FORTUNE Small Business: Spinning Straw Houses

Spinning straw houses

Red Deather Development Group helps build Native American communities.

By Herman WongSeptember 15, 2008: 8:58 AM EDT

(Fortune Small Business) — Cheyenne elder Winfield Russell is a real-life Joe Leaphorn. Like the character from the Tony Hillerman crime novels, Russell was a tribal criminal investigator, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the past ten years he has lived in a drafty old trailer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana.

But in July, Russell, 60, moved into a new two-bedroom house with a solar-powered water heater and a covered porch, thanks to a gang of 125 reservation residents and volunteers, assembled by the Red Feather Development Group, who built the house in 28 days.

“We do it with the community, not for them,” says founder Robert Young, a former retail entrepreneur who now works full-time for the group. “It’s a better investment.”

The Case of the Nose

The other day I spotted a nose I had seen before.

Not overly long or wide, but fitting perfectly in the face, round at the tip. A cute button nose.

Many people likely have similar noses, proboscises that are only a bump or two from being twins. Men and women with these near equal noses have probably met before, under a pretext other than the uncanny semblance of a facial feature, or have seen them on the streets.

But that is not what I am talking about here. What I saw was the same nose, a phenomenon I had never witnessed in my life. Not in San Francisco, Davis, my trips to LA or DC, in Japan or Beijing, or of what I saw in Thailand, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

What we have then, is a mystery.

The original, though I’m not sure that is the best way to refer to it, belonged to my girlfriend’s sister. It was a self-given present. She has since gotten married, and moved to the US. That her nose, or its copy, remains here in Seoul convinces me that something is amiss, more so because I was recently told that it is not the most popular shape.