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 The Other Big Earthquake
While the world focuses on Haiti, relief workers are still salvaging materials and building shelters for the survivors of West Sumatra's back to back 7.9 and 7.0 earthquakes of last fall, which affected 1,250,000 people, and killed or injured several thousand. Two hospitals and many schools crumbled, and 279,000 homes were damaged. Hands On Disaster Relief has extended Project Sungai Geringging until April, and I'm on my way there to help.
Why Sumatra, and why now? Well, as you may know, I spent the last part of 2009 pushing to finish the 4th and final draft of Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate. Three days before the New Year, I finished the 3-year+ long project and now I'm free to refocus my energy in other places. Humanitarian work, activism, travel, and writing (and my friends!) are generally what inspire me to get out of bed in the morning, and having lost my own home in the 1993 Northridge quake, I feel especially moved when I see the photos of people in front of the remains of their homes. I remember the huge difference that community support and aid made in my life when I was the one left homeless. So, since I definitely want to get out from behind this computer for a bit, and since there's a glut of people itching to go to Haiti, I decided on Project Sungai Geringging.
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 Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate
Four years after I hoisted my plastered, broken toe onto a footrest somewhere in the former Soviet republic of Moldova and started writing Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate, it's finally done! Here's a blurb that might end up on the back cover:
Beginning with a broken toe in Moldova, Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate retraces a personal journey through urban squats of Western Europe, Central American countryside, an Alaskan winter without electricity or indoor plumbing, the streets of Istanbul and Southern India, across Bosnia, Serbia and Romania on a bicycle, and eventually into the political countercurrents of Venezuela, Uruguay, Cuba and Colombia.
More than a travel memoir, this collection of true stories relentlessly pushes at the edges of cultural boundaries, while tracing a path of personal evolution through activism, love, loss, birth, death, politics, and exploration of the ever-evolving mysteries of life. It is a tale of what is possible when a young woman insists on staring down her fears, keeping magic as a travel companion, and sampling all the chocolate along the way.
Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate is a playful, personal story that pokes at politics and cultural differences, but focuses on our ultimate interconnectedness, and seeks to offer a reminder of the magic that is always around us, the ordinary magic we tend to overlook, the mysteries we get too busy to ponder. And in that ubiquitous magic we may just find reason to live with more trust and compassion, with less fear, and with more openness to the infinite possibility of life. We may find that we are capable of much more than we realize.
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The Book
Ordinary Stories of Magic, Adventure, and Chocolate
September 15, 2009
Well, it's been over a year since my old laptop was stolen. I think at this point I can almost say I'm glad it happened. I can't remember how I got by with that old laptop that couldn't do so many of the things I now take for granted, and I ended up rewriting the book in ways that I'm pretty sure made it much better. Everyone told me that would probably be the case, but I guess it was a little hard to believe when I was in the middle of it. It's funny how often things that seem so crappy can actually turn out to be those well-disguised blessings.
I didn't work on the book at all from May until October, and instead focused on a series of collaborative reportbacks from Japan about the global justice organizing surrounding the G8 summit in July, which were published on alternet and beyond. When I finally settled back into Ordinary Stories last fall, I had to start editing back at the beginning, rereading everything, making enormous changes, and eventually adding a few new sections. As the year unfolded, resolution to some of the questions the book had left unanswered started to appear through the circumstances of my life, and as a result, the ending of the story actually changed.
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