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.