The last time I mentioned Paul Salopek in a story was 2009. He’d been touted as a favorite for a Pulitzer Prize for his Tribune coverage of America’s war on terrorism in the Horn of Africa. And I noted, “A few weeks ago the Tribune dismantled its foreign service and Salopek left the paper.”
“Although you’re joining it online, this discussion was actually kindled some 60,000 years ago, when our ancestors first wandered out of the prehistoric African Eden, and migrated across the Middle East and Asia, before crossing into North America and rambling to points south. From 2013 to 2020, writer Paul Salopek is recreating that epic journey on foot, starting at humankind’s birthplace in Ethiopia and ending at the southern tip of South America, where our forebears ran out of horizon.”
I just checked the Web: The temperature today in Erbent, Turkmenistan, is 113 degrees Fahrenheit and climbing.
So while I’m paused in the Caucasus, waiting for the Karakum Desert to cool down before pressing on toward to China, I thought it would be a good time to launch the next “Out of Eden Walk” fundraising campaign on Kickstarter:
Last summer, I asked many of you to donate to this peculiar enterprise—a walk across four continents to document human life slowly, at boot-level, along the pathways of the first ancestors to migrate out of Africa. Your generosity has kept my storytelling trek inching ahead, first through the Middle East and then into Asia Minor. This time around, though, I am asking an even greater favor: Your continued support is profoundly welcomed, of course, but sharing the above fundraising link with all your friends and contacts is equally important. My one-and-a-half staff and I are trying to broaden our grassroots community. The health of our small organization—a federally registered 501(c)3 non-profit—depends on this.
With your support, we plan to launch major new outreach and education efforts during Phase II of the walk through Asia.
We are building a university workshop program for journalism students to teach the virtues of more meaningful “slow journalism”; sharing our hard-earned digital map-making skills in free seminars for students and the general public; and broadening our translations of the dispatches, which add up to 130,000+ words so far, in order to make the Walk’s storytelling truly global.
We have terrific partners in National Geographic, the Knight Foundation, Project Zero at Harvard, the Pulitzer Center, and others. But again: Only a robust and growing community of supporters will guarantee that the tiny non-profit at the core of this journey flourishes until I reach Tierra del Fuego in 2020. (Okay, more likely 2021.)
If you like the Walk, please share this Kickstarter link far and wide. For the Americans among our friends, all donations are tax-deductible:
Thank you all. Merci. Gracias. Teşekkür ederim. شكرا . תודה. 谢谢.
Paul.
Tbilisi, Georgia
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”—Barry Lopez.
