Blog Action Day: Poverty

It's blog action day! The theme is poverty! I'm sick of blogging for today, so I'll just shout out to Kiva. Hey, I was just going to donate there, but it looks like everything is just about funded. What's up? Are they out of people who need loans? If that's the case, I imagine they'll get more soon enough. Geez, this is the most dysfunctional Blog Action Day post ever.

Let me try again. Hmm. Poverty. I don't really have any big ideas on the issue. Greg Mortenson does, though, and after reading that book about him, I'm pretty convinced that he's doing a pretty good thing. I think I blogged about it before. He's building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kids can go to those schools and learn how to help their people out of poverty. (also, they won't go to the radical madrassas who will pay them to become angry fundamentalists. whatever you think about the USA's "war on terror", fundamentalists aren't great no matter how you slice it, and education helps prevent fundamentalism.) Throwing money at a problem won't solve it, but if you throw money at the Central Asia Institute (Mortenson's foundation) and they build schools for kids, maybe that will solve it.

At any rate, I don't want an argument about whether the Central Asia Institute is going to save the world, or whether they're The Best place to donate money. They are doing some good, and let's leave it at that. I'd just like to say that my personal Blog Action Day thing to do is to donate some money to the Central Asia Institute, and I'd encourage you to do the same. It's a tiny gesture, but every little bit helps.