Giving back on a budget

So, I’m pretty broke. And since I know that most (but not all) of you fine folks are a) earning a non-profit fellow’s stipend, b) earning an international non-profit fellow’s stipend, or c) paying copious amount of money to be taught things, I think it’s a safe assumption to say that we’re all on the same page. That being said, I get so much pleasure out of donating to a cause I believe in so I’ve been researching different ways to make every little dollar count. I’ve found some really nifty non-profits that are shown below. You’d be surprise how much just a little money can do. Hope you’re inspired!

End world hunger!

Heifer International is one of my favorite charities ever. They address the world-wide hunger crisis by giving both livestock and training to families in impoverished regions of the world.

Why I love it: A family not only gets an immediate source of food, but also a way of sustaining itself far into the future. The coolest part is that they turn the recipients into donors by having families give the first set of baby animals to another needy family. It’s really a gift that keeps on giving.

What you can do for the price of a T-shirt ($20): Sponsor a flock of chicks for a family in Zimbabwe. The meat and eggs provide crucial nutrients to the family and selling part of the flock provides income that can pay for medicine and school.

End the Achievement gap!

It’s a well known fact that students from low-income backgrounds under-perform in our public school system far more often than their more affluent peers. Less well known is the fact that this achievement gap is already present in preschool aged children. Jumpstart addresses this crisis by pairing at-risk preschoolers with highly trained work-study students in year-long mentoring relationships.

Why I love it: If you want to address problems in education, Jumpstart gets you the most bang for your buck. A recent study showed that every $1 invested in early education ultimately has a $7 economic return to the children, their families and tax payers nationwide.

What you can do for the price of a sandwich ($8.50): Sponsor one hour of quality literacy mentoring for a child who is seriously at risk of falling through the cracks.

Cure the sick!

It’s horrifying the number of deaths in impoverished nations from preventable, curable disease. Partners in Health is a mean, lean organization that’s going to put a stop to it.

Why I love it: PIH was started by one of my personal heroes: Dr. Paul Farmer. Read his biography Mountains Beyond Mountains and you’ll be a convert too. His years of tireless work are based on the simple undeniable truth that one life is worth just as much as another.

What you can do for the price of dinner and a movie ($24): Cover the transportation costs (re: ambulance) of 4 patients from rural areas so that they can reach a clinic for care when they wouldn't otherwise be able to get help.


I'll stop for now, although believe me, I could go on forever. Please let me know what you're favorite charities are. I always love learning about how people are saving the world.

"I'm not a mean person..."

As I’m sure you all know by now, it doesn’t take much to get me laughing. A cheesy pun? Keep ‘em coming. A B-grade comedy from the ‘80s? That’s what I’m talking about. Watching someone trip? Knee-slapping hilarious. This is probably why I laughed for a good 20 minutes yesterday after a chance encounter in the Massachusetts woods. I was taking a Sunday afternoon walk through the brambles alongside a little pond in western MA with my friends Ethan and Eugene (see pictures below) when an adorable fancy lap dog bounded into our path. Ethan, who was immediately charmed, picked up the pooch, pet it, snuggled it, and scratched behind its ears before reluctantly setting it down. Two seconds later a burly man (who could’ve passed for a 1950s lumberjack in a heartbeat) burst through the bushes, picked up the lap dog by the skin on it’s back and literally threw it into the pond.

Stunned (though admittedly not as stunned as the puppy himself), our eyes followed the clean arc of the blurred furball against the beautiful blue sky. I really think it had a good 6 feet of air.

“I’m not a mean person”, interjected the lumberjack whose threatening look made me wonder if I were about to be thrown into the pond as well. “It’s just that my dog rolled in dead muskrat.” Oooh, a dead muskrat, you say? That’s a perfectly good reason to chase your dog through the woods, pick it up by its fur, and hurl it into a drinking reservoir. That’s right, the pond was surrounded by very orange, very numerous and very visible “No trespassing—drinking water” signs.

So, why am I still laughing? 1) Ethan snuggled with a dead muskrat. 2) I watched a lap dog fly through the air. 3) For the next month I’m going to have to check each glass of water for muskrat-y dog hair.

This is why I miss you all so much...

A picture's worth a thousand words

Hello folks. In case you're curious what my life has been like since moving to Boston, I've compiled some pictures into a slideshow showing some of my more recent adventures. Click on the speech bubble icon if you want to see the captions. Also, here is a link to the album itself. Enjoy!

Hobbies. I need a better one.

Now that I’ve had a few months to settle in to my new job, my new house and my new life up here in Boston, I’ve started to notice my lack of hobbies. Starting a new hobby is certainly a tricky business. Your first hurdle: you’re going to be bad at it, at least for a while (believe me, this is a formidable hurdle given the type-A personality so kindly bestowed upon me by my undergraduate years). Your second hurdle: it costs money (given that my audience is primarily in student loan debt up to his/her eyeballs or is trying to live in a major metropolitan area on a non-profit fellow’s stipend, I’m sure you feel my pain). Your third hurdle: you actually have to figure out what it is that you enjoy doing (metacognition is not my forte—yes, NBS, it’s because I’m a girl).

That said, I think I’ve finally arrived at a solution. I’ve found a cheap, enjoyable hobby that only took me about 4 hours of patient practice at my desk to master.


Behold…I can now write both forwards and backwards with equal dexterity and speed! Then again, perhaps I'll keep thinking...

My Identity Crisis (aka: Welcome to my blog)

Last night while I was washing up the last dish from my rather uninspiring rabbit-fare dinner of vegetables and tofu, I was surprised to find myself in the throes of an identity crisis. "Aha," you may think to yourself, "she's going through one of those post-graduation, 'oh-crap-what-the
-fuck-do-I-do-with-my-life-now' episodes. And, come to think of it, you'd be right. But not completely right. You see, this particular identity crisis was sparked when my new female roommate stopped in the kitchen to say a friendly hello. “Hey Adriana,” I instinctively looked up to see who was addressing me, and found myself looking right over her head. Having spent the previous three months living with four guys (two of them several inches over 6 ft.) and two tall girls, I have revised my self-schema accordingly. I’m short. I will always have a good view of people’s nostrils. And that’s just the way it is. So why is it so difficult for me to accept that I’m suddenly the tallest of the female contingent in my house? Have I been literally, figuratively, metaphorically, allegorically and in all other senses replaced? Is the defining factor of my own existence really as simple as whether or not I have to crane my neck back to look someone in the eye? This is the point where I realize, soggy sponge in hand, that I’ve been attacking the same skillet for the past 15 minutes. Having reached my quota of philosophizing for the night, I put away my dish and trucked off to bed.
That night, my dreams were plagued with images of coming home to find a hoard of the curliest-haired girls this side of the Mississippi chattering in my living room.

Quote of the day: "If you put together your desire with my smell, you get a smore"