Skip to main content

I Have a Dream

And you are invited.

There are three parts to the dream and four ways you can be involved.

Curious?

Good. Because I don't think I can back out at this point, and I am going to be talking about this A LOT in the coming months.

It will take a few posts to flesh it all out, but here is the skeleton plan:




1. Travel & volunteer in Africa/The Middle East/India (tentatively May to August 2012).

2. Make a documentary film that looks at life and where hope lives in the developing world. Also, how we North Americans are changed by our cross-culture encounters and experiences.

3. Do this whole thing as a community. This is not about me going off on an adventure, coming back and having three-sentence conversations about my time away. I want to be a part of a team from start to finish.



What does that look like? How does something like this become a community endeavor?

I am asking for EVERYONE I KNOW to consider being involved by answering one (or more) of the following questions with a resounding YES!


A. Do you know of anyone involved in/living in any of these regions? People and organizations who might welcome a couple of short-term volunteers and be interested in being a part of a documentary.

B. Are you interested in coming with me for some of the time? Maybe you really want to volunteer in a specific location, or maybe you have a set vacation time and will come wherever I am then.

C. Do you have skills, expertise or equipment that you would like to lend? Maybe you are King of the Budgets, or know how to survive out of a backpack for four months, or would like to edit all our video footage.

D. Do you have ideas on how we can fund this? What creative ways can we find to make this a reality without putting any of the team in debt?


You don't have to answer yet. Just start thinking about it.


Speaking of thinking, I bet some of you are wondering...

Beth, this is kind of big and crazy. And unexpected.  How did you come up with this idea?

Great question. I will post on that next.

Comments

  1. this is interesting. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know someone in India. Amazing things they're doing. Don't know yet if they need volunteers :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey I like this thing. I haven't thought enough about it yet to say anything more.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh! I have a few ideas about raising funds and staying in touch with everyone involved in the project... can't wait until I see you! Which is soon!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Can't wait to talk more about this with you...pee-my-pants exciting :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. everyone: we shall talk more sooooon! store those ideas, let them germinate and grow and at the end of august, we'll reconvene.

    aimee: please don't pee your pants.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thi...

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro...

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st...