Peg Kerr's Journal

And now 250 people in Mitslam Village in the Tigray region of Ethiopia have clean water in their own community to drink from a shallow bore hole well. They no longer have to walk two hours to fetch dirty water that makes them sick. This well was made possible through the work of Charity:Water and their local field partner A Glimmer of Hope, and the funds were raised, in part, by the campaign I started to celebrate my 50th birthday two years ago. Read more about the well here (the report includes a GPS coordinate link which will show you the exact location of the well). One picture is below, and more pictures can be seen at the report linked to above.

Shallow bore hole well: Mitslam Village, Tigray region, Ethiopia This is the well created in part by the Charity:Water campaign I started for my 50th birthday

Thank you to EVERYONE who helped contribute, both to honor me and to decrease worldsuck! I am so extremely proud of this legacy, which will make a critical difference for the better in real people's lives for YEARS to come.

I ended up raising $1945, which will provide clean drinking water for 97 people. There were 46 donations in all. Thank you all so much for making my fiftieth birthday truly special.

Although both of my novels have romantic elements, I've never considered myself someone who generally reads romance novels myself. There are a few exceptions. Jane Austen, of course, is the most important one. I adore Jane Austen, as long-time readers of this blog know. Interestingly enough, it was a science fiction writer who got me to read Jane Austen, when I was (I think?) somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties. Eleanor Arnason made an off-hand comment at a panel at a science fiction convention (or perhaps it was one of our one-on-one conversations afterwards; my memory is hazy) that one of the best Iago-like depictions of evil she's ever read takes place in the opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility. Fanny Dashwood cleverly leads her husband, step-by-step, to repudiate the promise he made to his father on the latter’s deathbed to support his sisters. She gets him to agree to a little, and then a little more, and a little more, until by the end he is actually congratulating himself for his generosity for resolving to behave in totally dishonorable and miserly way to the women his father commended to his care. I was intrigued by her description of the passage and so read the book--and I was hooked. It's curious, that my introduction to romances was due to my writerly curiosity about how to write an effective villain.

Of course, Jane Austen wasn't considered a 'romance writer' in her day because the marketing category simply didn't even exist yet. Even today, I think that people who dismiss her as a mere romance novelist (often without reading her) are missing the point. She wrote about love and marriage, true. But she was hardly a wild romantic, but more of an Augustan realist with a very keen sense of the absurdity of human nature. When it comes down choosing between the worldview of Marianne or Elinor Dashwood, I think Miss Austen would clearly side with Elinor.

I also read Georgette Heyer's novels, which were recommended to me by a friend. I loved them and reread them almost every year. I had a couple Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge romances, which I picked up because I read Joan Aiken's children's books, and because Joan Aiken wrote continuations of Jane Austen's works.

Last year I picked up the Sons of Destiny novels of Jean Johnson (ladyofthemasque) because I'd read and enjoyed some of her fanfiction. These were fantasy romances. Magic+sex=fluffy and fun.

But last month, I did something I'd never done before. I'd just finished the Jean Johnson books and when I got the bookstore gift card from my family, I went into a bookstore and headed, somewhat uncertainly, to a section I'd never hung out in before: I think I'll buy a romance. Any romance, I don't care. Um, well, a good romance. But which one? No recommendation. No knowledge of the author. Could I pick a romance up off the shelf and just read it cold?

I didn't know and I had literally never tried doing such a thing before. I have a sense of a slight preference for type (I was gravitating toward the historical romances, particularly regency) but I have no idea who popular romance authors are. As a genre, I had a little idea of how the marketing works from reading, of all things, Elizabeth Peter's Die for Love, a marvelously snarky and fun murder mystery set, of all places, at a romance writers convention. Yeah, Elizabeth Peters was right. The covers of romance novels ARE embarrassing. I thought about Joanna Russ' essay "How to Suppress Women's Writing" as I browsed the lurid covers. Here was writing by women, for women. It's wildly successful, but I'm embarrassed to pick it up. I thought a lot about that as I browsed, but yeah, I was uneasy about being seen carrying a book with those stereotypical clinch bodice-ripper covers. How interesting. Was I buying into the disparagment of the genre without thinking about it?

My first two picks were okay. Fun and pleasantly salacious. I enjoyed them well enough that I went back last weekend and picked up four more, again, picking cold. OMG. This last attempt was much less successful. I squirmed at the egregious errors, in history and voice. It was like biting into a bon bon, hoping for some delicious chococolate, and encountering plastic. Well, that was a waste of money. The cover blurbs were useless and "New York Times Best Selling Author" is no guarantee of quality, believe me. The historical errors irritated me, and the cliches were a turn off.

Well, what do other people think are good fantasy novelists? So I googled "Best romance novels" and picked a book that came in #1 on several lists: Outlander by Diane Gabaldon. There are over sixteen hundred reviews on the Amazon page, so I guess a few people have read it. I was interested to discover, when I got to the bookstore to pick up a copy, that although it was considered a rather groundbreaking book when it came out, and won the best novel of 1991 from the Romance Writers of America, it is now shelved in "Fiction." Not Romance. No clinch on the cover.

So I'm diving into the book, and so far it's certainly gripping my attention. No taste of plastic in my teeth so far. I'll keep you posted.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$1826 RAISED SO FAR
91 people served
42 donations
29 days left

The Charity:Water blog posted about this campaign, and I felt more than a little envious. He raised more than $25,000? What fundraising mojo does he have that I don't have?

Then I realized he is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Oh. Guess that answers that.

(Only 29 days left! There's still time to make the goal!)

Astounding.

Katie Spotz, like me, wants to raise money to give people clean water to drink. So what did she do to bring attention to the cause?

She rowed ALONE across the Atlantic Ocean, the first woman and the youngest person to do so.

$75,000 raised so far. Awesome.



See her interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper here.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$1001 RAISED SO FAR
50 people served
28 donations
62 days left

( What I did today to make the world a better place )

Read about this initiative, the Zen Army, at Betty Londergan's blog What Gives 365 here:

When I come back in my next laid-back, enlightened life, I’m coming back as Indigo Cantor, Commander-in-Chief of the Zen Army. http://www.zenarmy.org and http://zenarmy.ning.com/ Like me, she’s on a 365-day mission to improve the world in whatever small way she can.

Here’s what I love about Indigo. Last year, she and her partner Paul both lost their homes in Nevada to foreclosure in the latest economic Armageddon (thanks, Goldman-Sachs, for all that you do). But since they’d been to South Africa the year before, Indigo had come back filled with a sense of gratitude, freedom & a desire to do something positive. So instead of freaking out (my preferred mode of crisis management) she simply said – hey, let’s just get out there and do some good.

Voila! The birth of the All Volunteer Zen Army … housed in a vintage 1970 Airstream trailer,(aka: The Shining Example) that Paul & Indigo bought with the last of their savings, and hit the road in January 2010. Their mission: to spend the year volunteering their time anywhere they felt they were needed: in disaster relief, animal welfare, senior care, health and nutrition, education, social justice, environmental issues –or just shoveling poop at Dreamchaser Animal Rescue http://www.dreamchaserpmu.org/ in New River, Arizona.

Indigo’s mantra is to find a need and fill it. They’re known for making surprise forays into towns, finding a senior center or food bank, and walking in declaring, “Hi! We’re the Zen Army and we’re here to help!” ... With 2500 people following them on Twitter http://twitter.com/zenarmy and over 600 fans on facebook http://www.facebook.com/thezenarmy the Zen Army is just hitting its stride.

Truly inspirational.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$445 RAISED SO FAR
22 people served
13 donations
82 days left

Next month is my fiftieth birthday.

I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to celebrate it, but one thing's for sure: I certainly don't need presents. I don't need more stuff. If there's anything the past couple years have taught me, it's to be grateful for what I already have.

As you know, I've also been thinking a lot in the past couple years about what I can do to make the world a better place. I've been following a lot of nonprofits on Twitter, and one of them particularly caught my attention: Charity:Water (@charitywater on Twitter).

Today is World Water Day. Did you know that a billion people don't have access to clean drinking water? That's about one out of eight. In three years, Charity:Water has sent $10 million dollars into the field to implement 2,321 water projects in 16 developing countries. That's over a million people served. Charity:Water makes it possible for people to set up their own fundraising pages, and they suggest that people donate their birthdays to the cause. I've been thinking about this idea for a number of months, and today's being World Water Day gave me the push to actually do it.

My own MyCharity:Water page is here. If I can raise $5,000, that will build a freshwater well in a village, which can provide 250+ people with clean drinking water. This campaign begins today, on World Water Day, and will last for three months, as individual MyCharity:Water campaigns do. 100% of the money that you donate at my MyCharity:Water page will go to actually fund the well (Charity:Water uses other funds to cover their administrative costs). The Mycharity:Water site Will track every dollar donated on my page to a specific water project. When the water project this campaign has helped fund is completed in 12 - 18 months from end of this campaign, Charity:Water will contact me and everyone who contributed to my campaign and send us pictures and the GPS coordinates of the new well this money raised. If we manage to raise the entire $5,000, there will be a plaque commemorating my campaign mounted at the well itself.

So I hope you'll consider giving a donation, whether $5 or $10 or even $50 for my fiftieth birthday. I've kicked off the campaign with a $50 contribution of my own. Charity:Water is a 501(c)3 corporation, so if you are in the United States, your contribution is tax deductible.* If you have any ideas or suggestions of what I might do to raise money for this campaign, I would welcome them in comments to this post. Many thanks.



*While Charity:Water can accept Paypal donations if they're made to the organization in general, if you want to contribute specifically to my campaign for my fiftieth birthday, they are set up to take contributions via credit card or check only. Either way, as I said, your contribution would be tax deductible.

( Several nice pictures Delia took of me for my campaign page )


( What I did today to make the world a better place )