Our friends Deron Triff and Alex Hofmann, co-founders of Changents, were featured this week on ABC News. Changents is a new social networking site that connects innovators on the front lines of social and environmental change with the people who want to help them. Deron and Alex talked about Brad Corrigan's work in Nicaragua and as a featured Change Agent on their site.

Watch the video...

Now you can be a part of Braddigan's story! Join him on Changents and show your support by becoming a backer! In little and big ways, you can stand up and make a difference. As Alex posted on the Changents blog:

"We need our beacons of light. We need our Change Agents. They are living proof that we can change and examples of where we need to go. Let's share their stories, back their efforts, join their teams, carry them forward, pick them up when they fall... protect them. We need them, and they need us. On dark days it seems nearly impossible to imagine... but we can change. We can change."

Show your support and let the world know about Braddigan and his story!

Labels: changents, lachureca, nicaragua

Beleza! Valeu Valeu a todos :) yea that's as far as my portuguese goes after a week rolling through the hills of Brazil... & what a beautiful country? unreal. mountains, trees, every shade of green, cliffs, beaches, & little towns scattered like gravel all over the countryside with some of the warmest smiles you've ever seen wherever we went...

so i've got to rewind the tapes a bit here - back to the the first time i heard mention of this amazing bass player from Brazil... i was in Hawaii hanging with some friends at YWAM when i overheard some of the local musician guys talking about this guy Tiago Machado who was set to return from a few months travels... they said he was a great bass player and remember wondering why that i'd try to cross paths with this guy before heading back to CO... i knew when i heard a friend in Hawaii mention this bass player from Brazil.

Sao Paulo was such a wild experience... i flew in from Nicaragua, 10 hours total of flight time, and arrived at Sao Paulo's Int'l airport at 8:30pm - well we had a gig scheduled for 9:30pm the same night as it turns out and when i got there at 9:20pm we found 1,500 people waiting there for us... it was epic! such a killer cool crew of people and such a warm welcome to Brazil... it really set the tone for the trip, such grace and warmth - i mean we've never played there before, we've not paid our dues in any way, and people were lining up around the block to come in and see us play... really because of three things: 1. Walking on Water's films are big down there and so our music has been there a little ahead of us 2. any int'l band is celebrated down there bc they're super hungry for new music 3. there are a crazy core group of Dispatch fans down there too... unreal - but yea, what a crazy first hour in Brazil being whisked off to an "i must be dreaming" show that was there waiting for us...

so we left the sprawling city of Sao Paulo and headed off into the countryside in our tiny little hatchback of a tour bus! it was hilarious... we were supposed to have a van reserved but the rental shop just shrugged their shoulders and gave us our little turtle of a car... she was a speedy little number though and we must have put in about 400-600km a day - Piritininga, Curitiba, Floripa (Florianopolis), & Guaruja were our stops on this test the waters tour... Rio was on the docket but we had to can it in favor of some other towns... but we'll be back there for sure in January ...

Check out a cool video Rey put together and some photos from Tiago and some friends down there...
-Braddigan

UPDATE: Our friends at Plywood Surfboards wrote a post with photos from our visit (in portuguese). And our friends who came to the show in Floripa serenaded us when we arrived!

Labels: brazil, concert, dispatch, nicaragua, tour

i'm not entirely sure where to begin because i don't actually remember a start to all this... Rather it's been just one little step at a time into a world unlike any i've ever known, and it's all been moving fast... my education in the dump that is, and the building of this new community of family and friends with whom i now have the privilege to share my life with in and among the heaps... so it's every month or so that i'm back down in Nicaragua now, in La Chureca walking along side some of the families there, getting to know the both dark and beautiful reality of their lives... And it's the dustiest kids that i find there with their lightning smiles and unsinkable imaginations that have the strongest hold on my heart, and their fingerprints are just all over my life now- they are stealing their food, fun, and hope from trash- and they're giving me the teaching of my life.

so with every trip i have yet another duffel of stories to unpack and storehouse of photos and memories to share... so many snapshots of this simple yet tragic life of a people that have nothing other than trash to convert into currency, and an endless amount of darkness and light battling at every moment- what has distinguished the last few months' trips though, is that every memory and image is shrouded in smoldering fire and chalky white smoke... it is the dry season and there are more fires and smoke on the horizon than ever before, from burning tires and plastic above ground to spontaneous combustion below from all the natural gas that has built up in the rotting... i've witnessed more corruption, joy, sickness, dirt encrusted smiles, glue huffing, and new little babies than ever before too. how about this one? wild cows and dogs walking alongside a young mother and her kids. she is 9 months pregnant and still working the trash daily looking for anything of value... vultures, fires, and smoke are her context as she sifts through garbage up to her knees carrying a box of plastic... her name is Damaris and her kids are now our kids, her struggle is now our struggle. la lucha. and man is she beautiful in the way that she carries herself.

i fought a handful of laborers with words and prayers in broken spanish who were told to drop a load of old tires just inside the entrance to the dump, right next to a little community of families living in their cardboard and tin shanties... i've never had so much adrenaline inspiring and confusing my spanish, but i got the point across. 2 more minutes into the dump and these tires wouldn't have been a threat to anyone, yet there they were insisting it was their right to dump them quickly... we offered to pay them to load them back up and into the center of the dump, but nothing. so they just dumped all the tires right across from the families just a few feet from some existing fires and drove off, a few of them laughing. i was unsure of the situation but to my core convinced of our purpose, and i was flat out pissed... so we stayed and found a man w a small truck that lived inside the dump and paid him to relocate the tires... and we also saw the weather stir as our emotions ran high as a tempest of rain clouds came in out of nowhere (during dry season?) and whipped up a 5 minute storm which helped us attack the open flames... it took us an hour or so, and we were covered in dirt and black flaked rubber, when all was said and done... but we were able to see these tires burned away from the hearts, heads, hands, and feet of the people that we'd grown to know and love in that community.

trash and people don't go together. these stories are straight from my journal. this stuff is real. thanks for being willing to open your eyes and imagination up to this place... more to come-

Labels: lachureca, nicaragua