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Revolution No. 9

It will be different this time—not the way it was when we were young and in the foxholes, during that rare spike in history when, as Hunter Thompson put it, “the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash.” In San Francisco, he wrote, he could drive across the Bay Bridge at any hour and wherever he traveled, there was “a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.” We helped integrate schools and hotels, put women and people of color in jobs they’d never been allowed to do, shut down Harvard and Columbia, drove President Johnson out of office, and stopped the war in Vietnam.

Now we live in a country where we’re losing. The pendulum has swung so far to the other side that I’m sometimes in dumb shock. If you’ve ridden the wave, been part of that long fine flash, it’s crushing to live through this reversal of what we visualized and worked for. While I was never at the forefront of political action in college, I showed up for demonstrations. Then, in my thirties, I remember the moment when I became too busy to drive to Delano to picket with the striking grape workers and was relieved to be able to write a check instead. As decades passed, I wrote checks with less frequency. Every four years I’d become impassioned during the presidential election, and if the candidate I had supported lost, I had sink back into disheartenment.

When I embarked on this book, I wanted to find out what it would take to revive that spirit. What had happened to the hundreds of thousands who’d put their bodies on the line in what was then called the Movement for a New America? I wanted to see if they still have hope, still are fighting the good fight, and it turns out many are. A significant number are teaching, serving in government or in the nonprofit world. What intrigues me is that many who gave up their involvement—whether large or small—to focus on careers and kids are feeling the itch to engage again.

Read My Tits

In September 2005, I was in New York on business, staying with Kathy Goodman, when she said, “There’s a march in Washington tomorrow against the war in Iraq. I think we should go.”

How could we do that?

“Jump on the Amtrak and we’re there in three hours. I’ve done it before—no problem.”

I protested that I didn’t have time. I was in New York for only a few days, and the march would exhaust me: six hours on trains, endless walking, noise, and crowds. More important, I thought it would be meaningless. “This administration doesn’t pay attention to demonstrations,” I said. “There are more people protesting the war in Iraq than ever marched against the war in Vietnam, and the story isn’t being covered. Truckloads of money have been raised on the Internet for candidates, floods of e-mails and petitions have been sent to the White House and Congress, and they haven’t made a dent.”

Kathy shrugged. “I’m tired of being angry and not doing anything. Let’s get our bodies there and be counted.”

I’d learned that when Kathy makes proposals like this, it’s best to abandon all resistance and pack a bag. At seven the next morning, we took the subway to Penn Station, waited in a long line, and then heard an announcement: “All southbound trains have been canceled until further notice. They’re having mechanical problems on the tracks, and there’s no estimate as to when service will resume.”

What! Hundreds of people were milling about the station and they were loaded for bear—wearing protest T-shirts and carrying placards and leaflets. But there was no way to get to the demonstration.

“Thank you, Karl Rove!” one man shouted. People laughed briefly, then got on their cell phones and relayed information. The special buses chartered to take people to the march had already departed. The only options were to rent a car, but not many were available, or fly, which would be pricey if we could even get seats.

Now that we were being thwarted, I was determined to get to Washington at any cost. Kathy and I took a cab to LaGuardia and bought seats on the next shuttle flight. The plane was filled with people we recognized from Penn Station, and they were all in our age group, probably because younger activists couldn’t afford tickets. “I’ll be damned,” the woman across from me said, “if they’re going to stop me from exercising my rights.”

Landing in Washington, we closed ranks and took the Metro to the staging area near the White House. Most of the people we saw on the train, in the stations, and on the streets were carrying antiwar signs and banners as they moved inexorably toward the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument, converging like rivers running to the sea. And oh, to join that sea! It had been at least thirty years since I’d marched, and I’d forgotten how good it feels to be part of a great common effort and feel the lift, the power, of seeing you’re not alone.

Hurricane Katrina had just wreaked devastation on New Orleans, and people carried signs: MAKE LEVEES, NOT WAR. There were life-size puppets and street theater: One group were dressed as wealthy socialites, wearing tuxedos and gowns and toasting one another as they hoisted a banner that read, “It’s a class war, and we’re winning!” Everywhere I looked, the majority were over forty—the same people who’d marched in the Vietnam era. I thought, Where are the masses of young? An Episcopal priest, Jim Lewis, said, “Young people are not as angry as we were about Vietnam. There’s no draft, they’re not being forced to kill, and if they’re middle class, they don’t know anyone who’s died or been crippled in the war.”

I went looking for Jodie Evans, a founder of CODEPINK, one of the sponsors of the march. She was easy to spot near the stage, wearing a shocking pink hat with enormous pink feathers over her long red hair, a pink T-shirt, and what looked like a pink tutu. Jodie was escorting one of the speakers, Cindy Sheehan, who’d lost a son in Iraq and camped out near President Bush’s ranch in Texas, requesting a meeting. Jodie, fifty-two, has been an activist all her life and moves at a hundred miles a minute. She’s a spectacular fund-raiser, organizes fact-finding missions to troubled regions, ran Jerry Brown’s office when he was governor of California, and became the first female campaign manager when Brown ran for president.

She and several friends had started CODEPINK on the run. Jodie and Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange, were in Washington in October 2002 when they heard that President Bush was about to ask Congress to approve a preemptive strike on Iraq. “I thought, My God! We have to try and stop it,” Jodie recalls. She and seven other women decided to protest outside the White House the next morning, expecting to find “all these people who don’t want war. But when we got there, we were shocked. There was no one—no one but us.”

Four of the women took off their shirts, which caused the news cameramen to scurry toward them. The women had sewn doves of peace on their bras and written on their stomachs with black marker: “Read My Tits: No War in Iraq.”

What bra, I wondered, do you wear for the action? A Wonderbra, a chaste cotton number, or a hooker’s bra with tassels from Frederick’s of Hollywood? Jodie said she wore what she had with her—blue lace. The idea had come from two young college women who’d heard that in some Native American tribes, when the braves returned from war, their wives would stand on the edge of the village and bare their breasts to pacify their husbands—turn their thoughts from killing to nurturing and love. Jodie, then forty-eight, wasn’t eager to expose her chest. “But when I saw the college girls about to do it, I joined.”

After putting their shirts back on, they walked to the Capitol and stood in line for seats at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee. “We were at the front of the line, so we got in, and all the cameras were trained on us because they thought we’d take off our shirts again,” Jodie says. They did not undress but started yelling, “No war in Iraq!” Committee chairman Henry Hyde ordered Medea Benjamin arrested for clapping, and the others were escorted out of the building.

They returned to the White House the next morning, taking the name CODEPINK to counteract the terrorist warnings coming from the White House—code red, code orange. Every day the women took turns standing vigil, dressed in pink, and others joined them. Within two years, CODEPINK had 250 chapters and 100,000 members, known for their fearlessness and in-your-face tactics.

The women traveled to Iraq, taking buses on the treacherous road from Jordan to Baghdad to observe the conflict firsthand, brought Iraqi women to the United States to speak with members of Congress, and worked with military families grieving children who’d been killed. Jodie knows what it is to lose a child. When she was twenty-nine, on vacation in Mexico, she waded into the ocean carrying her two-year-old daughter, Lala. A powerful wave arose with no warning and tossed Jodie over and over, wresting the baby out of her arms. When Jodie stood up, gasping for breath and screaming, there was no sign of Lala. Jodie never saw her daughter alive again.

“After losing Lala,” Jodie says, “I can’t be intimidated or frightened. What can anybody do to me?”

Jodie met Cindy Sheehan when Cindy came to a CODEPINK rally, and partly because they’d both lost children, they bonded quickly. In August 2005, Cindy called Jodie on her cell phone and said she was in Texas for a conference and had just decided to drive to Bush’s ranch to knock on his door and say, “Please speak with me.” An hour later, Cindy called and said the police had forced her and a friend off the road into a ditch. “I’m not leaving,” Cindy said.

“I’m on my way,” Jodie said.

She put out an Internet bulletin to CODEPINK members to come join Cindy, canceled all her meetings, went to an army surplus store, and bought tents, sleeping bags, Porta Pottis, bug repellent, water, and food. She packed the gear in duffel bags, got on a plane for Texas, and stayed for a month in what the women would name “Camp Casey” after the son Cindy had lost, Casey Sheehan.

The protest in Texas moved CODEPINK from the fringe to the front pages of mainstream media. Cindy, a working mother, became the face of the antiwar movement, encouraging others to speak out. Jodie had dropped all her appointments and left her teenage son in California to support Cindy because, she says, “I know what it’s like to be in the depths of grief.” She also knows that “action takes you out of the darkness. It gives you your life back.” CODEPINK’s members are predominantly middle-aged women, and when they meet to talk, Jodie says, the theme is: “Activism got me out of my chair.”

When your actions don’t produce results, though, I asked, how do you keep going?

“The only thing you can do is keep going. I mean, we ask ourselves, Why couldn’t we stop the war? Where did we fail? But what we’ve done has had an impact. More people know the truth….” She falls quiet a minute. “I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do what I do. Then at least you can say, I tried.”

Danny Goldberg

The march, instead of exhausting me, had been energizing, and when I returned to New York, I met with a friend who uses different channels for political action. Danny Goldberg, who calls himself “a rock ’n’ roll guy,” started in the music business when he was nineteen, eventually served as chairman of several record companies, and in 2005 became CEO of Air America Radio. He’s also “an activist by avocation.” A long-time officer of the ACLU, he debated Tipper Gore when she wanted to censor rock lyrics and took on Democrats and the entire American Left in his book, How the Left Lost Teen Spirit.

Tall and rangy, with a boyish smile and rumpled brown hair, Danny escorts me into his office at Air America on Sixth Avenue. “I’m on the couch!” he calls out to his assistant. The couch? Am I supposed to be his shrink? He drops onto a beige couch, and I realize he’s just signaled that if there’s an urgent call, he’s at the phone extension by the couch.

In your book, I say, there’s a chapter called “To My Fellow Former Hippies,” where you write that we still have to “complete our destiny.” How would that happen?

Danny takes a breath. “First, we have to accept that progress takes a long time. The sixties were an anomaly—in terms of the speed at which things changed. For example: Rosa Parks sits down in the front of a bus, a few years later there’s a march on Washington where Martin Luther King says, “I have a dream,” and Congress passes the civil rights bill. Betty Friedan writes a book, a women’s liberation movement is born, the Supreme Court rules, and suddenly women have the right to choose. Rachel Carson writes Silent Spring, and a few years later there’s an environmental movement. Lenny Bruce goes to jail for using foul language, and a few years later Richard Pryor can say anything he wants.”

Danny laughs. “We got used to change happening quickly. But the reality is that it takes a lifetime of work. You don’t do it in a few years and live in Utopia. If you have that expectation, you’ll get despondent and say, ‘What happened to us? We suck. We’re a shitty generation. We tried to change the world and it didn’t work, so why try anything else?’” He sits forward on the couch. “But if you look at the arc of a hundred years, there’s been amazing progress. When my grandmother was born, women couldn’t even vote!”

After Bush was reelected, Danny himself fell into a slump and toyed with moving to Canada. But he recovered his taste for political work and believes that progressives now are “where conservatives were in the sixties. We’re building a base, it’s growing, and we probably have another twenty or thirty years before we’ll see the fruits. We’ll be really old!”

“If we’re still here.”

Danny asks, “You know that Jewish saying about doing your part?”

“Tikkun olam?” Repair the world?

“Right. We don’t have to fix the world completely, but we’re compelled to do our part in repairing it. That’s it! Do our part.”

Danny grew up in a liberal family and organized protests in his high school, but when he arrived at UC Berkeley in 1967, he says, “I didn’t get involved with SDS or any political groups.”

“Neither did I.”

“They seemed humorless and creepy,” Danny says.

“And those meetings! Arguing for hours over minutiae…”

Danny says, “I was more a rock/drug type. The way I connected emotionally was with the music. I’ve got a short attention span, which is one of the reasons I love rock. You get to the hook within one minute!”

We laugh, lounging on the couches as if we’re back in New York in the seventies when we met. I hadn’t known Danny at Berkeley because he’d arrived after I graduated. “I dropped out the first week,” he says. “Why would I go to class if my parents weren’t around? All I wanted to do was buy and sell drugs, and by May I’d been arrested.”

For what?

He looks up at the ceiling. “Possession of needles, hashish, Seconals, and methedrine. And a .38 Derringer.”

“Danny!”

“I was hanging out with bikers, doing what I thought was cool. I clearly wanted to get arrested because I walked up to a cop when I was stoned and asked for directions.” Because he was seventeen, he was released to his parents’ custody after a week in juvenile hall. “I wasn’t raped or beaten, but it scared the shit out of me. I went to therapy and was never a druggie after that. I wasn’t really addicted, I was meshuggeneh.”

By the fall of 1968, he had a clerical job with a music company. He wrote reviews for rock journals, started his own PR firm, founded and sold a record company, became a personal manager for Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers, and Nirvana, and later was president of Atlantic and chairman of Warner Brothers Records.

He didn’t become active in politics until 1979, when he produced the No Nukes concerts, album, and film, starring Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, and other superstars, to raise public awareness about the dangers of nuclear arms. The concert was a turning point. “I learned that people in the music business could play a role in public life, and I never looked back.” He went on to become chairman of the Southern California ACLU, testified at congressional hearings, and raised money for progressive causes. Danny believes music can be more influential than speeches or demonstrations, because “you play songs again and again. You ask kids today about Abbie Hoffman or Eldridge Cleaver, and they’ve never heard of them. But ask about Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and every kid knows their music.”

When Air America was searching for a CEO, the investors met with Danny. “They were such an odd company that there was no obvious candidate,” Danny says. “People with a pure radio background didn’t understand the culture, and lots of people who understood the culture had never run a business. A rock ’n’ roll background seemed sort of right—it was both business and unorthodox.”

For Danny, the job was a rare opportunity. He’d long believed that the media were deteriorating—becoming less rigorous and independent and moving to the right—and here was a chance to play a role in shaping the country’s political conversation. “I thought, A door like this might not open again, so let me run through it.”

A year later, he was out the door. He’d spent most of his time raising funds, hoping to expand the company into television, books, and the Internet so it would become a national brand, a counterweight to Fox News. But after he’d raised about $15 million, the directors decided to downsize the company and cut costs, and Danny felt he wasn’t right for that job. “It’s not my strong suit. I’m, like, the flamboyant, create excitement, nurture the talent guy. I’m not, How do we get a cheaper phone system?” He still supports Air America and feels some sadness that he’s not staying.

“I’ve been married now seventeen years,” he says, “and I’m about to have my eighth business card.” He attributes this partly to his nature and partly to corporate mergers and acquisitions in the media. “Companies I worked for were bought and sold, my own company was sold. I can’t tell you what my next business card will say.”

“This doesn’t bother you—the uncertainty?”

“I’m not crazy about it,” Danny says. “But it’s been my MO. I’ve never done anything longer than five years in my whole career, since age nineteen. A lot of jobs were two or three years, and this is not the only one that was one year. I’d love to stay somewhere for ten years, like grown-ups used to do, but that’s not been my path.”

He says there’s a part of him “that gets combative and turned on when this happens. I didn’t know if that chip was still in me, but it is.” After Air America, he immediately jumped back into managing artists, including Steve Earle, and writing a book about the music business. “I’ve never had an idle day.”

What about doing your part? I ask. Tikkun olam.

Danny smiles. “I still believe that progressive and liberal ideas are better for most people in society, and we’ve done a terrible job of explaining why. My contribution is trying to address that, whether it’s with books, records, or movies. That’s what I love about Air America, and what I’ll keep working on.”

What about people who don’t have your resources and access to media? I ask. What can they do?

“There are a million other important things to do,” he says. “The biggest challenge is to realize you can’t fix problems overnight, but you can make a difference. Once you’ve realized that, set aside some time to be a citizen. See what calls to you, try a bunch of things, and if you support a candidate who turns out to be a jerk, do something else. The only way you can lose is by not trying.”

Ed Wayne

Okay, I thought, it’s time to find a way to plug in, do my part, but what would that be? While I admired the efforts of Jodie Evans and Danny Goldberg, I’d never felt drawn to politics. I disliked the maneuvering, strategizing, and spinning of information and had concluded that my contribution is reporting and writing the truth as best I can. But I also wanted to help people who’re suffering—especially children—and I found that there’s another stream of activists giving direct aid to victims of poverty, war, or natural disaster.

During the brief time I floated about in the Internet dating pool, I received an e-mail from Ed Wayne in Bosnia, who described himself as a “humanitarian.” In his JDate profile, he said he was five feet six. I’m five feet ten. “Can you imagine finding everything you want in a five-foot-six-inch package?” he wrote, and added, “In Bosnia, there’s a saying: ‘Poison comes in small bottles.’”

Two weeks later, after he’d flown back to the home he keeps in Colorado, we made an eccentric pair when we met at Trios restaurant. Ed looked even shorter than advertised, with a runner’s body and gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. No earring, thank God. Over dinner, he told me how he’d gone from being a Texas good ol’ boy making money in the oil business to a lone-wolf humanitarian.

Born in Houston, Ed founded a company that manufactures valves for oil companies, and after working aggressively to make it the most successful company in the field, sold it when he was fifty-four. “I had two children, and neither wanted to go into the business,” he says. “The industry was changing, and I thought: Sell it while you’re healthy.” It was sold in less than a month. “The good news was, I sold my company.” Ed laughs. “The bad news was, I sold my company. For years I operated with one rule: At the end of the day, I wanted to have more money than I’d had at the beginning. Simple. But now I had no vehicle. What in the world was I going to do?”

He was sitting one night with a woman, drinking wine, watching CNN, when he saw footage of refugees in Kosovo being loaded onto trains. “As an American Jew, I was taught, ‘Never again,’ and my interpretation of that was ‘Never again’ for anybody.” The newscaster spoke about massacres that had precipitated a “refugee crisis,” with no agencies in place to help.

Ed turned to his friend and said, “I’m going there.”

She looked puzzled. “Why? What will you do?”

Ed shrugged. “Whatever I can. Hand out blankets….”

She said, “When?”

“Immediately,” he said.

The next morning, Ed called the director of the American Refugee Committee (ARC), who asked what he wanted to do. “Make a difference. You don’t have to pay me, and if I do a bad job, you can fire me.”

Three days later Ed was in Skopje, Macedonia, where three thousand refugees had streamed over the border from Kosovo in one night. “The camps were a real education,” Ed says. “The atrocities, the wretchedness…it was off the charts. If you didn’t make a difference in somebody’s life every day, it was because you stayed in bed.”

Ed and a team from ARC drove into the mountains to conduct a survey of refugees who were afraid to come down to the camp. Ed felt miserable seeing families crammed into huts with little food and not being able to help them. He came up with the idea of buying a thousand red buckets and filling them with basic necessities like soap, towels, toothbrushes, and sanitary napkins. He told an acquaintance in Skopje, “I need to go see the bad guys.”

Who were the bad guys? I ask.

“Wealthy refugees from Kosovo, living in hotels and doing business.” Ed was taken to a bar “filled with guys wearing black shirts and gold chains.” He asked for the head man.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“Nobody, but I need to buy supplies for refugees just like you except they don’t have money.” Ed handed him a list, and the next day the man delivered one thousand red buckets and all the supplies, for which Ed paid $8,000. He found a Muslim relief worker to help with distribution. Ed told his Muslim cohort, “I want these to go to the people who need them. If I see one red bucket in a store window…someone is going to die.”

The Muslim laughed. “We understand each other very well.”

The Muslim leader gave Ed lists of refugees in the mountain towns, who responded emotionally when he showed up with helpers. “Every family wanted to serve us chai. We became the red bucket guys,” Ed recalls. “It wasn’t much—buckets and soap—but giving concrete things to people who had nothing…” He grins. “It was satisfying.”

Ed felt like the free man in Paris—“unfettered and alive.” He was letting go of what had been his prime directive: How can I make money here? At the end of the day, he had less money than at the beginning, but he was on what Joseph Campbell called “the pollen path”—pollen to the right, pollen to the left. Pollen is a source of life, and when you’re on the pollen path, things flow. Ed founded a nonprofit company, Bridge of Life, and did projects in Albania, Cambodia, and Serbia and Montenegro. He questioned himself—and still does—about his motives. “I thrive on drama and I like being the little guy who saves the day. But why am I really doing this? To impress women when they ask, ‘What do you do?’ Because I have a huge ego from being a CEO? Because I want to get my name and picture in the news?’” He says the answer has always been: “I do it because it makes me feel good.”

The down side is that he’s always chasing disasters, and he’s usually far from his two grown kids. The day after we met, Ed took me for a motorcycle ride and made it clear he wouldn’t be sticking around. Then why, I asked, are you on JDate, advertising for a “woman to share it all with”?

“I am looking for that woman, but I know I’ll never find her.”

“Why?”

“Because of my MO. Freeze or flee.”

“I don’t understand….”

“Neither do I.” He grinned. “But I’m real good at it.”

A month later, as promised, he left for Belgrade, where he was building a park in a Gypsy enclave. He sent an e-mail ahead to his contacts: “The curse returns, board your windows, hide your children!” His methods are irregular. He arrives like a stealth bomber, looks for the hardest problem, decides what he can afford to do, and spends his own money to do it. He ignores red tape and doesn’t ask permission. He has one rule: The local people must work on the project, digging trenches or putting up buildings. “I pay for materials, not labor.” He wears a T-shirt and jeans and drives a motorcycle or van fitted out like a police car with a siren and flashing blue lights. “We made every vehicle look like a police car so when we go to the border, they wave us through,” Ed says. “I went to the garage where they put lights on cop cars and said, ‘Do it.’ They figure if you ask for it, you have the right.”

His priority is helping children. “With adults, you can’t tell who’s good and who’s bad, but with kids, they’re all good.” In Belgrade, he says, the children who’re “at the bottom of the barrel” are in the Gypsy camps, where about 1,200 people live in flimsy shacks, have no water or latrines, and scavenge food from dumpsters. Ed told me, “These are not the dancing, happy, bullshit Johnny Depp Gypsies. These people are malnourished, and less than 1 percent live past sixty.”

On a Sunday, Ed and two helpers broke into the Belgrade water supply and diverted a line to the Gypsy camp. When the mayor found out, he asked, “Who gave you permission to do that?”

Ed said, “God.”

He built a park in the enclave—in what had been a garbage dump—because “parks do great things. If you put in swings, a soccer field or basketball court, you get kids and they learn social skills and motor skills. If you put in benches, you get older people watching the kids. If you put in tables, you get families having picnics, and later you get lovers who have no place to go.”

Ed bought materials like cement and steel poles that couldn’t be destroyed or carried off. Everyone in the Gypsy camp helped clear the site and assemble and paint equipment in red-and-white candy stripes. “Once they put a brushstroke on something, it belongs to them,” Ed says. “I can’t feed them all, house them all, or clothe them all, and I’ve learned from bitter experience that if you can’t do it for everyone, don’t do it for a few, because it’ll bring out the worst—jealousy and fighting.” What he concluded he could do was go around Serbia and build a park in every major Gypsy enclave. “At least they’ll have that.”

Six months later, Ed flew back to the United States to see his family. He promptly had his right ear pierced, and I could no longer thank God that Ed had no earring. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. He was about to undertake the largest project he’s done: building a state-of-the-art pediatric oncology center in a hospital in Belgrade. He’d learned that 20 percent of the children were dying not from cancer but from unsanitary conditions—no toilets or showers. “Kids were getting bone marrow transplants and not being isolated from germs.” When he determined what it would cost—$150,000—he balked. This was more than he’d ever invested in an unstable country. “Okay, Ed,” he thought, “it’s time to be honest. Is this a game you’ve been playing or something important that has to be fixed?” He knew the cancer hospital had to be fixed, and it wouldn’t get done without him. “I have to do it.”

“Do you worry about running out of money?” I ask.

“I always worry about money.” When he headed the oil valve company, he created what he called the “Ed Sanity Sheet.” Every month “my accountants produced a sheet that told me, If I had to liquidate everything, how much money would I have?” Now his accountants tell him how much he can give away. “If I keep spending at this level, I won’t run out of money,” he says. “I can do this the rest of my life.”

Why concentrate on Serbia? I ask.

“I can move fast. I don’t submit plans and wait for permits, or it would take five times as long and twenty kids might die before the hospital got built. I just charge ahead. What are they gonna do—arrest me? Take me to court for building a pediatric cancer hospital? Their attitude is: You want to spend your money? Go.”

What about working on problems in this country?

“Think of the bureaucracy and red tape,” Ed says, and “I couldn’t afford to build a hospital here.” He says the United States already has more volunteers and philanthropists than any other country. “The concept does not exist in Serbia. When I tell them what I’m doing, they think I’m stealing because nobody they know spends their money on other people.” Besides, he says, “it’s more fun living in a foreign culture where I’m the novelty.” He rents a flat, drives a motorcycle, and has a “great social life. I know more people in Belgrade than I’ve known anywhere.” He goes to homes where “the dining table is in the kitchen and you eat and drink with writers, artists, and politicians and have great talks—in English, for my benefit.”

“How do you deal with the contrast between the way you live and and the Gypsies eating out of dumpsters?” I ask.

“I have to take care of me,” he says, “so I can help them. Nobody says I have to suffer.”

He adds, though, that there are nights in winter when he’ll be walking alone on a dreary street and think, What the hell am I doing building a hospital in Serbia?

He says what spurs him is that “our time is limited. This is the moment when you take your best shot. Look at your funds, see what you can afford to do, and find what makes you happy. If it’s golf in Phoenix, get your ass to Phoenix.”

Ed says that “even in deepest redneck Texas, people have done things for their fellow men and had some taste of how good it feels.” In his office in Colorado, he has pictures of the children he’s come to know building the cancer ward in Belgrade. He points to each by name. “He’s gone. She’s gone. But she’s doing great!” He says if you help a child have a safe operation and that child “is alive because of what you did…you feel like God.” He beams. “God!” He stretches out his arms. “That’s way bigger than CEO.”

CharlesandTorkin.com

Dr. Charles Steinberg and Torkin Wakefield did as a couple what Ed Wayne did alone: improvised a way to help. When their youngest child left for Dartmouth, Charles and Torkin flew to Africa, which to them meant, as Torkin wrote in her journal, “Earth energy, drum beats, and lions and elephants roaming the savannah.” It also meant AIDS, TB, malnutrition, unemployment, incest, and rape.

Married twenty-three years, the couple have always done service work. Charles was a family doctor who specialized in treating AIDS patients. Torkin, a psychotherapist, helped found a holistic clinic. They’d taken their children with them on two-week service missions to Nepal, Peru, and Romania, but when the youngest was due to leave home, they wanted a bigger commitment. “We have skills the world can use.”

On Google, Charles typed: “volunteer—Africa—AIDS.” He found that the Infectious Diseases Society of America was sending Western doctors to Kampala, Uganda, to train African doctors how to administer the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) that were just being “rolled out.” It was a two-month program, but Charles and Torkin leased their house in Colorado for a year, trusting that once they were in Kampala, they’d find opportunities to work there longer.

How, I ask them, do you extricate yourself from your lives for that long—from your clients and businesses, mail, bills, house, cars, and pets? Charles says they started planning two years ahead, finding people to do their work and manage their affairs. “How many years do we have left—years when we’re healthy, strong, and can take on adventures?”

Torkin says, “Whatever that number is, it gets smaller every year by one. And just consuming more and ‘working on ourselves’ doesn’t feed us.”

When they arrived in Uganda, all their senses, which had been lulled to half-sleep by the familiarity of home, started firing. On the streets they heard people drumming, chanting, yelling. And the smells! “It was a constant jumble of things burning, flowering, cooking, and rotting.” In the morning they were awakened by the muezzin calling people to prayer and the cries of more than eight hundred species of birds. Charles couldn’t take his eyes off the marabou, “huge, ugly storks with a six-foot wingspan who build enormous nests in the trees of the city. They look like something from a Spielberg movie, but after a few weeks you get used to them and walk by without noticing.”

Charles, who has a wry wit, a brown beard going gray, and rimless glasses, started work at Mulago hospital, teaching doctors who’d never seen a laptop how to use one to determine the correct dose of ARVs for a patient. One morning, a scream of anguish split the air—a woman keening for a child who’d just died in the pediatric ward next to the classroom. Charles froze, not knowing what to do as the woman let out shriek after shriek. He resumed his lesson, but the next time this happened, he asked the Ugandan doctors how they cope. About ten children die in the hospital every week, and so many adults have died of AIDS throughout Africa that there are 24 million orphans—“the same as the number of kids under five in the U.S.,” Charles says. “Imagine if every child under five were an orphan.”

Torkin started doing AIDS outreach, visiting the Acholi quarter where refugees from the civil war in the north live in mud slums with no water or electricity. With her auburn hair and blue eyes, Torkin stood out as a muzungu—white—but the first woman she met, Millie Grace, gave her a gap-toothed smile and said, “You are most welcome. Please be at home.” Millie Grace was sitting against a mud wall making colorful paper beads out of old magazine pages, then stringing them into unique necklaces that carry the flavor and color of Africa. She and other Acholi women were making necklaces but keeping them in garbage bags because they had no place to sell them. Torkin bought three, and when she wore the beads, people stopped to ask where to buy them.

An idea came to her: Start a crafts co-op, BeadforLife, to sell the necklaces in American stores and at “beadware parties” that could be run like hip Tupperware parties. Torkin flew back to the United States with samples, and after I wrote a story about the beaders in O, they were flooded with orders. For the first time, the Acholi refugees could buy milk, send their children to school, patch their roofs, and buy medicine they’d never been able to afford.

“The rewards are so immediate,” Torkin says. “This is the best time of our lives.”

I ask Charles if he agrees. He nods, adding: “Some of our friends picture us living in a mud shack with a fire in the center.” He laughs. “The truth is we rent a lovely home with a garden” and they take breaks from work to go on safari in the game parks.

Torkin says, “Anyone can do this. No matter what skills you have, you can go to a city in the developing world, and if you walk around and introduce yourself, you’ll find a job.” She thinks everyone in the West should do this, even if just for two weeks. “If you still have kids at home, don’t wait,” she says. “Go with your children. It will change them.”

Inspired by Charles and Torkin and by Ed Wayne, I signed up for a two-week volunteer program in India, teaching English to orphans of low caste in Mumbai. The trip took place in November 2004, just before the tsunami hit Southeast Asia. Although I missed the tidal wave by days, the trip turned out to be an emotional tsunami, carrying the obliterating force of Shiva the destroyer—the god who’s ruthless and implacable, reducing things to rubble to clear the way for rebirth.