"How can I help?"

Although the FAQ covers some of this, I thought I would take some time to review in greater detail the many ways in which you, Dear Reader, can help a poor bloke out during his trudge across America.

1. Donate. There are two principal ways to do this at present: (a) contribute via PayPal, or (b) mail me your check or money order contribution. If you choose to go the PayPal route (click the PayPal Donate button on my blog's sidebar), be aware that PayPal takes about 4% of your contribution for itself; this is how it makes money. For those who prefer snail mail, you can send your check or money order to:

Kevin Kim
PO Box 6
Mount Vernon, VA 22121-0006

Thank you for contributing! The goal is to collect about $6000 to defray anticipated costs.* Be aware that I do not plan to use your contributions until I'm out of my main source of funds. Contributions, then, are sitting in the PayPal account as a last resort. And yes, check and money order contributions will end up in the PayPal account, because I want to keep donations separate from the money I earn. Whatever money remains in the PayPal account after the Walk is finished will be given to charity; I won't be keeping it. The money isn't there for my financial gain; it's there only to help me get by.

2. Buy my book or CafePress products. You can purchase my book Water from a Skull here; you can read about it here. You can shop for CafePress products here. I'd actually prefer your business to your contributions, as I feel less guilty about doing business with you than I do about simply accepting money.

3. Host me for a night or two. Are you interested in talking about religious diversity? Why not host me for a night or two? Be advised that I'll need the following things from you:

a. a place to shower, poop, and do laundry (and I'd rather not do all those activities in the same basin, please)
b. permission to audio- or video-record our exchange(s)
c. directions showing me a legal walking route to my next destination (i.e., you'll have to have planned that out in advance)
d. a place to sleep

Food is optional! I won't mind going without food. NB: I'll be passing through a lot of unfamiliar country, so I'd also appreciate your travel wisdom re: what to wear, how to deal with different kinds of local weather, etc.

4. Arrange for a local religious community to host me for a night or two. This would be the standard approach. If you see that I'm going to be in your area, and if you're roughly at the midpoint between two of my known destinations, why not get your church, temple, etc. involved? I'd be happy to meet and greet all of you, though as with (3) above, I'll need wash facilities, directions to the next place I'm visiting, and a place to sleep.

5. Respond to blegging. Every now and then, I'm likely to blog that "I'm getting low on X!" For example, I might observe that I'm low on Q-tips-- an absolute must for my nasty ears. Without a daily Q-tip treatment, my ears rapidly become as fetid as Gollum's soul. I might also bleg** that I need a thicker coat, so if you have a used one that might come in handy, think about sending it my way (assuming I have the presence of mind to blog the address of my next arrival point).

By the way, unless you know for sure that I'm traveling in frigid temperatures, never mail me candy. The results are always disastrous.

6. Walk part of the way with me! I haven't thought this one through all the way, but I figure I'll be wanting a travel companion every now and again. Perhaps a member of Church B could accompany me to Synagogue C, and we could all sit down for an interfaith meal? Among the problems with having a travel companion (or companions) is that the people at the next destination might be expecting to host only one person. This is something to think about.

7. Become a "Kevin's Walk Central" member. Want to help me coordinate the route? It's likely that several people or organizations will contact me from out of the blue, all asking that I visit their site. If that's the case, I'll need help picking and choosing if these good folks all live in roughly the same region. I haven't firmed up what the organizational structure of Kevin's Walk Central would look like, and I sure as hell know that I can't pay anyone for this work... but I guarantee the job won't be thankless.

If you're willing to join Kevin's Walk Central or would like to offer KWC some route-planning advice, please write KWC at:

kevinswalkcentral [at] gmail [dot] com

For very specific information about what you can do as part of Kevin's Walk Central, please, please read this very important post.

8. Provide me with a computer to work on. My basic computer needs, when I arrive at any given place, will be focused on email, but I will also need to upload photos and videos from my camera or Blackberry, not to mention sound files from my voice recorder, to my blog. The ideal setup would be (a) email capability, (b) Photoshop Elements (I'm not familiar with Corel & would need tutoring), (c) USB2 connectivity, and (d) Google Earth, to allow me to see where I'm going next. If you're a household with dial-up, well... I don't know what to say.

9. Volunteer to document the Walk! Are you a film student looking for a potentially interesting topic? Well, I can't provide you any pay (you'll have to use your head and figure out funding on your own), but I can provide you with my own life, for the next year or two, as grist for a filmic narrative.

10. Tell everyone you know about the Walk! Spread the word, get people interested and involved, and let's see what happens. The more people who know what's happening, the more likely I am to meet interesting people as I make my way south and east. On the practical side, I'm also more likely to get funding, and there's less financial "burden" on each reader if there are plenty of readers! Imagine telling 50 readers that I need them to pass the hat and raise $10,000. Now imagine telling the same thing to 10,000 readers.

11. Anything else...?

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*We'll probably have to revise this upward to some ungodly number. At the moment, I'm thinking $20,000, but am not quite ready to make an official announcement to that effect. (This note was written on July 10, 2008, while at the law library of Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon.) The reason for this is mainly my use of hotels and motels along the way. I have tried to avoid camping illegally, and my manager Alan Cook has been assiduous in his pursuit of CouchSurfing leads for me, but I still bleed a lot of cash thanks to the paid lodging, which so far has varied from 40 dollars a night (paper-thin walls) to 200 dollars a night (that was in Bellingham, and was a mistake-- but that hotel was also the only one in the area that had room for a person for two nights).

**For those who don't know the lingo, the word "bleg" is a combination of "blog" and "beg," i.e., to beg via blogging.


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