Tackling global challenge of water
Gary White, the water engineer-activist, and Matt Damon, the actor-philanthropist, have formed one of the world’s great partnerships and solved a problem that has eluded well-meaning institutions, national governments and brainy people — how to bring clean water to millions of poor households.
Without that most fundamental of commodities, the poor were trapped in a cycle of poverty, often paying exorbitant prices for delivered water or spending hours daily hauling jugs from distant streams and wells.
“People trapped in this cannot escape,” White said.
He and Damon created an escape path — water. org and partnerships with banks that allowed people to borrow $275, typically what it cost to connect water to a house in a poor country.
Water carries an almost magical transformative power. For example, White relates the story of a woman in Uganda who, after she connected water to her house, started making bricks, raising a pig and growing a garden. Then she built additional rooms on her house to rent out. Her personal economic transformation began with that one water line to her house. That’s creating capital, White explains.
Although White and Damon alternate the chapter writing, the result nonetheless is a seamless rendering of their journey of discovery, setbacks and solution finding. No vast government or charity programs here; White and Damon succeeded where others have failed, at least in part because they focused on solving the water delivery problem with the community and not by parachuting in with a solution decided from afar.
The stakes are high. As Damon notes in the book, “When clean water is unavailable, human progress is impossible.”
The authors are donating earnings from the book to water.org, the charity they founded. — Jeff Rowe, Associated Press
If you’ve ever purposely gone down the Craigslist Missed Connections rabbit hole, “Letter to a Stranger” is for you. Sometimes it’s sweet, sometimes funny, sometimes just weird.
“Letter to a Stranger” is a collection of vignettes by writers who all share one thing in common: an experience with a stranger that they just can’t shake.
The book’s introduction starts by explaining, “All writers have a peculiar devotion to strangers.” Colleen Kinder’s curated collection displays that devotion — a special kind of extroverted, artistic pull that makes even the introvert capable of fooling someone into thinking they are the most people-y of people persons. This artistic nature is evident in the latent poetry in each letter’s prose, refreshingly unique in voice from one to the next but all sharing a lyrical quality.
Though it reads like the series of letters the title promises, “Letter to a Stranger” is akin to a travel book. Many of the writers’ impactful encounters happen while away from home and their letters are rich with culture, history, and delicious nuggets of local detail.
With a map helpfully included, “Letter to a Stranger” takes us to a hammock in Mazunte, Mexico, where a young boy’s creepy behavior is somehow also endearing; to New York, where a woman’s motherly protection provides relief so palpable I nearly cried; to Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where a bus ride provides a sort of epiphany; and so many more spanning the globe.
“Letter to a Stranger” is an endearing reminder of the humanity that surrounds us; messy, awkward, compassionate, vulnerable. Its bite-sized pieces allow you to jump in and out and skip around — though the smooth flow of categories is worth passing through once from beginning to end.
Kinder’s concept is enchanting and the execution is solid. The people crystallized within the collection become strangers who haunt and inspire us readers, too.