Two Big Boosts for Berga!

Wow! We just got TWO big boosts for Berga!

The first one was in the mail when I came home from a trip to the United Nations in New York. A small envelope held a big surprise. It was a check for $100 for the Berga project from two close friends of my parents. Mom and Dad had gotten to talking with them about my losing weight to raise money for the needy community in the Berga wetlands of Ethiopia. They showed them this Losing Pounds for Berga website and it prompted them to send a check AND pledge $2 per pound for weight lost beyond the 21 pounds I had already lost at that time.

One line in their hand-written note struck a chord. “This is just the kind of thing we like to support – people helping people without a lot of hullabaloo and hierarchy.” They definitely took the right message from the website. That is definitely my approach!

And here is a preview of the second big boost for Berga that shows even modest efforts can make a big difference. I got an email this week from Geremew Selassie, the head of the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society. He sent photos of the community receiving the boxes of school supplies and the 66 sheets of corrugated steel the community decided to buy with the money we raised before starting this weight loss effort. The photos showing the progression of the new classrooms being built is moving. It is deeply satisfying to see the resources we gave turn into something so practical for people in such need. Stay tuned for the next post!

Lawnmowers, Funnel Cakes, and Ferris Wheels

It was Labor Day weekend here in the United States and in my current home town, Greenbelt, this holiday is a big deal. Taking inspiration from FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, the town was built with little machinery as a works project in the 1930s. It has a strong workers, left-leaning ethic in town of cooperatives. We don’t quite sing the International (I’ve done that in Norway actually on May Day), but something just short of it.

Part of celebrating Labor Day in Greenbelt is the annual four day festival, the 54^th annual this year. Rides, games, entertainment and all sorts of local community groups with stalls selling used books (my daughters’ elementary school), t-shirts (my son’s nursery school), and especially food. None of the food is good for you. None. Period. But boy do those Democratic Party funnel cakes taste great with powdered sugar.

We were down at the festival each day (it is only two blocks from the house) to volunteer and to play. The ferris wheel offers an incomparable view of our wooded neighborhood. Couple that with a skewers party we held at our house for friends and co-workers and it adds up to a rough week for dieting. So the needle hasn’t moved much or if so, slightly in the wrong direction. So I have not adjusted the pounds total this week.

Finally, the title of this post includes lawnmowers. Old fashioned reel lawnmowers to be exact. It has nothing to do with Berga or my weight loss efforts, but I witnessed a brilliant Labor Day parade show that could ONLY occur in Old Greenbelt. The Greenbelt Reel Lawnmower Society Precision Drill Team performed and was captured on video in what is what they call an instant classic. I wanted to share it here.

Poop is No Laughing Matter, Okay It Is

This UNICEF video uses humor to make the point that sanitation issues can be funny when kids talk about it but there are real human costs that aren't so funny. I thought I would share the first part of that post here and urge you to read it all on the Woodrow Wilson Center's New Security Beat. My primary point was the hidden cost of no or poor sanitation at schools: girls often drop out or stay home once they reach puberty. The school in Berga only goes to 4th grade. Part of expanding the school to serve kids up to 8th grade will be the necessity to upgrade its sanitation facilities as well.

I was actually responding to a post by the New York Times' Andy Revkin, the most important journalist with an environmental beat at a major newspaper in the United States (he might be the only one too!).

A recent post on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog—entitled “Poop is Funny, But It’s Fatal”—highlights a UNICEF World Water Day video about the necessity of destigmatizing human waste. Bacterial infections caused by contact with human waste kill 1.5 million people every year—most of them children. The stakes are high. The film uses kids and humor—two good ingredients for education through entertainment—to explain the importance of sanitation. The film emphasizes that although we may not like talking about feces, urine, toilets, and the like, we need to because the fact that 2.6 billion of us lack adequate sanitation is a fundamental threat to human health, productivity, and dignity. It’s a short film—YouTube friendly—and these are complex links, but they are key to understanding the need to invest in available technologies. The UNICEF video rightly emphasizes the additional costs of lack of sanitation, noting that girls often won’t attend school if there isn’t adequate sanitation...

And Now 21!

When you weigh a lot, your weight can change quickly, at least by the standards of you folks occupying the skinnier world. So I am pleased to report that I have finally broken through the 20 pound threshold that has been so elusive.

Intense exercise is a wonderful thing and of course key to this whole endeavor. Yesterday was one of those days, pushing up the roundball in a basketball run that I joined in 1992. Organized at first as graduate students from the University of Maryland Government and Politics Department, it has been weekly for 16 years now. Only a few faces left from those days and we have moved inside to kinder wooden floors as we got older - gone are the days of mid-day sun outside on the asphalt.

But the upshot is a push and a magic 21 popping up on the scale this morning (after some subtraction of course). Facing happy hour with former students of mine tonight so it may be short-lived but the hope is we are off the plateau!

Note of explanation on the Duke University logo - as a alumnus, one thinks Duke when one talks basketball. Just the order of things.

Back to 19

That would be pounds lost, not years old. I am finally back to the lowest total pounds lost after having a highly caloric (Bar Harbor Blueberry Ale is actually outstanding) vacation and follow-up weekend in Ohio to celebrate my folks 45th wedding anniversary. One cake wasn't enough, a neighbor friend made a second. And despite BOTH cakes having typos (ironic given Mom's English teacher background), they were quite tasty. Perhaps a little too tasty. (I should hasten to add, it was the baker and the neighbor who had the spelling difficulty, not me mum.)

So I am back to 19. Need to make a push. Waiting for that push. I am sure it is coming. Any time now. Do hope it will come. Really need to make that big jump. Also really need to add a donate here page with a Paypal account so I can really start sending this thing out to folks. The new addition to the school in Berga is just not going to get built at this pace.

Conservation: It is about People Too

"Did you know that the National Audubon Society is for people as well as birds and wildlife? I didn't. Then one day last August I received an email about an Audubon-sponsored trip to Ethiopia." So starts a piece written by one of my compatriots on the Berga site visit last November.

Ruth Ann Wiesenthal-Gold, a volunteer with Audubon in Florida, captures the perspective of the conservationist coming to better understand Ethiopia's overlapping economic, environmental, social, and political challenges by seeing them first-hand. In her piece for Big Cat Rescue, she weaves in first person narrative with statistics about Ethiopia's challenging conditions, highlighting particularly the tough roles of women and girls. Ruth Ann has been a great supporter of my Losing Pounds for Berga effort, loyally reading this points and sending notes of encouragement. It is great she is sharing her insights from having visited the Berga Wetland site with other U.S.-based conservationists who as she says, need to come to understand as she did that people and their development conditions are a key part of their conservation organization's work.

Blueberry Pancakes and All That

So a camping vacation should be a diet-friendly endeavor, yes? Lots of hiking, simple cooking, and an early bedtime to avoid those late night snacks.

Such were my hopes for our family vacation where we had six straight nights in Acadia National Park on Maine's rugged coast. Cadillac Mountain on Mt. Desert Island provides beautiful vistas when there are no clouds. Clouds being the operative word and what comes with them, rain being the true key.

So I am determined to learn how much it rained while we were in Maine for by any measure short of South Asian monsoon totals, it was a LOT! While the kids being half Danish helped - you just suit'em up in rain clothes and send them outside - we still ended up eating out much more than planned. Don't get me wrong, being stuck with Bar Harbor's lobster heavy restaurant menu isn't exactly hardship duty, it doesn't necessarily facilitate weight loss.

And the blueberries. The ones that go in the pancakes. We made the pilgrimage to Jordan's in Bar Harbor, the best blueberry pancakes I've ever had (the batter is in 3 gallon plastic drums that the cook bear hugs). And if that wasn't enough, there were ample blueberries just down at the end of our campsite. So when the rain did clear and we cooked in camp, it was a short commute to drop in the small but sweet blue nuggets.

This side alley (or more precisely) side trail digression is all prelude to saying that I gained back 3 lbs over the two weeks we were in Maine and visiting friends in Fairfield and Newport. I've lost 1/2 a pound in the first day back but still some making up to do.

Dinner with Sahlu

Greetings from Fairfield Connecticut where we are staying with friends on our way North, fleeing the heat and humidity of Washington in summer. Our ultimate destination is a week of camping in Acadia National Park, a camper and hiker's paradise. We will see how camping food and exercise is for the diet.

Before leaving we had my good friend Sahlu Haile over for dinner during his short trip to Washington for meetings with our mutual friend Heather D'Agnes. Sahlu and Heather are teaming up to support integrated population-health-environment development efforts in Ethiopia and East Africa more generally from their respective positions at the Packard Foundation and US Agency for International Development. It was wonderful for Sahlu to meet the family and tell Sofie, Emma, and Erik about Ethiopia

It was Sahlu who got me to Ethiopia the first time when he invited me, Heather, and our good friend and colleague Roger-Mark De Souza over early last year for a conference and study tour. The attached picture was from that trip that went south of Addis Ababa into the Rift Valley to see the magnificent (but often shrinking) lakes. The national parks in this area have tremendous scenery yet tremendous challenges as well. There are often more people, cattle, and crops in the parks than wildlife, the reality of a terribly poor country. I wrote "Seeing is Believing" about this trip south of Addis for our blog last year that starts...

The vista of Ethiopia’s ancient Rift Valley, speckled with shimmering lakes, stretches before me as our motorized caravan heads south from Lake Langano, part of a study tour on population- health-environment issues organized by the Packard Foundation. Sadly, the country’s unrelenting poverty and insecurity are as breathtaking as the view—Ethiopia currently ranks 170 out of 177 countries on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index. These numbers become quite personal when child after child sprints alongside the truck, looking for any morsel. Here, I don’t need to read between the lines of endless reports to see the country’s severe population, health, and environment challenges—they are visible in the protruding ribcages of the cattle and the barren eroding terraces in the nation’s rural highlands.

Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections in Video

I have often said on these pages that one thing that excites me about the Berga community is the dynamic nature of different ways these poor folks are trying to meet their needs. The people in the community live integrated lives with multiple challenges (education, health, livelihoods, security, sustainability of it all). They need, and are pursuing, integrated responses to meet these needs. They capitalize on resources from conservation organizations around protecting the endangered species to help pursue a basket of health, education, livelihoods strategies and programs.

I came to this village with a group of conservationists who wanted to learn about how these integrated efforts play out in local settings. One set of these programs is commonly called PHE programs for population, health, and environment where those fields connect in the field so to speak, and therefore groups that work in these areas see advantage in joined up efforts to address the community's multiple needs.

All this buildup is to say there is a great new video that explains the underlying logic of this approach. My Wilson Center colleague Sean Peoples has put together a 9 minute video featuring Dr. Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado at Boulder explaining how these issues are linked. Lori was speaking at the Environmental Change and Security Program here in Washington earlier this year and her talk is an excellent primer. Sean mixes in her powerpoint slides with her presentation so you can easily follow along as she uses photos and data from projects in the Philippines. Our hope is that the video will be useful on multiple levels and in the context of Losing Pounds for Berga, it is understanding the power of the Berga community's efforts.

Broke $500 for Berga

Slowly, slowly the pounds are coming off and the dollars are going up. Just wanted to flag the breaking of the $500 total pledged for the Berga wetland community project. It was only $600 plus that enabled the community to buy 66 sheets of corrugated steel to begin the school expansion project. So I'll keep losing weight but we need more people to pledge (or just donate a set amount now) to keep building up the pot!

On Sierra On Berga

Ethiopian population, environment and development issues came in for more attention on New Security Beat, the blog done by the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program. The blog post flags the Sierra Club magazine piece I mentioned in an earlier post and adds some additional links. The picture on the story is another one from the health room portion of the Berga program.

2 > 1 or 0 but < 3

So I managed to lose two more this week which I will gladly take although it is one short of the goal of three. Fourth of July week is a tough spot for making such progress but some extra manual labor provided an unexpected exercise bonus. And in what has to be a positive sign, most of what I was looking for at the Casual Male Big and Tall store was actually too big.

And I found a sunrise rather than a sunset to symbolize the optimistic outlook on the diet and the fundraising. This one is the product of jet lag in Melbourne, Australia last year.

Tough Week so Beautiful Sunset

Tough week the holiday week. Spent the latter portion with family and weight loss wasn't exactly on the agenda. We'll see how far away I am from achieving this week's goal of 3 lbs lost.

Don't have any good tie-in to this photo but I have been just looking for an excuse to use it. It is sunset in Addis Ababa and was one of the moments you wish you really were a good photographer to capture the beauty of what you are seeing. Don't read it as the sunset on the diet or my efforts to raise funds for the dynamic program in Ethiopia's Berga wetland. Pretend it is dawn breaking!

Sofie's Home

So Sofie's home from camp and she was quick to ask me if I had held up my end of the bargain. When my 8 year old went to sleep-over camp this past week, we made a deal. I would lose at least 3 pounds while she was gone. I was pleased and relieved to be able to say yes, I lost 3! Not more, not less. Need another short term goal to break this effort up into doable chunks.

Sierra Magazine Features PHE in Ethiopia

The new issue of Sierra Magazine features the story and photos of the professional journalist and photographer who visited the Berga wetland site in the same group I did last November. The story and the pictures include a few from that site visit (you will recognize health worker Gete Dida from a previous post) and many more from their much longer trip to the country. The piece captures a key part of the story - the tremendous education, health, family planning, and rights challenges for women in Ethiopia. And journalist Paul Rauber connects these challenges with the environment in ways meaningful to the people struggling to survive as well as the biodiversity (mostly birding) interests of Sierra readers. He even points out how these clash in stomach turning ways when a spectacular species is spotted just over the shoulder of a woman begging.

I'll write more about this article and the issues it raises. Great read if you want to learn more about Ethiopia through the eyes of someone visiting Africa for the first time. Photographer Ian Berry on the other hand, has been covering African issues for decades including the distinction of being the only photographer documenting the 1960 Sharpville massacre in apartheid-era South Africa.

Off to Camp Weight Loss Bargain

My daughter Sofie is off for her first sleep-over camp - an entire week! Before she left, we made a deal that I would lose at least 3 pounds while she is gone. I am down three after three days. The question is can I keep it off with the horizon dotted with temptation.

Join the Party!

More great news. I have had a lot of terrific support from colleagues here at the Woodrow Wilson Center and our Environmental Change and Security Program. Pledges of course, some "green team" lunch time walks, invitations to play weekend basketball, and general moral support. Even making sure we have fruit rather than just the same devilish cookies I have been eating at our meetings here for the past 11 years!

And now a new kind of support from colleague Meaghan Parker. Meaghan made a generous pledge of $3 per pound and promised to add to it $3 for every new Mama pound she loses!

So join the party! If you want some extra motivation for shedding, we are happy to have you on board the Losing Pounds for Berga bandwagon!

School Expansion Started!

Great news! I received an update about our efforts to help the Maru-Chebot First Cycle Elementary School from Geremew Selassie (pictured) of the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society (EWNHS). And it is good news - they have started expanding the school to go beyond 4th grade!

After returning from my visit to Ethiopia late last year, I tried a few modest things to raise some money for the Berga wetland community and this inspiring combined education, conservation, health, livelihoods project. When I had my colleagues over for a December office party for example, I suggested a donation rather than a bottle of wine or food. My 8 and 6 year old daughters helped me pick out school supplies for the kids with a focus on basics like pencils, erasers, rulers, scissors, and calculators. We sent three boxes (two of school supplies, one of clothes) and a very good friend carried over $600 we had collected from friends and family.

Geremew and his colleague Zewditu Tessema have been so very kind to bring these supplies to the community as part of EWNHS's partnership with the community. The community decided to use the $600 to purchase materials for to start expanding the school. This step is critical, as it will extend the school beyond 4th grade as the closest school for older children is 5 km away, a distance that often proves prohibitive, especially for the young girls.

Here are the key passages of Geremew's email:

We have already delivered the two boxes and 66 corrugated iron sheets for the new class rooms during a small ceremony held in the school. We will send you the pictures as soon as they are ready. The construction of additional class rooms has started. That picture too will be included.

Thank you Geoff for everything you people down there are doing for the Berga community.

Many thanks,
Geremew G

Such a modest amount of money in the big scheme of things starting to make a difference. Gives me inspiration to re-energize my weight loss effort (which has really been treading water) and try to get the word out on this effort and ones like it. Next post - soliciting ideas for going "viral" with Losing Pounds for Berga.

HELP Plus

Just want to put it on the record that my colleague Gib Clarke (pictured here being treated quite well at a Filipino site visit) has come up with a good acronym for the efforts to combine all these population, health, and environment components to advance development for poor communities. PHE doesn't exactly roll off the tongue or make clear its focus at first blush.

Gib came up with HELP Plus which stands for Health, Environment, Livelihoods, and Population with the Plus standing for whatever the communities want it to be. Could be micro-credit, could be sustainable agriculture, could be water and sanitation...

So HELP Plus it is for our acronym obsessed world. Parenthetically, the best acronyms come out of the Philippines, a country that seems to revel in them. IPOPCORM is my favorite, designed purposefully to sound like popcorn according to one of its architects, Leona D'Agnes. Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management. Impressive title and impressive projects. I in fact blogged on Grist about my visit to one of their sites a couple of years ago where I got to swim with Nemo!

Integrated Lives, Integrated Programs

Quick recap - I'm combining the need to lose weight with the desire to raise money for a dynamic community project I visited in Ethiopia. I'm taking per pound pledges in hopes I will lose a LOT by December and these resources can expand the the school three more grades so kids won't have to walk 5 km each way to stay in school past 4th grade! Or to fence in the school, or to add to the microcredit program that supports especially the women's efforts to sell butter, or to strengthen the conservation around the endangered Whitewing flufftail that nests in the wetland behind the school (and really nowhere else but in South Africa where the bird migrates!).

Or whatever the dynamic community decides for it should be about what they want, not what we get excited about funding. Often it is the more mundane that is the most needed. Those of us who do have conservation as one of our goals need to recognize that communities such as the one in Berga have a multiplicity of challenges. Faced simultaneously. With high priority for a lot of folks.

So I find the integrated approach, recognizing that these people live integrated lives and have integrated needs, responds to the true complexity of their lives. In my case, I work directly with programs that combine livelihoods, health (including reproductive health), conservation and natural resource management. Lots of great resources for these programs that are scattered all over the world.

Heller's Guide to Weight Loss Frustration

My calf is killing me. Haven't gone into raising cattle. No, my left leg is proving problematic when it comes to some of my favorite workout options i.e. basketball. Strained it a couple of weeks ago playing "the game too far" and now it makes itself known with twinges on my walks to and from work. It is as pathetic as it sounds.

The small but nagging injury exemplifies what I find to be a catch-22 for overweight people who were formally very athletic and in shape (long, long ago). Many of the sports you enjoy are now sports you enjoyed. I can still play basketball, although with what we will diplomatically call a significant erosion of my skills. But running the 30-35 miles a week that I did at one point not too long ago has become seemingly impossible until I lose enough to take the pressure off my knees. Gotta lose it to expand the repertoire. Running is a key way to lose it. You get the picture.

Special Friends in Town

So some special friends are in town this week.

When I visited the Maru-Chebot First Cycle Elementary School last November, I was really just tagging along with a group of 10 American environmental activists from the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. Two friends and leaders in population-health-environment field, Katie Mogelgaard and Sarah Fairchild, had arranged a dynamic visit to Ethiopia for them to see first hand the links between severe environmental, demographic, and health challenges.

Katie and Sarah were kind enough to let me tag along before we all went to Addis Ababa for a conference entitled “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa.” Both the visit to Berga and then the conference proved to be fascinating. I’ve told you a lot about the Berga site. The conference was an energizing three days with participants sharing insights from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, DRC, and then places farther afield from Madagascar and the Philippines. The conference had a host of sponsors but I should single out friends at the Population Reference Bureau and LEM, the Ethiopian NGO that hosted the meeting.

But back to this week – the Audubon and Sierra group is back in Washington along with a similar group who traveled to the Philippines this past March. I missed joining them for dinner tonight, but I look forward to catching up with them tomorrow to share stories and more importantly, discuss how we are all working to support that community in need we visited together that sunny November day in Ethiopia.

Keeping Girls in School

We met this little girl during our visit to the Berga wetland project in Ethiopia. Her eyes enraptured all of us visiting that day. More than one of us spontaneously recalled the iconic cover of National Geographic with the young Afghan girl and her striking green eyes. This one was close on our heels the entire time but never uttered a word.

And it is for girls like her that I want to help this school and others like it get better sanitation facilities. So girls like her can stay in school past puberty.

It makes sense when you think about it, but one of the major reasons girls drop out of school at much higher rates than boys in this part of the world is the lack of private, sanitary toilet facilities. If girls do not have separate and passable facilities when they start menstruating, they stay at home at alarmingly high rates. Without any of the help of pads or tampons, going through this transition to womanhood in public without facilities is simply not something girls will or will be allowed to do.

And of course the negative ripple effects are enormous. Higher levels of education are connected to so many positive things for girls and women:

--higher income and economic opportunity;
--greater decision-making power within the household and the community;
--more resources invested in the health, education, and nutrition of her own children;
--more control over when and how many children to have, in part through higher usage of modern contraception; and
--smaller family sizes that typical enable greater investment in each child;

…and the list goes on and on.

So this vicious cycle is one that needs to be broken in places like Ethiopia where the facilities for schools need resources for so many things, including clean and private pit latrines. Just as the negative ripple effects can be so terrible, so too can the positive ripples of such minimal investment pay tremendous dividends in the lives of kids and especially girls like the one pictured here.

The Beatles on My Diet

Temptation to the left of me! Temptation to the right of me! Here I am, stuck with a middle again! (to paraphrase the Liverpool four)

All of Kirsten's family in town for a big family birthday celebration led to two Memorial Day weekend garden parties and lots of leftovers. And then last night a trip to Baltimore for little Erik's first ball game. As you can see, he didn't leave much for Daddy to finish!

Film on Forgotten Fistula Crisis in Ethiopia

It would be interesting to know what percentage of Americans have heard of obstetric fistula. Actually, I guessing it would be next to none. Not that anyone would spend the money to conduct the poll.

Obstetric fistula is an injury suffered from prolonged labor in childbirth that is avoided or repaired where babies are delivered in hospitals. In parts of the world where hospitals are few and far between in remote areas, it is a different story. And a heartbreaking one for an estimated 2 million young women and girls told touchingly by filmmaker Mary Olive Smith in the documentary A Walk to Beautiful. The film's website says about obstetric fistula :

Short of death, the most devastating effect of neglected childbirth is obstetric fistula, a hole that forms between the vagina and the bladder or rectum during prolonged, obstructed labor. This horrific injury leaves victims incontinent. Some develop nerve damage in the feet and legs.

The risk of obstetric fistula is much higher for young girls who often have prolonged labor as their babies are simply too big and a safe Cesarean section is not available. If the physical injury wasn't enough, the social and economic consequences for the victims are life-shattering. The incontinence and associated smell often leads to ostracization by family and social networks, leading the woman and sometimes her children to be shunned.

We at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington were lucky enough to host Mary Olive, a former colleague, last week for a screening and discussion of this film that tells the story of five Ethiopian women and their difficult roads to treatment at the famous Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. It gives outsiders a glimpse of this terribly unfair malady and its devastating impacts while providing hope and inspiration from these particular women and girls who overcame tremendous hurdles to even reach Addis for care.

I don't know if they have obstetric fistula records at the small room that serves as the health facility at Berga wetland project. The two young women with one year of health training (see picture) who work there do deliver babies and they record deliveries on handwritten charts on the wall. I will try to find out more about their particular experiences and how far away a hospital is for example. In the meantime, find a way to watch the award-winning film A Walk to Beautiful.

From Denmark with love (and calories)

My wife Kirsten is from Denmark and the girls are attending a terrific Saturday afternoon Danish school with 60+ kids. Play games, do art projects, watch movies, sing at the Embassy on holidays (see picture), and learn about Denmark.

And eat. Eat Danish Danishes which are of course not called Danishes and are much better than what we in the United States call Danishes.

And drink Danish beer. Not the kids mind you, but the parents, at the yearly fundraiser. Carlsberg, Elephant. Really, really good beer.

So yes, the yearly fundraiser was this weekend. I did my part by buying plenty of the open faced sandwiches, drinking Carlsberg, and having one small piece of the kringle as the pastries are called. Not exactly great for the diet.

Did I mention the beer?

Kids there and kids here

I have said that the kids of Berga, so charming and in such need, captured my heart when I visited their school. It is memories of their smiling faces and obvious hurdles that keep me motivated to find ways to support their school and associated projects.

There are smiling kids closer to home who are also motivating this crazy combination of trying to lose weight to raise money for the Berga community. They are close to home because they are IN my home - my three little ones pictured here.

What are the school needs?

I have mentioned a school for young kids is at the center of my efforts - really it was the kids who provided the true inspiration. Geremew Selassie and Zewditu Tessema of the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society brought us to Berga last November and were our experts, guides, and interpreters. I stayed in touch after the trip and asked them to tell me about the school and its needs. Here is some of what Geremew Selassie wrote me:

The Maru-Chebot First Cycle (grade 1-4) Elementary School is located in Ada Berga Woreda, Chebot Kebele. The total area of the school is over 16,600 sq. meter. A total of around 400 students are currently attending in the school. There are 8 teachers. The school has only one block. It is built of
local materials (wood and mud), a roof with corrugated iron-sheets ceiling, and cement floor. The block consists of four class-rooms and an office.

The old school block is in such a dilapidated condition that the
teaching-learning process is seriously affected.

The main problems of the school can be summarized as follows:
. Walls are crumbling;
. The floors are badly damaged or worn out;
. Most of the students are sitting on the floor because of shortage of
desks;
. Doors and windows are broken down and need repair;
. Chalkboards are small and of very poor quality;
. Rooms have no ceilings;
. The compound is not fenced;
. Class-rooms are over crowded; and
. A number of students who are either from very poor families or have no parents cannot afford to buy simple educational materials.

Parents and the community at large have been trying to improve the condition, by pulling together their own resources and soliciting funds. They have not been able to make significant differences with their own meager resources. With the number of students growing every year, the existing capacity is approaching breaking point and the teaching -learning process will certainly deteriorate further. Hence, there is a dire need to build additional classrooms.

Repairing the school is not only a matter for improving the teaching-learning process. Many parents, including the Site Support Group members are sending their children to this school. The repair will have a positive impact to the conservation efforts around Berg wetland.

Since the school is only up to grade 4, then after, the students have to go to Enchinee, which is 5 km. away. This means the students have to walk 10 km. everyday, a very tough routine for 4th graders, who are quite young. So there is a need to up grade the school up to grade 8, by building additional classrooms. By the time the students complete grade 8 close to their homes, from then onwards, they will be strong enough to cover the 10 km. daily walk.

What are the goals?

I've been thinking long and hard about setting two goals: the amount of weight I should aim to lose by December 31st and how much money I would like to raise for the Berga school which is formally called the Maru-Chebot First Cycle (grade 1-4) Elementary School located in Ada Berga Woreda, Chebot Kebele, Ethiopia. Having specific targets focuses the mind for weight loss and fundraising!

Let's focus on the second question - how much money should I realistically try to raise? I want to be ambitious and set a high goal so as to not undershoot. Yet what is that in an age of the Internet and ideas catching on? I suppose if things go well, I could always revise the number.

I want the amount raised to make a real difference in the lives of those living in the community. I asked once for details on what the school needed and friends at the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society who are working with the community gave me a detailed list. To round up, it would be $25,000. Yet this would only be to repair and upgrade the school for grades 1-4 and perhaps expand. But for reasons that will become obvious, the real goal is to expand to grade 8 so these little ones aren't unrealistically expected to walk 5km each way to go to school for older kids.

And what about supporting all the other terrific and equally vital services that are part of the integrated community effort: the micro-credit program to give women the capital they need for producing butter, the medical supplies and modest salaries for young women with one year of medical education to provide a very basic maternal and children's health services, maintenance for the well that provides safe drinking water, resources to upgrade the rudimentary sanitation facilities, resources so the community continues to refrain from cutting the wetland grasses to preserve the nesting area of the White-winged Flufftail, resources so the community can develop eco-tourism around the Flufftail that only nests in this wetland and in a few places in South Africa.

So....I need a higher target for the need is much greater.

Progress....of the Slow Variety

Greetings fellow travelers. I've got a couple of half written posts on how amazing the people are in the Berga wetland community I visited in Ethiopia. It is why I am not a prolific blogger here or at New Security Beat where I blog at work. I want to write too much and make it just right. And that of course takes time.

So I am trying to turn another leaf and be short and sweet (as opposed to quick and dirty) with blog posts.

I've been down as many as seven pounds. This morning it was just five. Still working up the courage to tell you all where I am starting from. Have to save that detail for later (I think they call it a teaser), but suffice it to say, I have lots to lose.

I was in New York City on work travel last week and it is always tough to diet on a trip. And I take a lot of trips. But especially in a city with so many wonderful restaurants. That said, I saw a lot of UN cafeterias and dining rooms although they are not horrible if you make the right choices. If....

And I can report that the Amtrak salad is reasonable but perhaps not delightful. Best option is stocking up at the sushi stand in Penn Station although when your train is delayed for nearly five hours, you end up eating your sushi with your hands standing in front of the big board ready to dash to a gate. Not that I am bitter or anything.

I am still working on making it easy to make a per pound pledge to spur me to lose weight and to raise money for this terrific multi-dimensional education, conservation, health, development project in Ethiopia. I have some prospects for working with a group that can make your donation tax-deductible and making the money transfer more formal. Stay tuned for details.

For now, feel free to email me at geoff DOT dabelko AT gmail DOT com if you would like to make a pledge. I will gather them up and then formalize them with receipt etc once we get a formal system set up.

Getting Started

So I was eating a bag of chips when I thought of this idea, trudging along in my daily workday pilgrimage commuting one hour each way between the suburbs and downtown Washington, DC. Two disparate desires came together in a single scheme: losing weight (and lots of it) and raising money for a poor but fantastically dynamic village project in Ethiopia.

I haven't been doing either very well recently so while putting the two together somehow struck me as crazy, I didn't immediately discard the idea and retreat into my iPod.

I need to lose weight and so while I had just bought the chips, I was guiltily thinking about how to shed the pounds as I was putting them on.

In the strange way the brain works, I was also pondering ways to support a community (slide show) in Ethiopia I had visited for just a few hours last November. I was visiting with a small group of American environmentalists there to speak with community leaders about their innovative combination of education, environmental, health, and income generating efforts. We were connected to this particular community by the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society because they were building all these efforts around a modest looking ground nesting bird called a White-winged Flufftail.

But I'm giving you too much detail about what excites me about this integrated development project. I haven't told you how these two joint concerns came together in the form of a plan to achieve both weigh loss and more resources for this community.

I had recently supported some family and friends with pledges for their walk for a cure efforts to battle breast cancer. And it struck me that perhaps I could raise money for this community by gathering per pound pledges for losing weight. If I could manage to share my rather shocking weight total with the world and figure out a way to gather and disburse pledges, I might actually muster the discipline to lose some serious waistline baggage.

So this self-imposed pressure scheme is what I will be trying to get started in coming days. This blog will grow as I hopefully shrink and the contributions for Berga grow. Stay tuned for more details on the fascinating Berga Wetland Project that is so much more than the name suggests.