Sunday, June 03, 2007

Man Overboard now available as an E-Book

Thanks to the online smarts of my young colleague Fred Schebesta, the book MAN OVERBOARD is now available for purchase for what appears to me to be a very small amount of money at the following website: www.savemarriagebook.com.au

I was giving it away, but that was fine when we had a flourishing business to support us. Now, we are drought-stricken sheep farmers in central western New South Wales, living through the worst drought in living memory. And we are campaigning on behalf of all farmers for the right to sell the carbon they accumulate in their soils by good stewardship.

Since December it has been quite desperate on the land in Australia, with farmers committing suicide at a rate of one every four days. Mainly the men. Several in our area have been on 'suicide watch' - never to be left on their own. One of our friends was found in his bedroom with a gun barrel in his mouth.

The pressure on marriages in such blistering drought conditions is unimaginable. Louisa and I and our son Daniel have been coping quite well by finding solutions to our problems in projects we can share. Public speaking on climate change issues and what they mean for farmers has seen us in demand and travelling around the eastern states.

I must admit I fell into a hole, a depression felt my many men on the land when you can no longer provide for your family (that traditional role that we retreat into in times of stress is not a refuge when the chips are down.) But good fortune came our way in the form of a whole lot of love from people we didn't know.

And I want to tell you the story of what can happen whenn you open up your heart and let a little love into your life.

I sat alone one night after a depressing discussion with Louisa about the flock and our money problem. We ran out of cash to hand feed our sheep and ran out of grass. She was deflated and I was devastated. I felt castrated. But I asked for help - just asked for help. Just then, I could hear on the TV the sound of a World Vision commercial. "Adopt a Smile for Christmas". Adopt a blowfly, adopt a mongoose, adopta chicken... these words went through my head. Then "Adopt a Sheep" popped into my mind.

So, faced with sending the entire flock of 2600 to slaughter and lose 7 years of breeding for superfine wool (which no one wanted to pay for anyway), we went public and appealed to people to adopt our sheep for $35 a head, the amount required to feed them for 100 days (the planning horizon during a drought). I put up a blogsite with PayPal to take donations. I thought we'd get 6 or 8. So I sent press releases to 2 Sydney daily newspapers... and waited. Two days, 3, 4, and a call from Tele asking for pix. Sent what we had. No, need a sad pic of farmer and wife. We took one, hard not to laugh. Day 6, 6.30am Sydney radio stations start calling. Small item in The Daily Telegraph (Tele). Channel 7 calls. Can they land a crew near
the house at Uamby? 2 hours filming reduced to 1.45 minutes on that night's news. Tele and Channel 7 put links on their websites. Channel 7 promos the spot on every break duiring the news and runs it last. Kabloom! 5000 hits on blogspot. 100 adopted. Next day: SMH online calls. More links. More radio stations. Louisa and Daniel, no training, giving interviews on air to listeners all over the eastern states. Orders pouring in. 10000 hits by start of week 2. Channel 9 sends a crew. Today Show. Daniel features. More links. More radio. Serious backlog of adoption certificates (personalised with name of sheep (+pic) and name of adopter. Calls from adopters - when will they get their certificates? Need them for Xmas. (Xmas! Forgot about that.) 20000 hits and 1000 adopters later, 3 of us getting 4 hours sleep a night, handfeeding sheep and churning out certificates, while fielding media and 'where's my certificate' calls. Recruit local business centre for help. Disaster. Customer complaints. Recruit sister-in-law. Great. Need more sheep portraits. Maxed out hard drive in my laptop. Crash. Byebye files. Phone keeps ringing. German journalist arrives to write a piece on the drought. In the next 3 weeks his articles appear in 4 major German online and offline newspapers. We are flooded with hits from Germany - 500 in a day. Put
up a German translation of the blogsite with link on landing page. Local papers and radio arrive late for the party. What's that rumbling? The rising drone of the online conversations about us. StatCounter lets me see where hits coming from. Follow hits backwards to source to find links. Turns out people are posting stories and links on their personal blogsites, discussion groups arguing about the rights and wrongs of farming in Australia, quilters and knitters and spinners and crafty ladies telling each other they adopted, highschool girls (lonelygirl15) adopting a lamb for company in their adolescent cocoons. People telling people what they've bought other people for Xmas. Wealthy people send a cheque for $1000, 'inspired' by what we are doing. Japanese man thinks he can take delivery of the animal. "Crikey!
You'll have to pay more than $35 for that, Cobber." That's Life magazine does a feature. More radio results. In the midst of the chaos, sniping comments left on blogsite by animal rights activists and farmers accusing us of not being financially crippled enough to deserve the money. (Response: "I'm just doing my best with what I've got.") Calls from farmers begging for some of the money. Charity begins at home. "I'll save my sheep first, then yours. I can't help anyone if I go broke." (We put full step-by-step instructions up on blogsite and flag it. We call NSW Farmers to discuss taking the program national.) Negative blog comments spark large response from other commenters, positive. Cards and letters flooding in. Visitors turning up unannounced. Guided tours. Every adopter says they're praying for rain. Christmas Day: People are opening gifts to find our one of our lambs, rams or 'ma'ams' have come into their lives. It starts to rain at Uamby. 40mls. More than we've had for a year. It's raining money, too. Results: Our target $87000. Total Week 8: $70000. (We had spent $60,000 up to when the appeal started.) Still fulfilling orders. Many fell through cracks when computer crashed. Also lots of no-show of certificate (sent via email) because customer changes email address, spam filter knocked it back, inbox full, etc. Still "where's my certificate?" Customer is always right. No, not "customer" in our case. Newfriends? No. We are now family. This farm is their farm. These sheep are their sheep. We got an email from a lady in Sydney asking if "Benny" (a male lamb sponsored on behalf of Ben, an elderly gent in London who loves Australia and cricket) would send Ben a note of encouragement, as he had fallen into a coma. I wrote back that I told Benny that Ben was ill and he said, "How sick is he?" I said: "He's as crook as English cricket." Benny said, "No one can be that crook..." and dictated a note to Ben. We heard later that, after getting Benny's message, Ben started coming out of the coma. Our first miracle!
Many people were effusive in their thanks (and we were the ones who were thankful) for giving them an opportunity to do something for farmers suffering in the drought. (We told everybody we weren't the most deserving, but they didn't care. We offered them the opportunity,. and the most deserving didn't.) It was hte Spirit of Christmas. Giving. Next steps: Expand the relationship. Expand the family. Learn how to love and be loved. Due to time problems, we developed a one word fulfillment letter body copy:

((((HUG))))

We meant it, too.

Michael

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