Peg Kerr's Journal

Let's see if these links work:

My 24th loan

My 25th loan

My seventeenth Kiva loan goes to a woman here in the U.S. (in Ohio), also named Peggy, who teaches Irish stepdancing.

A bit more frivolous than my previous loans, perhaps, but I want to support women in the arts, and I could use more dancing in my life, dammit.

Is in Mali. Read about it here.

My thirteenth loan goes to these ladies in Chiapas, Mexico.

I picked this loan because I admire women who support their families by doing art.

Just made my 11th Kiva loan, to a woman in Lebanon. She's a fifty year old widowed mother who runs a coffee shop.

I checked the level of my loan repayments, and it was enough to fund another loan, with just a modest pay in. So now I am helping to buy flour, yeast and flour for a baker in El Salvador.

This is my eighth loan.

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

I like reading the blog and following the Twitter feed for Afrigadget (The Twitter feed is @Afrigadget). It has great stories of scrappy people using their ingenuity to make their lives better. Today's story was about a woman named Jane who dreamed of being a surgeon, but she was too poor. But using a sewing machine she obtained through microcredit lending, she's managed to provide a decent life for herself and her children. Read Jane's story here.

It made me think about checking my Kiva portfolio to see whether I had enough money accumulated to make another loan. Sure enough, with just a few dollars added, I could make another loan. So, in honor of Jane from Nairobi, I made a loan to another woman, Elizabeth James, this time in Nigeria, who has a business selling fruits and vegetables in her local market.

What have you done today to make the world a better place?

Thanks so much to those of you who responded to my appeal and donated to my MyCharityWater campaign yesterday! I've reached 10% of my goal. I'm running a little behind, though, as we're 16% through the length of the fundraising campaign.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$560 RAISED SO FAR
28 people served
17 donations
78 days left

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

I've mentioned being a Kiva lender. Just saw a link tonight to the website of Muhammad Yunus, one of the co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for developing the idea of microlending to the poor. He has a chapter of his book Banker to the Poor up on his website, and it's truly fascinating reading (not to mention inspiring).

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

Good morning! I started my day with a new Kiva.org microloan to fifteen lovely ladies from Paraguay. A nice way to celebrate payday.

I have been thinking rather obsessively about this the last three days.

Longtime readers of this Livejournal know that I sometimes ruminate here about what I should be when I grow up. Which is both rather funny and sad, since I'm going to be 49 on my next birthday. I thought for many years that what I wanted to be was a writer, which (I assumed) meant a writer of original, professionally published fiction. Well, I've done that, and done it well, if I do say so myself, but the creative part of my brain hasn't been cooperating enough to allow me to do that for awhile. This caused me great pain for a long time (see my entries tagged "writers block"--there are a LOT of them.) I think I finally figured out the reason why the original fiction intended for professional publication stopped--although, who knows, in five years I may surprise myself and get back to it. Not holding my breath, though. I started to realize that the larger question is, what is my vocation? My life's work, if you will (and yes, I realize that doesn't necessarily mean it's what I do to earn my living). I've wrestled with that question in this LJ, too, particularly here and here.

A lot of thoughts have come together in my mind about this the last few days. Some conversations with kijjohnson who is wrestling with her own questions, now that she has been laid off. Going back to see my therapist, after several years away. He is the one who gave me the assignment to figure out what I do well. On that one, I just was lazy and asked you (and was genuinely startled and touched at all the heartwarming answers--thank you!) One of the things I discussed with my therapist at that meeting was how my thinking about writing fic for publication has been evolving and, in perhaps a related way, how my thinking about my day job has been evolving, too. Part of it is simple gratitude that I have a day job (with health insurance!) at all, since Rob has been laid off. But more than that, I started applying some of the reading I've been doing about vocation at work. I read about a woman who scrubbed floors at hospitals, and when asked what she did for a living, she said she helped the sick. I read about a creative man who was the manager at an art framing store who was happy with his work, because he said his job was to help people display their own creative endeavors. I read about a man who worked for a moving company who said that his vocation was to decrease the stress for families when they moved. If you think about it that way . . . how do I serve a vocation by working as a legal secretary? If you look at it that way, it's not so much that I type insurance paperwork, it's that I assist six attorneys by decreasing their stress, helping them accomplish their projects. At the time I was thinking about all this, one of the people I worked for suddenly underwent some serious upheaval in his life, and he really needed me to decrease his stress in a way that he's seldom needed before. I suddenly saw that I was assisting him that way, and once I realized that . . . well, it felt pretty good.

And then there's the thinking I've been doing in the last year watching several projects: Obama's election, and particularly watching how the Transition team is implementing things at http://change.gov. Getting involved as a microlender with Kiva.org. Taking a look at Google's Project 10^100 contest (see an explanation here). Project 4 Awesome, by the Vlogbrothers (the Brotherhood 2.0 guys, John and Hank Green, the originators of the Nerdfighters).

It's all interconnected, I've suddenly been thinking in the past three days. John and Hank Green, the ones who pointed me to Kiva.org, have put it into words as: "We want to Decrease World Suck." ("We're Nerdfighters We fight against suck....we fight awesome...We fight using our brains, our hearts, our calculators and our trombones.") The genius of this as a vocation is that it's so flexible. That's why John and Hank have turned it over to the Nerdfighters, and said, okay, run with it! What can you do to decrease worldsuck? It's exactly the same thing that Andrew Slack is doing over at The Harry Potter Alliance. It's why Obama set his organization up as a grassroots movement, modeled on, well, community organizing, trusting people to see the work and carry it forward, from the ground up. It's why people have been responding to the election by saying, what can I do now, to help get our country back on its feet? It's what Wellstone was trying to do, and it's what the Wellstone Action is trying to carry forward. It's what the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater is trying to do, and Playing for Change. It's Teach for America, and the Peace Corps, and Bread for the World, and the Search Institute, and Hippo Water Rollers and the Life Straw, and so much else. It's St. Martins Table and projects to create and distribute solar cookers in Africa. It's the guy who wrote Three Cups of Tea, who's building schools for girls in Afghanistan. It's paying it forward. It's keeping a heart of flesh in a world that tries to put in its place a heart of stone. It's raising kids and cleaning up the environment and making the world a better place.

Tell me what you are doing personally (or an organization that you like that works) to decrease world suck.

Edited to add: Apparently, the Nerdfighters are a subgroup over at Kiva. I've joined the group. I've also joined the Decrease Worldsuck Foundation over at Facebook.