Helping Nick Kristof

Last December I met my number one idol, Nicholas Kristof. My father is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Kristof was the speaker at their annual parent-child event (to which Council members are allowed to bring their high school and college-aged children). When he asked me if I wanted to go with him, my father casually mentioned that he hadn't seen "Nick" in a while. Turns out my father used to hang with Kristof way back when my dad was writing for Time Life Books and living in Tokyo and Kristof was the Times bureau chief there. Amazing. As we walked into the Council that night - me with my best I'm-still-in-college face/attire on - I was a little nervous. But as soon as I got to shake his hand and tell him how much I admire his work, I realized that Kristof is just like my dad, an intellectual asiaphile (complete with Asian wife, no less), with the added bonus that he has taken quite an interest in Africa as well.

Kristof's column today is quite interesting in that it deals with the current hot topic of microfinancing. He focuses on an organization called Kiva that allows people to lend money directly to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kristof himself lends money to a baker and a TV repair man in Kabul and then goes to visit them and see how his loans have changed their ability to do business. In addition to Kiva, Kristof also mentions an organization that is close to my heart:

Web sites like Kiva are useful partly because they connect the donor directly to the beneficiary, without going through a bureaucratic and expensive layer of aid groups in between. Another terrific Web site in this area is http://www.globalgiving.com/, which connects donors to would-be recipients. The main difference is that GlobalGiving is for donations, while Kiva is for loans.

As many of you know, Dave and I used GlobalGiving for our wedding registry. In fact, when I was doing my research for our registry, I emailed Kristof (through the link on the Times website) to see if he had any recommendations for such organizations. I promptly received an email back from his assistant, Winter, citing Doctors Without Borders and savedarfur.org as good organizations to which I could donate but saying that she was not familiar with any charity registry sites. She then asked me to follow up with her if I found something promising in my search. When I finally chose GlobalGiving (for precisely the reasons cited in Kristof's column) I emailed Winter with the news. I'm sure that Kristof has a million different people in his life who could have told him about the organization, but, for tonight, I'm going to pretend that it was that email to his assistant that showed him the way...

(If you don't have Times select and want to read Kristof's article let me know and I'll email it to you)