Birth of a Movement: Entreprenuers Striving to Change the World

I just came from facebook where I had two conversations simultaneously….one with Wayan in Bali (I wrote about him in the nomad book and we are still good friends. He’s a great guide if any of you are headed to Bali or if you are a tour company looking for a local guide. His English is excellent and he plays guitar and sings as well…and he just got married and is serious about employment.  www.wayansukerta@yahoo.com). He’s the one who said I was “unbalanced” when I kept falling in the mud in the rice fields at night. The other conversation was with a reader, Anne Marie. I just kept clicking back and forth. Far out. I often don’t do chats on Facebook….but this time the timing was right.

I’m still in Todos Santos, Mexico. Today I set about building a Christmas tree. I figured i needed a frame….so I made a teepee with thrown away bamboo. I even put horizontal twigs to hold it together. The next step will be to attach small branches of leaves and create a tree we can decorate. But all those branches!  All that tying. I’m thinking it will be a lot easier to make a teepee with a sheet. My creation may never reach treedom!

Grandson Cris arrives tomorrow. This is his vacation home. He’d probably like a teepee better than a Christmas tree anyhow!!   Ciao.

I applaud the health care vote that just happened in my backyard in DC, and I especially love reading about it while living in a beautiful casita in Todos Santos, Mexico. Tonight the sky was fuscia….really, I couldn’t call it pink. It was much too alive and bursting with brilliant color to be called pink. And of course, the ocean was fuscia as well. What a beautiful spot.

I haven’t done much because I’ve been hanging out here waiting for the plumber who was supposed to have come today. It’s 6:30 and I doubt he will show up now. I suspect the cartridge wasn’t available in TS and he had to go to the big city, La Paz to the north or one of the Cabos to the south.  I do hope he gets here tomorrow. My little house has no water. I go to the other casita for the shower or toilet. It’s not a big deal and I do remember hundreds of places I’ve lived in without water all the time, not just when something breaks.    Also a water main broke this morning and no one in the area had water. I think they fixed it, but I have to go to the other house to find out.

I have no phone…it’s one of the things I have to do in town. Buy a sim card and get a local number for the phone my neighbor loaned me. I have a Magic Jack which allows me to call the US via computer, and a Skype account, but they get me to the US and not to the plumber. Funny this technology.

Mitch, Melissa, and Cris arrive on the 24th. I haven’t seen them since August. Grandson Cris is five; I especially can’t wait to see him. I’ll write again on Christmas day after dinner at a Cafe/Restaurant Santa Fe on Christmas Eve.

Hope there are lots of good things under the tree on Christmas morning.

I apologize to all of you who have been checking this regularly and wondering what happened to me.  I promised to write  three times a week and it’s been two weeks since I added anything. That last entry was soon after I received the copyedit of the anthology and I haven’t done anything but edit since it arrived.

But it’s done! And I am not in Washington, DC, buried in snow. In fact, until I phoned my friend Susan an hour ago (free using my new Magic Jack), I didn’t even know there had been a storm.

On Tuesday night, around two in the morning, my co-editor, Maria Altobelli in Patzcuaro, Mexico, and I hung up after a three hour Skype (we probably Skyped about twenty hours over four days). I packed up the manuscript which my friend Kelli FedEx’d the next day.

At seven AM on Wednesday morning, I stepped on a plane at Reagan National and seven hours later I stepped into a warm, welcoming  Mexico (nowhere near Patzcuaro).

Last night I walked five minutes down a little sandy path to the ocean. The sun was gloriously setting in long orange swaths across the sky. By the time I got back to the house, the palm trees were silhouetted against the fading orange sky. It was breathtaking.  (Sorry, all you folks on the east coast who can’t get out of your front doors.)

I am happily snuggled into a casita, trying to catch up a bit. Tomorrow I will take a walk and then get back to Let’s Get Global. I promised myself I would work on the content for the website. As I’ve said before, I can’t apply for funding until there’s a site. So….in the glorious warmth and ocean breezes of  Todos Santos (about two hours  up from the bottom of the Baja peninsula), I will be writing and researching. (My son and family arrive on the 24th and we’ll all be here until the 6th. This is their house.)

I did drive into town today after the plumber left (the shower broke!). Bought some oranges and a papaya from a guy on a dirt road, met a woman, an American who has been here for twenty years, who is preparing to become a nomad (total coincidence). And I brought some chocolate muffins and chocolate chip cookies to the manager of the Budget car place as a thank you. When I got there from the airport, I hadn’t changed any money yet. He looked at his watch and announced that the bank closed in ten minutes, and he flew out of the office with my two hundred dollars and came back with pesos. For fifteen minutes I was in charge.

I’ll write again in a couple of days. Thanks again for your patience.

I’m working on an anthology for Crown/Random House (the publishers of Tales of a Female Nomad) called: FEMALE NOMAD AND FRIENDS, Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread around the World. It’ll be out in July. There are 40 authors telling tales of connecting in other cultures. The stories are wonderful. They’ll make you laugh out loud….and they’ll make you cry. I’ve been collecting these stories for years! They’re great. So are the more than 20 recipes in the book.

All the royalties from this book will go for scholarships to slum kids in India…so my heart is really in it.

Today, the final edit (from the copy editor) arrived and I’m going nuts. My friend and co-editor on this, Maria Altobelli, and I worked hard at maintaining the integrity of the writers’ styles. The copy editor’s goal seems to be to make them all sound alike. Standardization was the word in the cover letter.

As a writer I play with words, grammar, fragments of sentences. Even punctuation.  My interest is diversity; hers is standardization. I have until the 15th to get it done, not even ten days. The final decisions are ours, so the book will still be wonderful………..but it’s going to be a long haul. Today was a waste as I just kept getting more and more upset.

I want personality and slang, and uniqueness…..she wants standardization of grammar and punctuatation.  Example:  ”It kind of snuck up on me.”  She changed it to “It kind of sneaked up on me.”   No way!  It’s a totally different sound and personality.  Oh, this is not going to be a good ten days…it’s due back at Random House on the 16th.

I’m going to be in Todos Santos, Mexico (Baja) from the 16th until January 6th…..with internet, beach, and family.

If I survive the edit.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that Digg button there on the right. According to Wikipedia, “Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function…”

And peripherally, if Digg and other social media expose us to lots of readers, they will not only popularize our cause, they will also bring in money….down the line.

My friend, DeeNice , added Digg to the blog a few days ago. She surprised me. She’s the one who set up Birth of a Movement and she’s been administering it from the beginning.  Her idea for this blog is to “monetize” it so that Let’s Get Global will get a stream of money every month, enough to keep the organization going.  That means getting so many people to read it that advertisers will want to appear on our site.  She says it will take a year to build the readership to the point where we will earn significant money.

I know lots of ads are keeping lots of blogs afloat; but I keep wondering if something like Digg and ads would turn people off rather than bring more business.  I’m pretty low key…and my vision of this blog is to be chatty and friendly and basically to share the progress of LGG and the frustrations and successes along the way. I really do want to chronicle the development of our cause because I think we are going to change the population of our country and its relationship  to the world.  LGG is going to make history.

But for now, we are making friends.Of course we need money to keep the organization going; and it sure sounds appealing if we can do it more or less passively by “monetizing” this blog. (We will be seeking foundation funding as well, but not quite yet. As I said earlier, we have to have a Let’s Get Global website before we write for grants.) But I don’t want to lose you. Please let me know what you think about having links to Digg and Facebook and more. Social networks are the definition of PR these days.

How about ads?  What if airlines and travel and sporting goods companies have ads here?  What if Target and movies and foods want to advertise?  Would it be a turnoff or a wonderful sign that the world is taking notice?

I would very much like your thoughts.         Thanks, Rita

OK. I did Thanksgiving (ate too much, of course), studied a bit on how to do a Logical Framework so that I can first create it and then include it in my funding package (not an easy job, but necessary), and now it’s back to getting that website in some kind of order, the one that doesn’t exist yet, the one that has to go up before we can do anything else.  That involves writing….and I am so very talented at finding ways to avoid it. Writers, in general, are far more skilled at creating ruses to avoid writing than the rest of the population.

I have a list of things I need to include in the initial website, like what LGG is all about, and why, from many points of view, we need this movement. I haven’t thought about anything else for months. You’d think it would be easy to put it into words. It’s just a matter of doing it. But I’m not. I’m struggling with a tone, an attitude, a way of doing it in a friendly way.

My attention span is probably as short as many of the teens who will be reading the site. When I read most sites, my eyes glaze over very quickly. I want the LGG site to have more than information. I want it to have a personality.

Step number one:  just do it!!!

I am spending tomorrow studying what they call “the structure of the Logical Framework.”  A LogFrame, I learned two nights ago, is a way of organizing thoughts, concepts, and procedures so they can be presented to foundations who might want to fund Let’s Get Global. It is clear that it will help me present our project and convince people that the world needs what we are planning to do. I’m convinced. So are lots of you. Now I have to convince a couple of foundations.

I would be happy to have your input. Just write in your comments why you think we need the goal that LGG is setting out to accomplish:  to create a movement in our country that will encourage, assist, and send off thousands of high school graduates to experience the world, before they go on to the next phase of their lives.

Did you know that from 30 to 50% of kids who start college never finish?  Most kids aren’t ready. I don’t know about any of you out there, but I majored in “boys” my freshman year!! A Gap Year grows you up, focuses you, and gives you the confidence that happens when you are out in the world making your own decisions!  It changes who you will be and how you will think for the rest of your life!!  Let me hear from you, please.