Jose Arocha’s blog

This is not about the divide created by the 101 between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto.  It is about another type of divide.  Erik, who just happened to cross the Atlantic from Sweden, told us this story he faced today on his first day of the 2005-2006 version of the Digital Vision fellowship at Stanford University.  He went straight from the airport to IKEA to buy a mattress.  He was quick as he knows his way around this Swedish store.  When he reached the shipping service, the guys at IKEA told him they could not delivered the mattress but until Wednesday of the next week.  So he resolved to call a cab and take the mattress by himself.  The lady from the cab service told Erik that they did not service East Palo Alto.  Her first excuse was that it was not a safe place to provide their service.  Erik insisted that he was at IKEA just at the entrance of the town and the cab would park in a safe area within the installations.  "No, I am sorry" he got on the other side of the phone.   Erik could not believe he was facing a sort of a market segregation on his very first day, just across the street from the very core of Sillicon Valley.  He was facing the same reality of many underserved communities in every single country around the world with no access to services just because either they are not "nice" neighborhoods, there is no enough wealth in the community to justify the investments or not enough votes to care of them.  At the end, the lady mentioned they had an agreement with other cab services to split the areas of service and East Palo Alto was not their area.  Oh well.  Erik was determined to sleep in his mattress that night and decided to solve the problem his way.  He crossed 101 to Palo Alto with a mattress on his shoulder and then called the cabs to pick him up.   This was the Erik’s way of crossing the divide and get access to the service he needed in the first place.  With such determination, I look forward to what Erik will achieve this year at Stanford.  Erik crossed the 101 divide as a consecuence of confronting a more complex one, the prejudice we create towards the unknown in our minds.  A great challenge and opportunity for social entrepreneurs.

I am Jose Arocha.  My
home town is Venezuela.  My interest is to create new means, tools and
services,  so people at home can help each other.

I grew up in a country in crisis.  Much of what I saw around was
crisis, communities in misery, vulnerable, excluded from decent life, excluded
from access to decent social and public services, excluded from access to job
opportunities, with little trust in the system and many times in each other.  During my life span, poverty has gone from 33% to close to 80% today.

However, there is a reserve of people and institutions doing the work and building a future for the country.  I want to join this effort.  I also want to contribute to improve our reality into something
more hopeful, promising, positive.  I am
dedicated to create new opportunities so people at home can help each other and
increase the social, cultural and economic wealth of our  communities.

This is and has been my genuine me.