Marilyn got a great e-mail to day and I want to share it. Meredith Ludwig wrote “Snake County Stories” a folk history play about McDonald County in 2011. She has just completed another project and since protecting our water supply is one of Marilyn's passions, she wanted my readers to know about it.
Marilyn also hopes that the play will be presented again (and again) in McDonald Co. to entertain and remind us all of what a rich heritage whe have in the Ozarks. (Yes, I was born near Lanagan, so I am a native as well.)
Lucky
From: "Ludwig, Meredith" <[email protected]>
To: "Ludwig, Meredith" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 2, 2014 9:23:27 AM
Subject: I wrote a comic book!
In the spring of last year you may recall I lost my friend Sandy Hepler, an activist of the tirelessly active kind. Long passed the time when a lot of people had moved on with their lives, he stayed in the trenches, a constant advocate for civil and environmental rights. He’s the friend that requested we compost his body in his apple orchard. He’s also the friend that left behind funds for me to write a comic book about composting toilets. I’m proud to say the project is completed and The Scoop about Poop is now available as a free download. I’ll give you the website at the end.
As I was working on this project I had educated people tell me that this was a topic they didn’t think appropriate for children or that they were too squeamish to read it or that it was an icky subject. Maybe so, but everybody poops and it has to go somewhere. In many countries that somewhere is a field and young girls are the most vulnerable when they go to make this most intimate of deposits. Maybe you heard the BBC radio piece about the two girls in India who left together to go to the field at dusk and never returned. Think the worst and that’s what happened and no, they did live to see another day. 48% of India’s population defecate in the open. That’s nearly half a billion people and that’s just in India. Think about what that does to your surroundings, both water and air. We are so used to flushing a toilet and letting somebody else on the other end worry about it. Well, we are in the minority world-wide when it comes to having in-house toilets.
I chose to live with a composting toilet 4 years ago and I know I can’t go back to flushing. With the aquifers out west shrinking at an alarming rate, do we really still think it’s a good idea to poop in our drinking water?
Sandy thought a comic book would be the best way to reach children, and also lighten up what some would condemn as a disgusting topic. He had spent so much time with the orphans in Nicaragua that I decided to set the story there and in the US. The heroes are two ten year olds whose curiosity leads them to discover a simple solution to one of the world’s biggest problems. Please visitwww.thescoopaboutpoop.com. Read it, share it with friends and help us distribute this comic book to those who don’t have computers, let alone toilets in their lives.
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