This should have been posted on December 19th, or sometime really very shortly thereafter, and yet here it is, appearing on December 26th (I blame Colonial Williamsburg, but I’ll save that for another post). That’s the bad news. The good news is that when the Passports with Purpose travel bloggers fundraiser ended, you wonderful people had donated not just the $100,000 the organizers had been shooting for, but an astonishing $110,000. That means that there will soon be five communities in Haiti that will have clean water, all thanks to your generosity.

My heartfelt thanks go to Tumi, which kindly donated one of its new, excellent pet carriers as a prize. I’m happy to announce that reader Rosy won it — and I’m also happy to tell you that she hasn’t had to wait this long to hear the news. Thank goodness, the Passports with Purpose team was not vacationing in Colonial Williamsburg, and therefore was able to tell her, and everyone else who bid on the carrier, timely (as I used to say in the lawyering biz) about the fundraiser results.

If it’s any comfort, I too did not win my prize (I invested heavily in the 26-day Silk Road trip). I never do win the PwP prizes I bid on — and yet, as I’ve said before, I feel like I always win. Five communities in Haiti’s Boucan Carre and Mirebalais, each with an average of about 370 people, will have clean water, improving their lives and their futures in the most fundamental way. High fives all around, my friends — that’s a tremendous win, and we could not have done it without each other.