July 1, 2004

Dear friends,

So I guess you could say I've got a lot of news. For instance, I'm married.

I can't tell you how strange and good it is to say that. In my thirty-six years of wandering around the planet, that's one set of words I've never spoken before. Of course, it's even stranger to say "I love being married, and I'm really looking forward to the wedding."

For several reasons, Deanna and I decided to have an introvert wedding and an extrovert wedding. The small Quaker ceremony was June 5, and the bigger one is coming up July 10. Neither is very traditional, but both are weddings. Some people figured we were having 'the real wedding', then a party. Nope. In fact, we're not exchanging rings until the second one. To be fair, though, the second one will be quite a party, and a big ol' picnic.

Of course, if you're having two weddings, the sensible time for a honeymoon is between them, and that's what we did. My wife (!!!) and I returned from Guatemala a week ago. Since both of us have a dominant nerd gene, we decided to spend most of our honeymoon studying Spanish at the Probigua language school in Antigua, Guatemala. This is great for Deanna's work, and was fun for me since I love languages in general. We also spent plenty of time goofing off, though, and did some serious lounging by the pool as well.

What I didn't expect to do on my honeymoon was found a non-profit organization. It looks like that's how it's working out, though. Our language instruction consisted of five hours a day one-on-one with a private teacher, and we each got to be friends with our instructors over the couple of weeks of classes. After learning of my interest in socio-political and poverty concerns in Guatemala, my teacher offered to take me to a rural school in the mountains to see what the rural schools look like.

The city schools in Guatemala are generally pretty well taken care of, but everything changes in the country. The one I visited had two hundred sixteen students, grades one through six, and the country was only paying for four teachers. Those four are each living on one hundred twenty-five dollars a month.

It was amazing to see what they're doing with so little, and nourishing to hang out with the kids some, who were eager to show me their multiplication tables and speak a couple of words of English.

The school has two projects that they've been dreaming on:

They have a well with dirty water that they pull up in buckets to use for whatever they need. They have a boys bathroom and a girl's bathroom in the school, but no water running to them, so they haul up buckets to use there, too. This is a serious health concern, of course. They've figured up the costs to run plumbing up from the well to the bathrooms, but the expense is prohibitive - there's no way they can come up with the $125 that would cost. Yep, $125.

The school also provides lunch for the kids each day, no small thing in a country where 58% of the population lives below the poverty line (according to stats from Utrecht University, the Netherlands). They prepare the food in what is basically a closet with a couple of burners in it. They would like to build a real kitchen, and have the space for it, but the $850 it would cost is out of reach.

The most amazing thing about the experience was this: I spend so much of my life looking at huge problems in the world and feeling like I can't make a difference at all, and at this particular school I was amazed when it suddenly clicked for me that this is a place where I can.

A couple of days after we got home from Guatemala I did a show at Furman University to a small crowd of mostly students, and I told them about these two projects. I explained that the donations aren't tax-deductible, but if folks wanted to chip in on this, I would pass it directly on to work on these two projects. They gave me $410 on their way out - more than enough to cover the plumbing and well on the way to the kitchen.

I 've now met with a lawyer and an accountant and I'm in the process of establishing a new non-profit corporation to aid rural Guatemalan schools, Proyecto para las Escuelas Guatemaltecas, or P.E.G. It will have one hundred percent flow-through. No administrative, advertising or any other costs will be taken out of the donated money. It will go straight to Guatemala to fund specific projects at specific schools, one at a time. There are a lot more details to explain, of course, but that's the gist of it, and I'm really excited about the project. My Spanish teacher, Claritza, will be the contact on that end, and I'll be back and forth fairly often, as I suspect other folks involved with it will be too.

Me and the principal of the school

...and I haven't even begun to tell you about playing at the North Carolina State Special Olympics opening ceremony or the new songs I've written, or the upcoming national press push for Spin. Better let some of that wait, I guess, but stay tuned. I'll be touring hard for the rest of the year, from New England to New Mexico and from Colorado to Florida. I hope to see you somewhere along the road.

Thanks for your support of my ramblings over the years, both geographic and verbal. Be kind,

David