For many people in the world, this is what it looks like to get a drink of water in the morning:
More than one billion people in the world (1 in 6) lack access to safe, clean water. The lucky ones have donkeys like this one to help them carry the 5-gallon jerry cans.
You can help. Donate to the Bald Birthday Benefit (as a bonus, you can see me shave my head).
Wow. And thank you.
That’s about all I can say after the first day of the Bald Birthday Benefit. On day one we brought in $275 of our total $600, getting us 45% of the way there. Wow. Thank you.
What are we going to do for the next 29 days? In my FAQ I jokingly said that maybe my goal was too low and we could just up it, and maybe that’s what we’ll have to do. I’m more than happy to be proven foolish. And it seems I’ll be proven bald as well.
My favorite part about all of this is that I haven’t had a chance to put any grand ideas in motion yet. I had all these big plans for a huge launch, and none of them happened. All I’ve done is spread the word and people have responded. That’s so cool. Thank you.
Let’s give people life (and me a haircut). Donate to the Bald Birthday Benefit.
So here’s the deal: I’m turning 30 in 30 days and I need your help to celebrate. There are more than a billion people in this world who don’t have easy access to clean, safe drinking water. To celebrate my big 3-0, I want to give 30 people clean water.
It’s not much, a drop in the bucket so to speak. But to those 30 people it would mean life.
The nonprofit charity: water can give one person clean water for 20 years for about $20. So giving clean water to 30 people will cost $600. That’s a pretty big chunk of change, but with your help, I think we can do it.
So help me celebrate my 30th birthday by raising $600 in 30 days and giving clean water to 30 people.
Oh, and if we can do it, I’ll shave my head. Welcome to the Bald Birthday Benefit 2009.
Interesting article exploring a Pew Research Center study about what Americans consider necessary. A car is at the top of this year’s list, followed by a clothes dryer (not a washing machine? Survey FAIL?), air conditioning, TV and a computer. It’s kind of an interesting study, especially since things have become a little less necessary since 2006.
I found a few things surprising:
Generalizations, of course, but ouch.
It’s interesting to consider what is necessary in your life. Some things are pretty easy decisions, like cutting the cable or Netflix. But other choices are harder—that car payment may be pricey, but if you ever find a job how are you supposed to get there without a car?
These discussions become a little more real in the light of comments like this one.
A few weeks ago I realized that every single pair of jeans I own had ripped knees. And I’m not talking about the cool, threadbare spot at the knee that’s soft, comfortable and somehow stylish. I’m talking about gashes that stretch across the knee and rip even farther every time you bend down to tie your shoe.
Since I’m a cheapskate, buying new jeans wasn’t an option (yet). I decided it was time to patch my jeans.
So I did. I went through my wife’s pile of scraps and found a fun pattern. A little flowery, but still cool and manly. I slapped it on my jeans, did my best Frankenstein stitching, and voila! My jeans are ready to go another six months.
Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. My jeans are good to go and contrary to popular belief my manliness is still mostly intact.
Musician, blogger and Compassion advocate Shaun Groves is in India right on another Compassion bloggers tour. These are pretty incredible trips (they did Uganda last year and the Dominican Republic last fall) and admittedly hard to read.
This morning I checked in on his blog and came across this post about leftovers. It turns out to be the same pitch he gave at a concert in Minnesota a couple weeks back that I happened to attend (which is great, because now it’s in writing, not just in my head). It’s a powerful statement on how God provides for us, but he only wants us to take what we need for each day. It’s an Old Testament rule that Paul repeats in the New Testament: Share your leftovers so everybody can have enough.
In America, it seems, we’re gorging ourselves on leftovers while the rest of the world starves. Using this idea of leftovers, Shaun challenges people to sponsor children through Compassion using their leftovers. And there are tons of other ways to do it. That’s part of why I keep doing these ‘you can change your world’ posts.
It’s easier than you think to change the world.
Twin Citizens can head to Bachman’s this weekend to support Children’s Home Society & Family Services (our adoption agency). For $5 you can get all the fixings to pot a tomato plant right in the store (fun for the kids!) and 100% of the money will go to CHSFS. It’s an easy Mother’s Day gift or a cheap way to add a little green for you apartment dwellers.
It’s this Saturday and Sunday, May 2-3, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Bachman’s. You can find more details at the CHSFS site.
I’ve talked about the site invisiblepeople.tv before and the incredible work being done there. Mark is the man behind the site, formerly homeless himself, unemployed and on the verge of being homeless again. He’s been holding on for quite a while now and it’s great to see the site continue and help people start seeing the homeless.
You can help Mark and invisiblepeople.tv by simply posting a comment on this blog entry, thus giving your vote to invisiblepeople.tv to win a $3,000 grant. So follow that link and comment and you can keep Mark’s site going.
How’s that for easy way to do something important?
OK, so bizarre ethical/sci-fi/theological question based on yesterday’s post about carrying capacity of a planet: What’s the ideal number of people to have?
From an ethical perspective, the ideal number would seem to be as many as we can reasonably support. Meaning, however many people can live happily on the planet and not over-use our resources. OK, say we hit that ideal number. More people would mean a decreased quality of life for everyone, if not collapse of the planet. So what’s the best solution ethically? Do we try any means necessary to increase that ideal number through technological advancements (taller buildings, more efficient systems, colonizing other planets, etc.) or do we limit population growth to maintain that ideal number?
From a theological perspective, is there some sort of imperative to always have more people? This sort of goes back to God’s command to Noah to multiply and fill the earth, which raises the question, when have we fulfilled this command? Assuming the ethical concerns are met (seems like bad theology to be willing to have more people in poor conditions just so you can evangelize them), does it make sense to go and make disciples by going and making more people? Should the church always be in favor of population growth so that more people can worship God and make him known?
They often say less is more, but is that true for humanity?
I’m just babbling here and throwing out bizarre questions I don’t have the answer to. These are the kinds of things I think about late at night.
So I’ve been thinking about the whole 5.4 acres per person thing (and not 72 square feet). Strangely enough, I find population density fascinating. Now that we’ve done the math right, I wonder what that means. Is 5.4 acres enough for a person to live on?
Clearly that’s a lot of space, but it starts to feel smaller when you consider things like growing food, dealing with waste, generating power, etc. One person said that’s comparable to four football fields.
It all leads to the question what is the carrying capacity of the planet? How many people can the planet sustain? Some people think we’ve already passed that number (which, if true, would raise all sorts of scary ethical questions and push us into eerie sci-fi territory). I don’t know what that number would be, but it would surely involve plenty of math for me to screw up. Plus all sorts of variables and intricacies that gets pretty darn complicated.
While I like pondering some of those unsolvable questions, what it really comes down to for me is what are you doing with your 5.4 acres? Are you living in such a way that you’re burning up resources and space and time? Or are you conserving what you can in order to save some for the other 6,769,999,999 people on this planet (not to mention the generations to come)?