Hmmm…I just realized I am being very geo-centric.  It’s 16:00 Ontario time, but it’s 4:00 am in China and the 3 day,  world-wide global mobilization “STAND UP AND TAKE ACTION TO END POVERTY NOW” has already begun!

There’s plenty of action going on.  Our international mothership - GCAP (Global Call to Action Against Poverty) has pulled together a detailed news release on activities happening all over the Globe.  I’m a huge fan of  Oliver Mutukudzi and would love to be at that “Free the Hungry Billions” concert in Nairobi where a grand collection of African musicians will be playing to end poverty…or at the India Gate in Delhi tomorrow to watch as campaigners light a lamp to symbolize the dispersal of the darkness of poverty and illiteracy.  This on the eve of Diwali, India’s great Festival of Lights.

But I’ll be on Parliament Hill in Ottawa at noon tomorrow, taking the pledge and forming a giant white band in the company of our own musicians, poets and activists. A little more sedate than some of the events planned across Canada. We won’t be dropping a giant pumpkin off the Peace Tower, I can assure the Hill security folk.  But at the University of Alberta, Make Poverty History is pairing with Engineers Without Borders to put on the Poverty Smash, where a 400lb inedible pumpkin will be dropped from 100 feet onto a van painted to symbolize poverty, literally “crushing” poverty at their STAND UP TAKE ACTION event on October 16. All in  fun, yes, but organizers have been working for months to get out the life and death message that poverty can be stopped in its tracks and must be now.  

And this just in, an entire schoolboard in Quebec is standing up tomorrow – that’s more than 22,000 students!  

Can’t wait to see that final world-wide count come Monday morning…everywhere time.