From Encore Nation member Bill Siemering… Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make , the better”  To me, that means we’re trying new things and learning all through our lives. How wonderful and exciting to live life like this, curious, not knowing how the experiment will work out.

When someone asked Thomas Edison about his years of failure before he was recognized as a distinguished inventor, he replied, “I never had any failures. I learned what didn’t work.”Of course we learn without experiments too. I feel I’m learning all the time, picking up bits of information in the market, having a conversation that twists my mind like a kaleidoscope, so I see new forms from an old image.

One of the joys of traveling to developing countries is to see the world freshly from another perspective.People with very limited material wealth are rich in generosity of spirit, dedication to excellence in their work and in building vibrant communities.

This accumulated lifelong learning is one of the many reasons I feel these are the best years of my life.The past experiments just create a hunger for more.

My new project with Developing Radio Partners is the most challenging of my life; if it works, it could provide better information to those who need it most, people living mainly in rural areas of developing countries who rely on radio as their most important medium.Information is currency that can bring people out of poverty. The project could improve the lives of millions. Or it could fail to catch the imagination of donors who could make it real.

In our neighborhood fish market, the owner had collected aphorisms and posted them on the wall.One said, “A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit.” That’s what we at the Encore site are doing, men and women.

The first radio station in the United States was at the University of Wisconsin, a land grant university with a strong commitment to extending the resources to then mainly farmers and their families.So the original meaning of "to scatter seeds" – still my favorite metaphor for our work. We’re all scatterers of seeds, aren’t we?They are all little experiments.We share our ideas, some collected over a lifetime, others just picked up today, with the hope they will take root and nourish a friend, colleague, family member or a stranger. We scatter them freely and widely.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, who championed human rights and protested the killing of peasants in El Salvador, wrote: "We plant seeds that will one day grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing they will hold future promise.  We lay foundations that will need further development.  We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities."