Chapter 3: Who You are

May 18, 2011

What kind of person reads The Inca Diaries?

 A couple of you are retired postal workers. Another was named the best chief financial officer in the Puget Sound region a few years ago. You are really a very eclectic aggregation with at least one thing in common: You care about other people and what happens to them.

My friend Roger is very much like the rest of you. He responded to my last e-mail with a link to a Time Magazine article about Hillary Clinton and Julia Roberts.

The threat from cooking:

Actress Julia Roberts has become the “global ambassador” for Secretary of State Clinton’s mission to change how women throughout the world cook. Mrs. Clinton is working to establish the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves are the items my group will be installing in Quechuan homes in Peru in August.

Roberts:

It speaks to so many issues about mothers and women around the world who are trying to care for their families and the toxins that they're exposed to while cooking for their families. Something that's such a joy in my life every day — cooking — is this incredible, horrific danger to women around the world.

Clinton:

Everybody has had a meal that is cooked — some of them very meager, some of them very elaborate. But nearly 2 million people around the world, mostly women and children, die each year from this activity we all take for granted, because they are breathing the fumes and the smoke from using solid fuels, such as wood or dung or crop residues. That's almost as many people as die each year from malaria and tuberculosis combined. And we then see the impact on all the rest of us, because about one-fifth of the world's black-carbon emissions come from cookstoves. We aim to have cookstoves that are affordable and more efficient in a hundred million homes within the next several years. (http://cleancookstoves.org/)

You are people who pay attention to these sorts of things.

Like my best friend, the retired school administrator who bought two inexpensive and virtually indestructible laptop computers. One went to a granddaughter, and the other to a child in a third-world nation.

Or another friend who asked that instead of wedding gifts, individuals make donations to The Smile Train, which funds surgery for children all over the world who had the misfortune of being born with harelips.

A third friend gave a special holiday gift to her business clients last  year: She purchased on their behalf desks for schools in Malawi, where as many as 90 children in a classroom were forced to sit on dirt or concrete floors for seven-hour days because they had no desks. $48 puts 2-3 children at a desk. (View this truly amazing story at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40711558#40711558)
Most of you are retired or facing retirement I wish I could connect you, because you represent a group of people who would probably like each other very much. But out of respect for your privacy, I send the Diaries to myself and bcc the rest of you.

Let me tell you a bit more about yourselves.

• Arts: you are a music instructor, several dance instructors, a poetess, a painter and a museum curator.
• In technical fields: Current and former Boeing employees. At Boeing, one of you is my oldest friend and has worked on space launch vehicles. Another friend is a programmer and computer tekkie.
• In politics, government and civil affairs you are a minister, civil rights worker, ACLU member, city planner, former city council member and a retired top-ranking Department of Defense employee in personnel management.
• You are a retired college professor, retired college administrator, present and current school board members, a retired school administrator, and a former superintendent of Seattle’s gypsy school.
• Fashion: A designer and a retired buyer
• In health, you are a social worker, dentist, MRI technician and nurse.
• You are a health statistician, an airline hostess, a professional coach, a Smithsonian lecturer a Metro bus driver and the owner of a public relations firm.  You worked in real estate. You are a retired ferry system first mate, a caterer, dairy worker, homemakers, retired government workers, a handyman, fireman, sewer system administrator, a member of a sewer system board, a retired banker, an environmentalist, former caregiver and a hairdresser.
• And you are a Daughter of the American Revolution.
• Some of you have gone undescribed because I don’t know the proper words to explain what you have done.

Together, you make up a special set of people who I have had the pleasure to know and who have much to offer.

Greetings to you all.

Love,
Robert