Readings

It's a long plane ride from Los Angeles International Airport to Nairobi — twenty-four hours in the air, and you get there two days after you started. I arrived with a couple of extra boxes containing books — theater books of all kinds, textbooks, and play scripts. On the label I had boldly printed their destination: Ford Foundation East Africa Office, Rahimtulla Tower, Nairobi, Kenya. Perhaps because of this address — either that or the literature — I was able to pass through customs without paying the duty for which Kenyan Customs is notorious.

When funders move into indigenous communities they tread a very fine line. On one side of the line they have a duty to undertake sufficient investigation to ensure that they properly understand a funding request and their own role in relation to it. On the other side, obtaining the information may conflict with the ability to acknowledge and give appropriate respect to the applicant's indigenous culture and its bounds.

Nonprofit should be nonexistent—the term, not the type of organization. The time is right to insist on a term that focuses on the investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurial imagination that have always been so essential to organizations that serve the social good. “Social-profit organizations” is a term that can better capture the contribution made by entities that have too long been known as charities or nonprofit groups…

My first horse was like New Mexico.

On summer grass under an arch of the cottonwoods, no creature could have been more beautiful, at least to my eye. He was a big rangy bay with a white blaze, and he animated the afternoons just by lazing into view. He was an ordinary country gelding, but his long-limbed grace and equine pride conjured a kind of magic. At a hundred yards, when he lifted his head, I could feel his kingly disdain. He was all horse, not an ounce of Flicka, and he could fly over the hills. Not to coin a phrase, but I was enchanted.