In honor of my online friends . . .

[pegkerr]

I discovered a new group online this week, It Starts With Us, which is a new website that just began this month. Sign up at the site and you will be joining the "A-Team." Each week, the friendly webmaster Nate St. Pierre will send out an email with a mission, designed to take about fifteen minutes, which will help decrease worldsuck. This week's mission, my first, was as follows:

Has someone made a difference in your life recently? Think about what they did for you and how it made you feel, and then go and be that difference for someone else. Of course it doesn't have to be exactly the same, but the point is to reflect on ways that you have been impacted by someone, and then pass on a variation of that action to someone else, so they can experience the same benefit that you did.

Well, friendslist, this mission was obvious to me. YOU made that difference in my life this week. I was so unbelievably touched by your generosity and kindness, especially when so many of you have never met me or my girls before. How could I do the same for somebody else? So I went to Kiva.org and searched until I found a loan request that involved bicycles! I found a woman's entrepreneurial cooperative in Nicaragua that includes one woman, Jeny Cerrato, who sells bicycle parts out of her home, and I made a Kiva loan to the group, in YOUR honor. The loan has been credited to the Nerdfighters Kiva group, which, of course, is dedicated to decreasing worldsuck.

I hope some of you might sign up with It Starts With Us, to help me continue with the mission of decreasing worldsuck everyday. I've syndicated the blog at itstartswith_us and itstartswithus_feed. You can follow Nate St. Pierre's Twitter feed here. Thanks again!

I will be posting the girls' thank you notes to you soon, hopefully tonight.

With love and gratitude,
Peg