mackenzie was give her hope. She had a couple of weeks that she didn’t think about cancer, she felt really good and she felt like she beat it. That means more than the money,” Amy Philips, Mackenzie’s mother, said to Marilu Hynes.

Matthew is anxious because the chemotherapy hasn’t worked, and the cancer is spreading through Mackenzie’s body. He was expecting his friend to be back by now.

“I try not to think about it,” he said.

Mackenzie Carr was first diagnosed with cancer in the end of last year, and she got through it. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in February, and has been going through rounds of chemotherapy since then.

Matthew has been praying for Mackenzie every night. The day when he saw her pull out some of her hair at school was when he knew he had to do something.

“He didn’t realize how sick she was. That really hit home for him, to see his friend loose her hair, and realize that this is cancer and this is serious,” Marilu Hynes said.“He said,‘I want to do something solid.’”

The campaign helps Matthew deal with the pain of seeing a friend go through cancer. It keeps him positive, and makes him forget for a while what’s ahead.

“This isn’t just helping Mackenzie, it’s helping Matthew too because he’s able to do something for his friend. A lot of people say ‘I wish I could do something’; he’s doing something. And maybe that’s helping him to be prepared and supportive,” Marilu Hynes said.

The story of Matthew and Mackenzie has moved many people in the Fredericton community – perhaps because people find themselves in an almost unison understanding of this battle called cancer.

“Everyone has been touched by cancer. Everyone knows somebody or they’ve heard of somebody who had cancer. People are happy to give a loony,” Marilu Hynes said.

There’s something about Matthew and Mackenzie’s friendship. They’re two ten year-olds who know more about cancer than many adults. They have a childish spark about them, – the energy, the smile – with the wisdom of an elder person.

“They may not have a hundred things in common and they may not see each other every day, but when their together they just pick up where they left off. They’re on the same page. They’re both old souls, they’re very wise, and they both see more and understand more than most ten year olds would,” Marilu Hynes said.

Gillen is a large man. He looks like he’s built up of tires, a larger tire on the edge of the seat and a slimming one at the top. He wears square rimmed glasses and has straight fine hair like his daughter did. He’s quiet and only says what he has to. But he’s straight forward, says what he means.

When I asked him about his life, he said “I’m just a cab driver”, and turned back to the road. He’s the kind of guy that keeps his eyes on the road and his arms on the wheel.

When his 16 year old daughter died in an alcohol related accident, his doctor suggested he keep a journal to help him cope with the loss. The journals developed into an internet blog called “A night in the life of a Fredericton cabby”.

“There’s something intriguing about what goes on in the cab,” Gillen said.

The blog is a weekly journal of what goes on Mike Gillen’s cab. It also has pictures and film footages of the people that have been there.

“In the past 6 years, I have seen people laugh, cry, get undressed, get dressed, fight, puke, bleed, have sex, give birth, get drunk, get arrested in my cab,” Gillen’s internet profile says.

Mike Gillen keeps the people he writes about in the blog anonymous, and asks permission to film or photograph them.

The site gets over a hundred hits a day, a total of 16,353 hits from when he created it. Many people have started requesting Gillen, cab 24, through the blog, and have become good friends of his.

“I need an outlet for all these stories, and the blog happens to be it,” he said.

Mike Gillen works 12-hour night shifts from Wednesday to Saturday, and spends the rest of his time updating the blog. He says it’s an extension of his work.

“I’m just a guy trying to make a living , pay my bills, raise a family, looking forward to vacations just like any other guy. This [the blog] is just something I do as part of my job,” he said.

Mike Gillen took me down the streets of Fredericton and told me stories that happened in his cab. He talked little about himself. He’s the guy sitting on the front seat of a van, invisible to the people on the back. But he’s there.

I asked him if that was his daughter’s face on his arm. “Yeah, that’s my daughter there. She was a pretty girl,” Gillen said.

He didn’t charge me for the ride.