purejuice

I need to rejigger my charitable contributions. Defenders of Wildlife -- and a bunch of others, similarly -- pissed me off with a new picture of flayed wolves every day implying a new crisis for which they needed another $100. To pay the email jockey, presumably, who I'd be happy to flay personally with my 1 1/2 inch Swiss Army keychain knife blade. Peace out.

The Innocence Project, I think, is the fundamental civil rights Ur-charity. I donated in memory of Aunt Cherie. Begone, all you spring freaks at UNCF. As for the NAACP, I think I may have to join just to honor the memory of Thurgood Marshall.

I need a better global warming charity and will spelunk over at American Institute of Philanthropy to find one. Here are their A+ enviro candidates:
http://www.conservationfund.org/
http://www.rmef.org/
http://www.sierraclub.org/foundation/
http://www.tpl.org/

Charity Navigator has 96 four-star enviro charities.

Go me, I've been contributing to the TPL for nearly 20 years. A+!!!! But I'd already given to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (AIP grade: B+) for sentimental reasons, in memory of my father (he's buried at sea). Chesapeake Bay Trust is four star rated, and sounds like a better bet -- along with the four star Surfrider Foundation, to which I've contributed in Daddy's memory on and off for 20 years (he was a total beach bunny).

Women's microloans, in memory of grandmother Pure, my aunt and mother, not rated by API, four stars at Charity Navigator.
http://www.kiva.org/

Animal welfare, A+ per the AIP:
http://www.awionline.org/

I've been pretty assiduous with tiny contributions to the four-star charity Water Missions International, despite their email jockey who included me on their prayer list, or something. (Have we been introduced? You're not allowed to touch me, hug me or pray for me otherwise. Under any muthafuckin' circumstance.) They are the people bringing potable water to the Haitians, the lack of which has caused the current cholera epidemic, as I predicted nearly a year ago. If you send just $10 a pop, it literally saves a life.

In other movement of the chi news, I have settled my fathomless seamless health insurance issues, paid the bills, made a grocery list for the production of duck carcass soup and lemon cake, and hope to put away the mountain of packed-up Christmas decorations today.

I have also sworn to re-jigger and compleat the fathomless, seamless, endless, white afghan, which I do not love, before starting another ripple afghan for the blue bayou bedroom (best deal, and best weight, on shades of ice blue!), as well as to finish the 10 lords a leaping garland, just in time for Christmas 2011, before starting on the elves. I'm so psyched about the elves.


Animal assistance, ca. 2008, always helpful.


One of Martha's more sublime ideas.

It was 10 years ago I went to Cuba for the first time and, surrounded by Spanish-speaking black people, for the first time, for the first time felt I was Home.

This is the absolutely unsurprising result of my upbringing. First memory is of my mother's arms, rocking chair, Puerto Rico, looking out the window at the dazzlingly twinkling stars and thinking that the tree frogs' undulating song was the music made by the stars. Then Africa. Etc.

So I just had to have this album of Buika, inspired by Almodovar and the cross-dressing 91-year-old ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, and recorded in Cuba, la perla de los Antilles.



Buika's tale of globalization and political exile is told in today's NYT. I have to go track down Chavela.

In other news, the cholera outbreak I predicted in Haiti, the result of unburied dead and polluted water, has begun. I did advise, after checking out carefully, contributing to Water Missions International, which, though Christian, is single-handedly doing an honest and top priority job to which no one else is paying attention.

Potable water is pretty much the third world issue. Lack of it is responsible for most of the deaths of all kinds, including in refugee camps and in genocides of attrition. Depriving people of potable water is a low-tech way to kill them.

I discover that the Haitians have never had potable water. It came in dead last in a survey of world water poverty eight years ago. The situation now is unimaginably bad, with unrecovered dead contributing cholera and other toxins to waters already fatally polluted with sewage (there is no sewer system in Haiti). The survivors, in a word, are going to die if they don't have cleaner water.

http://purejuice.livejournal.com/1539735.html

Please donate what you can.
http://www.watermissions.org/give

The Caribbean, as you might understand, is very close to my heart. Mami wata too.

You read it here first. Please donate to Water Missions International Haitian relief earthquake fund. Cholera is a completely predictable, and ineluctable, outcome for all refugee camps and natural disasters, for which none of the NGOs are ever prepared with potable water systems. Diarrhea is the number two killer of children in the world, and it already is gripping the Haitians.

Unlike an earthquake, this you -- unlike the absolutely fucking clueless NGOs -- can do something about.


http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1953379_1953494_1954584,00.html

( NYT: Poor Sanitation in Haiti’s Camps Adds Disease Risk )