Clawing my way over a litter of anti-nausea medication and empty Gatorade bottles back to the land of the living, I blink into the light and ask myself the question: what the hell day is it?
Yeah, I know it's Monday, March 13, which means that it has now been Lent for 13 days. Unfortunately, on Day 8 I started to feel like all was not well in my GI tract, and by Day 9...well, you don't want the details. We were onto Day 11 before I was able to eat anything that wasn't a clear liquid and I'm still subsisting on the fabled BRAT diet (bananas, apples, rice, and toast...I've been through a few of these goddamn things). Anyway, so in absolute terms it's Day 13, but in terms of the 40 Ways it's only day 8. Hopefully I can double up a few times and still get in 40 ways by Easter. Lent is actually longer than 40 days anyhow.
But I digress.
So, when your stomach and intenstines rise up and smite you, what do you do to keep your mind off the internal mutiny until you feel like a human being again? Well, when you're not sleeping or crouched on the toilet, you read BOOKS! Which brings me to our eighth way:
Book Relief: Hurricanes 2005Book Relief is an effort put together by
First Book, a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 (mmm...Clintony) whose mission is "to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books." Since then, according to its website, First Book has distributed 40 million books to "over 1300 communities around the country." It's a national organization run by local Advisory Boards who organized fund-raising and distribution in their own communities. Again, according to their website, about 90% of their funding comes from their corporate partners and obviously one of the things they get back in return is advertising (you can see that just from the website). However, they do ask for private donations and they do also call for volunteers, for their regular operations as well as for the special Hurricane Katrina Book Relief project.
Anyone who's ever tried to read a book at the beach knows that books and water are a bad combination. "In New Orleans, 118 of 126 schools sustained damage; in Mississippi, 300 schools were damaged, 24 of them severely damaged or destroyed," according to the website; and any school that sustained severe water damage probably lost most of its textbooks and its library. Book Relief's goal is to distribute 5 million books to schools and libraries who are absorbing the 190,000 displaced Louisiana students as well as to the schools and libraries that eventually be repaired, rebuilt, and reopened. Their
September 2005 press release will tell you what they did for immediate relief; they have now distributed 1.5 million books in Gulf Coast areas and are continuing to schedule distributions.
Although you cannot eat books, they are, in my opinion, one of life's necessities, and literacy and education are basic rights just like food, shelter, and clothing. (Yeah, I know technically speaking people in this country don't have basic rights to anything any more, but let's move past that for now.) So, if you want to help get books to children and their families who have been displaced by Katrina or help restock a school that got wiped out by the flood,
for half a buck you can sponsor a book, and for $500 you can put 1000 books in a library somewhere. The original press release says something about being able to put a personalized message in the book you sponsor, but they don't seem to be doing that any more. If you're an educator or if you work with a literacy program, you might be interested in
sponsoring a classroom as well.
The catch, of course, is that you do not get to pick which books get distributed. Book Relief and First Book obviously rely heavily on donations from publishers, which means that they probably can't control exactly what they're distributing. One is troubled by the nagging fear that one's $250 will go for 500 remaindered Star Wars novelizations or 500 copies of
Of Pandas and People. For reassurance, you can check out First Book's
Board of Directors,
National Advisory Council, or their
staff, and make your own call about whether they're liable to be doing this in a responsible manner. I Googled First Book's president,
Kyle Zimmer, just to see what turned up. Well, she's an English major from the University of Iowa, so presumably she knows the difference between a real book and a pile of crap...oh, wait, here's a bio of her from a keynote she gave at
Women In Technology International:
Throughout her career, Ms. Zimmer has worked at the intersection of policy, business and social issues. Early in her career, she served in the federal liaison office for Ohio Governor Richard Celeste with a special focus on transportation and natural resources. Ms. Zimmer later became an advisor in the Presidential campaign of Walter Mondale with a particular emphasis on state and local issues in the central region of the country. After graduating from The George Washington University National Law Center, she entered legal practice where she represented a wide spectrum of clients including corporations, state and local governmental entities, and the Navajo Nation in a range of issue areas, including contract negotiations, anti-trust issues, and federal legislative matters. Ms. Zimmer later became the Director of State Affairs for an innovative alliance between major consumer organizations and property and casualty insurance companies. In this capacity, she designed and implemented legislative campaigns in more than twenty states annually.Strange mix of the progressive and the corporate...well, that's what the big nonprofits are, really. Anyway, Book Relief is an economical way to make an impact, and who knows, you may wind up being the reason that some 7 year old from Biloxi winds up writing the great American novel based on her childhood experience of Hurricane Katrina. Would that not be cool?
See you tomorrow,
The Plaid Adder
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