Hello Mohammad,
First, please understand that our leaders are all volunteers and they do not get paid to offer their knowledge here, freely to our members. They hold "day jobs" and they are often very busy working on projects and so they sometimes take days to write back to me and my wife, and we build this site.
No, we do not think you are stupid and we do not think that you are a terrorist. We have many Arab members and some of our leaders and authors are Arab. Some of the countries represented here in the COW's leadership team are Syria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Kuwait and others.
We are proud to say that we are a worldwide community of people that work hard to help and to understand one another. While we are indeed human and sometimes issues arise that can highlight our differences as people and the different cultures we all hail from, we are also very committed to working as a worldwide community that may help in some small way to bring understanding between us all. To that end, many of our Arab leaders and members interact and are friends with our Jewish leaders and members. We sometimes joke that we are the
real United Nations, without all the mess and expense of the fancy limousines or the diplomats and their high cost parties.
To see our leaders and the countries they represent, please visit:
http://leaders.creativecow.net/
So, please do not feel that anyone here looks at you in the manner in which you expressed. That is simply not the case.
As to becoming a COW Leader, that comes about by the COW Team selecting new leaders from among the people who post answers and help for other members. We watch for those members who are actively helping others and whose posts prove that they are truly helping lead the forum they post to, so we write them and ask them to make it official by joining the team.
We never put up new leaders who have not been involved in the site. We look for active members who have been contributors and who are already leading. So, the likelihood that we will add a new leader who has not been active in the COW forums, is very unlikely. It is not a matter of where they hail from but is due to the fact that becoming a leader in the COW is built on recognizing the ones who are already leading by helping.
We spend many many thousands of dollars every month building a site to help people around the world to be better at what they do. All of our services are free. The only items we sell are the DVDs and that is because we work with our leaders to help them publish and sell their titles. But all our tutorials, podcasts, newsletters, our magazine, etc., are all free. Because of this, we do not get involved in direct sponsorships of students or others that ask us for help. We are already helping many hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and therefore do not have the resources to help beyond that. When we do help someone with direct money sponsorships, it is to help one of our leaders whom we know is in trouble and needs assistance.
As to the way to get DVDs of the Creative COW Master Series to you there in Iran, I do not know. We are only set up one way to work and that is with PayPal. We are a small company that is built up of only 5 people that do all of this and it is a LOT of work and we do not have every option available to us due to us being such a small company.
So, in the end, I do not know what to tell you as to why Andrew didn't write you back -- as Andrew's company has grown so much that he rarely posts in the COW any longer -- or why Aharon Rabinowitz didn't write you back. I suspect that Aharon is very busy as he and his wife are expecting a new baby and he is working very hard to get things ready for this new addition to their family.
Tim Wilson may interact here in this thread, as he might know more about the politics of mailing to Iran. I do not do that part of the business, so I have no idea whatsoever as to if or how we can mail to Iran. I do know that we cannot mail to Cuba and a few others places. If Iran is one of those places, I do not know.
I hope that I have been of some help in getting you to understand what the COW is and isn't, and how and why we function as we do.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world
really needs now is an undo button.
