Fight Poverty, See Hot Naked Travelers, Feel Good

The 2013 Travel Blogging Calendar for Charity is your chance to support some great non-profit organizations and have a little fun doing it – and its just $25!

And it IS lot of fun.  Herein lie 23 of the hottest male and female travel bloggers on the inner tubes – and me!

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When I was 17-years old, I wandered out of a cold, dusty little hotel onto the streets of Lima, Peru.

Several dirty, under-dressed, hungry children surrounded me, hands out, looking for some help. For the first time in my life I was smacked directly in the face with the incredible toll under-development, poverty and malnutrition takes on human beings.

There had been a time before Peru when intellectually, I had known about poverty but I was emotionally unaware of the burden that poverty places on the human body and spirit and how it’s very existence cheapens all of humanity.

Since then I’ve seen more abject poverty than I care to mention. Travels through Africa, South America, India, Haiti and other spots developed the activist in me. Because most citizens of wealthy nations never witness much of this suffering there remains an emotional disconnect to what so many of our fellow human beings go through just to survive day after day.

As many of you know, I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as an activist working at the nexus of environmental conservation and human suffering – the place where I feel the solution exists. At times, this work can get so emotionally heavy and frustrating (not to mention financially challenging) that I’ve had to back off for a bit or find a different route to have an impact.

Sometimes, you simply have to bring a bit of levity to the whole thing.

So when Jeremy Scott Foster , Chris Walker Bush and Ben West approached me to participate in creating a calendar of travel bloggers, writers and photographers as a fun and easy way to raise funds for some awesome development organizations, I jumped at the chance.

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One of the organizations that will receive funds from this effort is VSO Bahaginan, an impressive group that works throughout the developing world on issues of health, poverty alleviation  education, AIDS, governance and more. I have seriously considered volunteering with these guys over the years and I will do so….once my kiddos are a bit older.

VSO Bahaginan:

We are committed to fight poverty and disadvantage through a wide range of volunteering development programs. We are the federation member of VSO in Asia and the Pacific. VSO is the world’s leading independent international development charity that works through volunteers to fight poverty in developing countries.

VSO Bahaginan recruits, trains and sends skilled professionals to work in partnership with organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. We manage and develop business partnerships with companies who release their employees on short-term volunteer placements.

We support national volunteering to encourage active citizenship

Through volunteering, people – including the poor and marginalized – can participate in the transformation of their communities. We support organizations, programs and advocacy that promote volunteering for development. We do this by developing products and delivering training to help national volunteering partners to practice good volunteer management. We involve young people and give them a chance to make a real difference in their exchange communities.

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If you’re looking to donate to a charity this holiday season , I highly recommend purchasing a calendar.

There are two of them,  The Men or Women of Travel Blogging Calendar at $25 each – all proceeds are donated to the either VSO Bahaginan or MITRATA NEPAL, another effective organization focused on children.  And thank you also to Uprinting for generously helping us out on this.

Simply click here to place your order.

Looking at sexy naked people just never felt so good.

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