Scale

Ok, you'd have to be living under a rock in a very remote part of the universe to be unaware of the awful devastation being caused by the famine and political horseshit happening in Somalia and surrounding countries.

I started following a while back and the pictures progressively got worse, the numbers of the fatalities kept going up and the children kept on dying. In the thousands. To date 29,000 children in 90 days.

To follow the math that's 322 children a day. 13 every hour. The length of time it will take me to write this post 13 children will no longer occupy this planet. 13.

And yet here in North America we're suffering an epidemic of such extreme proportions it's humiliating to even talk about, but I will. Because it's time I faced it myself.

We're a continent that is over taxing our health care system due to our own issues with food. We're obese. Where Somalia doesn't have enough, we have excess and we choose to exercise it. Clearly not literally. Our scale tips so heavily the other way that we're dying from it. We're killing ourselves in gluttonous excess while Somalia can barely get on the same scale.

I felt ashamed when I realised what a self indulgent ass I've been. Mothers and fathers incapable of feeding their babies is a real issue. Not being able to protect their babies from the world they're being born in to, is a real issue.

Trying to fill some void in myself with food is a symptom born of the fortunate. My problems in relation to famine are barely worth getting on the scale, while famine tips the scale and busts it off it's axis.

How self indulgent I've been to excuse my behaviour. So. Am I just going to be someone that blogs, posts, yammers my mouth off and then fails once again to lose the weight. I sure as hell hope not. But I can't do it for me. I've proven that time and time again. I am incapable of doing this for me, otherwise I would have done it years ago.

So what do I do? What do I do to crack this. What CAN I do to make it impact. On what scale can I make a difference.

Well, I guess we're about to find out. Am I scared? Oh hell yes. Of what? Failure I guess. No, let me iterate that. Failing AGAIN. Finding out I'm too lazy to do it.

So here's where I needed to hold myself accountable. I knew I needed to make this public. I needed all of you to go on this journey with me. But I needed it to mean something. If I was going to do this I needed it to become personal.

I thought about Somalia. I thought about me. I realised in order to genuinely make a good contribution I had to make this personal. I had to give of myself to this because it hurt me inside to think of those babies dying. 8 so far. 5 more by the end of this post.

So each pound had to matter. Every single pound I fought hard to gain, had to have an impact and be celebrated.

Every pound. Could every pound matter? Well with the help of a tool at CanadaHelps I set a goal of $1000 to be sent to the Canadian Red Cross. Whatever we send by the 16th September will be matched by the Canadian Government http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=40022&tid=001

So what happens after the 16th September? I keep going. One pound at a time. With your help I hope that I at least hit my first goal of $1000. If I do that I'll increase the ceiling.

I'll post more on the honesty system and question of "who's making sure you're actually losing weight". For now my page is up...my journey begins...one pound at a time.

http://www.canadahelps.org/GivingPages/GivingPage.aspx?gpID=13870


Of note. It took me almost exactly one hour to finish this post.