Equilibre

By aredien© 1993 All wars produce profits for a select group of companies, most of whom either participate in the bloodshed, by producing weapons and munitions, or in cleanup and reconstruction, such as building companies and pane glass suppliers. However, French Catholic entrepreneur Alain Michel has found a more Christian way to cash in on the escalating violence in the Balkans and eastern Europe. His Lyon-based company, EquiLibre International, transports merchandises and people to war-ridden countries and other ill-fated places often lacking such services. It's true that most humanitarian missions in places like Bosnia and Nagorno Karabakh are non-profit, but EquiLibre International has found a niche as a profitable supplier to non-profit companies. Its major task, accounting for 60% of revenues, is to carry humanitarian supplies for EquiLibre, Mr. Michel non-profit association that provides emergency relief principally in Bosnia, Croatia and Romania. Yet EquiLibre International also counts the U.S. State Department Office of Foreign Disaster Aid (OFDA), the EC, and private companies such as Creusot-Loire as clients. Mr. Michel's calling into humanitarian assistance came in 1984. Owner of an equitation and restaurant complex at that time, Alain Michel wasn't particularly inclined toward working for charity organizations, but a close encounter with poverty and suffering changed everything. A priest he knew in Lyon asked for his help in transporting medical equipments to a Polish pediatric hospital lacking the basics to keep its patients alive. ``I couldn't ignore what I saw there,'' says Mr. Michel, ``The doctor had so few supplies that he had to do perfusion on newborns with used adult disposable syringes that nurses had sharpened on whetstones. In the process so many diseases were transmitted that and only 10% of the babies in the hospital made it.'' When the charismatic 49 year-old restaurateur returned to France, he set up an association to transport aide to Poland and the pediatric hospital. He called it EquiLibre, or Balance in English, because of the equilibrium that he wanted to develop between richer nations and lesser ones. The non-profit EquiLibre multiplied its actions and countries of intervention. Convoys delivered food and other emergency supplies to Armenia after the 1988 earthquake, to Romania, to Lebanon. Mr. Michel says that once he begun organizing the firsts humanitarian convoys he became so morally and financially tied to the system he had started that it was impossible for him to stop and go back to his former profession. ``I had borrowed money to buy aid and I had to organize fund-raisers to pay it back. I gave TV shows and organized concerts to raise money. The more EquiLibre became known, the more people asked me to organize missions. The process fed on itself.'' For seven years, the association financed its own humanitarian operations. It paid for the trucks' leases by renting the side panels of the vehicles to advertizing agencies. In 1992, however, Alain Michel met Michel Plouzennec, a 36 year-old trucking company manager. ``I was looking for meaning in my life,'' says Mr. Plouzennec, ``I had been working for 14 years and was starting to wonder what I was working for.'' Mr. Plouzennec wanted to do volunteer work for a while. "I thought I would do my humanitarian good-deed and feel better after it.'' Instead he and Mr. Michel decided create EquiLibre International, a profit-making transport company headed by Mr. Plouzennec. Since EquiLibre International reinvests all of its profits in the association EquiLibre, the transport company remains a non-profit venture. However according to Mr. Michel its creation was necessary. ``In order to get a trucking company's license in France we had to be recorded on the register of commerce, something an association cannot do,'' he says. Moreover, a for-profit company, unlike a non-profit company, can recover the value-added tax it pays on its commercial operations. So Alain Michel took advantage of a 1985 French law authorizing a limited-liability company to have only one shareholder and started a for-profit company, EquiLibre International, whose sole shareholder is the nonprofit association EquiLibre. As a profit-making company, EquiLibre International can recover the VAT it pays. People familiar with EquiLibre and Mr. Michel himself think of the association and the enterprise as a whole since one couldn't exist without the other, although they are clearly separate in the law. Feeling quite comfortable about mixing business with charity, he says ``Yes we make a profit out of humanitarian actions but as long as this business is clean, I see no problem with making money since all of it is reinvested in EquiLibre,'' he says. According to Mr. Plouzennec his business is stainless indeed. ``We have an ethic, you know. We cannot accept to transport just anything and certainly not weapons.'' Working principally for EquiLibre doesn't keep Mr. Plouzennec from stopping in Germany to load in vegetables on its way back from Poland or in Croatia for construction materials freight after a mission in Romania. War in Ex-Yugoslavia projected EquiLibre among the top largest European non-governmental organizations (NGO), together with more widely known associations like Medecin du Mondeand Medecin sans Frontiere. The notoriety EquiLibre gained through self-financed humanitarian missions brought businesses to EquiLibre International as private charity associations and institutions such as the EC called on EquiLibre to organized and transport emergency missions. Among others, the French association Reporters sans Frontieres (Without Borders) hired EquiLibre to transport 80 tones of newsprint for the Oslobodenje (Liberation) newspaper in Sarajevo. The Office of Foreign Disaster Aid (OFDA) also asked EquiLibre to transport 2500 tones of food, medicines, and clothes to Bosnia during the next four months. Eveline Rivoallon, director assistant of Creusot-Loire Industrie, a unit of Usinor-Sacilor SA, says her company decided last winter to ``do something'' for one of its clients in Sarajevo. ``I choose EquiLibre because of its good reputation,'' she said. The company hired EquiLibre to bring provisions to the employee's families. ``We are going to call EquiLibre again at the end of the year to send another convoy,'' she said. EquiLibre International, created Jan. 1, 1992, expects its 1993 profit to jump to 18 million francs ($3.1 million) from 9.5 million francs in 1992. The truck fleet grew to 11 trailers this year from six in 1992. In addition the group owns 23 smaller trucks, 12 vans and 1 bus. But the humanitarian enterprise's concept doesn't appeal to everyone. Medecin du Monde Director Pierre Pratier says condescending, ``I won't says that we can't stand them, but like us when we started EquiLibre is often improvising and lacks professionalism.'' Bernard Coq a French journalist who wrote a book on humanitarian organizations in Ex-Yugoslavia says, ``Because In Bosnia EquiLibre's trucks are always well guarded people wonder what they transport and since it is still a young organization other NGO are suspicious.'' He adds that for NGO such as Medecin du Monde EquiLibre International's profit making effort isn't appreciated. ``Making money out of charity is a sensitive issue and it's only normal that people get suspicious about it. That is why we keep our records open to those who ask,'' says Mr. Michel. Alain Michel says he is paid 20,000 French francs a month ($3,454), doesn't drive a company car and doesn't have a expense account. At the beginning religion wasn't the driving factor in Mr. Michel humanitarian effort, but today he says ``it helps me to go beyond my limit and to keep faith in my work. I go to mass more than just once a week,'' he says. In 1993 the restless humanitarian entrepreneur surpassed himself. First, at home where he developed new marketing technics. Then, abroad were he has diversified beyond transport into other areas. With the advice of Jean-Louis Baron a successful textile businessman, Alain Michel launched a mail order service to sell products displayed in the non-profit association's monthly. In Presence Dans Le Monde, the association's magazine, members can choose among other products, between brut or rose's special ``Cuvee de L'Espoir'' champagne. The add praising the exquisite taste of the wine tells the readers that for each bottle sold 70 French francs ($12), 10 French francs ($1.7) are used for EquiLibre actions for the children. ``Buy the champagne of hope and share the joy of your celebration with kids suffering from hunger, waror illnesses,'' reads the add. Mr. Michel however did forget his humanitarian duty, ``Alcohol is dangerous for your health, drink with moderation,'' he warns. Mr. Baron was among the initiators of a placement fund recently made to members through the the association. ``Instead of the usual donation we give people the opportunity of placing their money and to keep the interests.'' EquiLibre works with an investment company and suggest placements in mutual fund to interested members. EquiLibre receives 0.4% of the investment company's management fee. Mr. Baron expects the pay off from this service to soon become very profitable. Jean-Louis Baron was EquiLibre's financial director for a year before leaving EquiLibre to start his own humanitarian enterprise last August. He came to EquiLibre after his wife and two daughters were killed in a car crash during the summer 1992. His life was falling apart, he says, ``I was questioning my goal in life and wanted to stop doing business. Then, I remembered my friend Alain Michel. We were boy scout together. With EquiLibre I used my entrepreneurial skills for a humanitarian purpose.'' Mr. Michel explains EqiLibre success by the fact that people are becoming increasingly aware that ``We are all players in the world crises. Now people want to get involved,'' he says. Mr. Baron adds, ``People and companies hire EquiLibre because they feel that they are contributing to a good cause.'' Although EquiLibre's humanitarian/enterprise relationship is unique in Europe, other non-profit associations are heavily relying on sponsoring and marketing to finance their actions. UNICEF has been using TV and mailings for a long time. Others use the charity promotion concept. A portion of a product's price is redistributed to the charity organization partner. Benetton works with Caritas for example, Agfa with UNICEF, Neutrogena with Pharmaciens sans Frontieres. However, according to other NGO no one but EquiLibre has been so far in combined charity and business into a profit-making venture. Present in 12 French cities and 17 foreign countries EquiLibre has become a major player in humanitarian emergency missions. But for Alain Michel his success is only ``a drop of water in the ocean,'' he says. ``We are facing situations more and more depressing and dramatic.'' This, however, doesn't keep the enthusiastic enterpreneur from starting new projects. Always ready to tackle desperate situations Mr. Michel believes that family farms are part of the answer to world starvation. Inhis new agriculture school in Lyon, students learns the farming technics they will then teach people in countries where cultivation methodes are inadequate. In the meantime, Alain Michel says he ``finance the school with the sell of the organically grown vegetables we produce,'' he says.

Dead Cold

By aredien © 1992 Washington -- More than 40 Americans have been frozen solid, waiting for science to catch up with what killed them. Another 450 living people also have signed up for a chance at cheating death through cryonics, the process of freezing a body or brain with the intention of bringing it back to life in a better time. For members of the three American cryonics associations, death occurs only when the body is too badly damaged to be preserved. In the meantime, they are only "suspended." "Death does not happen all at once," said Avi Ben-Abraham, a doctor and the president of the American Cryonics Society. "By freezing people in liquid nitrogen, we stop death at its clinical stage." Most cryonists are highly educated, in their late 30s and usually are men, although some couples have arranged to be frozen next to each other. Believers say cryonics does not conflict with religion and their groups even include a few ministers, although most are atheists or agnostics. "Religion and cryonics are both pro-life,"Abraham said. "God gave us the intelligence and knowledge to extend life." Candidates for the big chill must take care of several legal and financial matters while still alive. First, enough money must be put aside so that interest pays eternally for preservation costs and maintenance. Legal arrangements with such group as the ACS also must be made to give full rights over the body and finances of the deceased. This ensures that a revived person won’t come back to life with empty pockets, and if If all goes well, the interest earned could bring back some suspended people as millionaires. Shortly after death, the body is prepared for suspension. The blood is drained and replaced with a substitute designed to protect organs against damage from extreme cold. Then the corpse is frozen at minus 320 degree Fahrenheit in a container of liquid nitrogen -- head first to assure that in case of disaster causing the nitrogen to evaporate the brain would be preserved the longest. ACS’s service provider, Trans Time Inc., then stores the bodies in stainless-steel containers in a warehouse in Oakland, California. The cost of ACS suspension services ranges from $75,000 to $150,000 depending on whether the brain or the entire body is suspended. ACS Vice President Jim Yount said he regrets that no cryonics organizations exist in Russia. He said he would be interested in making connections with Russians because Siberia’s permafrost could be a great help in preserving bodies. Non-believers scoff at the idea of bringing back a frozen corpse and even true believers don’t expect anyone to be revived for another 50 years. In the five past years, Paul Segall, a medical researcher in Berkeley, California, and president of Bio Time Inc., said, "Cryonics has changed from a speculative science where people were just being preserved in the best available ways to a real scientific effort where scientists are using natural and artificial techniques to chill animals to the ice point and then bring them totally back." But even if cryonists never bring a single person back to life, their work can provide valuable medical research. Segall is working on a blood substitute that he says could revolutionize low-temperature bloodless surgery and cryonics. His experiments on hamsters, dogs and baboons show that animals can be revived after about 50 minutes of clinical death near the ice point. Segall says his research will increase from one hour to three hours the operation time during low-temperature surgery. Although his work showed him the limitations of cryonics, he said, "If I die, I don’t have time to wait for research. I want to be frozen with the best techniques available." Cryonists also have to find a way to stop the aging process, said Segall, but according to Dr. Estelle Ramey, a gerontologist and professor at Georgetown University, lab experiments on mice seem to show that increasing life expectancy is possible but stopping the biological clock is not yet possible. "Mother nature is not interested in any species hanging around for a very long time," she said. "All it is interested in is: live long enough to reproduce yourself ... and then get the hell out of the way." Nevertheless, Ramey, 75, does not smile when she talks about cryonic suspension. "I have seen changes in molecular biology that were just unimaginable when I was in school," she said. "I think the field is wide open."

Riding Along with the Cops

By aredien © 1991 Washington, is the nation’s crime capital, the media likes to say. The streets in Southeast are often compared to killing fields and in Northwest, drug dealers, transvestites and prostitutes share sidewalks with the homeless and drug addicts, they say. Eager to see for myself what life is like for the Metropolitan Police Department, I recently participated in two night ride-alongs. One took me through the streets of Southeast’s seventh district, and the other one to the third district in Northwest. Ironically the officers I was riding with in Northwest responded to many more calls than did the officers with whom I rode in Southeast. Not half an hour passed without some action: arrest, robbery, assaults. It is true, however, that when the radio dispatcher in Southeast came on the air, it was for major incidents. I arrived at the Southeast station at 8:30 p.m. expecting that on a Friday night this was a good time to start. I was wrong, an officer told me. "You missed all the actions," he said, telling me that a man had just been shot to death, "He was laying on the sidewalk, bleeding like a pig." The latest Police Department’s statistical crime report, which covers the months of January 1991 through August 1991, clearly shows that crimes in Southeast are more violent than in Northwest. In the seventh district, 97 homicides were committed during that period, while in the third district 31 homicides occurred. However, the total number of thefts was 3,089 in this district, while it was 1,217 in the seventh. Although police interventions were few that night in Southeast, they were often massive. For an arrest of a man accused of carrying a gun, at least five police cars and a helicopter was dispatched to the scene. I was also pretty impressed by the work of an undercover jump-squad, who kicked open an apartment door to rescue a woman allegedly being abused by her husband. The undercover officers wore jump boots, military pants and sweatshirts. They carried their guns on their backs, underneath sweatshirts. They looked strong; they were not the kind of people you would want to run into on your way home late at night. When we arrived on the scene to back up the jump-squad, I noticed that those officers were extremely professional. Before putting handcuffs on the husband, they asked his wife to take the children away to avoid humiliating the father. They also made sure that the woman knew the legal procedure to see her husband, and they gave them both time to speak to each other before taking him away. I stayed in Southeast with the police from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. in which time we answered two calls for domestic violence and made one arrest on charges of possession of an unregistered gun. We actually spent most of our time at Burger King filing out event reports. The third district, in Northwest, covers an area from Harvard Street to L Street, and Connecticut Avenue to 4th Street. After a 45-minute wait in the station, I was finally assigned to Officer Adrien Lancaster who was driving scout car number 98 that Friday night. For the last two years, Lancaster has been working nights and he enjoys it. "Sometimes I can’t wait to come to work; I love my job," he said. He loves his beat too, and after a couple of hours riding in the neighborhood with him, you understand that he knows everybody there. Lancaster knows the prostitutes, the transvestites, the hustlers, the addicts, the cashiers at Seven Eleven; everybody. In Southeast the police’s relationship with the community was limited. The car would slowly pass in the streets, sometime stopping to disperse a group at a street corner, but rarely would the police talk to the people. Here in Northwest Lancaster stopped and chatted for a while with a man standing at the door of an apartment building. I soon realized that the man was a drug dealer. "He gives us a lot of respect," Lancaster later said, "Some just sell in the street and don’t care when we stop in front of them." The man, Lancaster told me, is a police informer. After dispersing a 2 a.m. traffic-jam of cars stopping to pick-up prostitutes, Lancaster pointed one out to me. "This one does it to get money for her drug habit; she is on crack," he said. He was interrupted by a radio-call, "A woman was heard screaming," said the dispatcher. Lancaster switched on his lights and sirens, and stepped on the pedal. He picked up the microphone to answer the call. The car was going at 60 MPH, through red lights, into the lanes of oncoming traffic, and up one-way streets in the wrong direction, "I hope my driving doesn’t bother you," he said. I assured him that I, too, enjoyed it, and he admitted that fast driving for him was the recompense for a job which at times is a bit dull. We arrived on the scene at the same time as three other police cars. Neighbors pointed to the window of the apartment where screams had been heard. With their guns in hand, Lancaster and two other officers ran up the stairs and knocked on the apartment’s door, only to be told that the police were not needed, and that the woman had screamed to call someone in the street. "Yea, she was acting stupid," Lancaster said. When applying for a ride-along with the police, one has to sign a release form stating that the rider won’t sue the government in the event that something happens. I knew I was exposing myself to violent scenes and that I might see a lot of blood. I thought I was ready for it. At 1:45, a call came on the radio. It was for us. A man was hurt, in front of the Seven Eleven. While Lancaster was speeding to the scene, I was trying to prepare myself for the worst. I was nervous. The first thing I remember seeing was a man walking aimlessly in the street. He wore a white T-shirt, which was now red from the blood running from his head to his legs. His entire face was covered with blood, and he was screaming furiously. He tried to tell Lancaster the story: his brother in law attacked him, he said, and took his son away from him. We looked for the brother in law, who lived closed by, and stopped him while he was getting in his car, to go to the hospital, he said. In the fight he broke an arm twisted it backward and cut his upper lip. Once back in the car, Lancaster told me that blood never bothered him. "I have seen so much of it before," he said, adding that when you are born in Southeast, you are exposed to it frequently. Although working at night for two years might seem hard to the majority of people, Lancaster said he is perfectly happy working this shift. He always wanted to be a police officer, "As soon as I turned 21, I was in the academy." His parents are quite proud of him, he said. In Southeast, after the chase and the arrest of the man who carried a gun, an officer made a remark that reflected the general attitude of most officers I met. He turned toward his partner and said, "You know Fonda, I love this job sometimes." --30--

Le hérisson de la famille

Maxim

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