By Amelia Glynn 

Picture At Right: men washing woman's hand as part of an honoring ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa

By Amelia Glynn

When Will Keepin, PhD, author and president of the Satyana Institute, a non-profit service and training organization, invited the audience to stand and participate in a group exercise, I felt myself gripped by a familiar panic.

It's hard out there for a wannabe biodiesel homebrewer. You can spend weeks clicking through forums and how-to sites, but sometimes all you really need is some hard time getting your hands dirty before you understand the basics. (Or maybe that's just me. My eyes tend to glaze over at the sheer volume of biodieselry available these days.) So this summer, instead of learning to kayak or make my own skis, I'm going to study under one of the many self-proclaimed masters of transesterification at a biodiesel workshop.