Water for Life...from all of us

Last night Bill and I watched the Madonna Malawi documentary, I Am Because We Are, a work of art that scours the soul. Among the poorest countries in the world, Malawi is home to some 1 million orphans—children fending for themselves and for one another in a dusty, AIDS-afflicted world. Their struggles to live, to learn are here, in this film. So is their evanescence, their odds-defying radiance.

You can't watch a film like that without being moved to do something. This morning, in honor of all of us bloggers who clearly care about children and their future, I've again turned to the exquisite organization, Pump Aid, which, through its Elephant Pump technology, provides clean water to rural Malawi and Zimbabwe, in environmentally thoughtful fashion. Clean water helps to prevent disease. It nurtures gardens. It feeds communities. It affords hope. Pump Aid, the organization, allows those of us living here, in our comfortable homes, to do something.

Someday soon, through what is, in the scheme of things, a modest donation, a water-rich garden will flourish in rural Africa. A garden that feeds 250. That will be our garden, we bloggers. Seeds that we together planted.

Finally, the image here is a photo I took in the squatter's village known as Anapra, in Juarez, Mexico, where my fourth novel, The Heart is not a Size (Winter 2010), takes place. I have not myself traveled to Malawi. Last night's film made me wonder how and if I someday could.

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Keeping the Peace

My husband, son, and I spent yesterday at an inn along the Delaware River—just the three of us watching the last of the lemon-colored leaves fall. Everything seemed hushed, out where we were. Nothing urgent or pressing, just old autumn color (which is antique color) and sky.

I would like to believe that I can keep the peace that I found out there alive. That it won't dissolve itself inside the rush toward Christmas, that I can, this year, avoid that rush. Driving home I wondered how my friends would feel if my holiday gift to them were something they might never see—an elephant pump, I'm thinking, installed somewhere in Zimbabwe on behalf of school children and their families. One pump can bring water up from the earth for 500 people, I've read. It can do that sustainably, changing the health and welfare equation, sprouting gardens, teaching children science, their parents hope. A British organization called Pump Aid makes it possible to sit right where I am and to do this sort of good, and why not make this the gift of the year? A pump in the name of my friends: It seems like the right thing to do.

So I'm thinking about that, and if you too are interested in helping to replenish one small fraction of the earth in this way, I encourage you to go to this web site, and read.

http://www.pumpaid.org/

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