So it is rally season again. In a little over two weeks time I will be competing at Cochrane near Calgary at the Western Canadian season opener. It would be wrong of me to go into this year without the expectation of a win in the championship even though the schedule is so jammed. With the first event comes the usual glitches for a small rally team like ours in Canada. Car prep, license applications and medicals all collide at an inconvenient point and of course, sponsor relationships need to be nurtured and renewed which means we need to get back on to the media bandwagon. Add in to the mix a regular day job, a larger than life Rally4Life project, strength and conditioning

training and sleep deprivation training, and life is suddenly really busy.

A little insight into the life of someone on a new path.

Firstly I would just like to share some amazing numbers with you. We had to give a little update speech the other day, so I thought I would do a bit of research. The disaster in Haiti seems enormous and overwhelming, and not to take away from the fact that it is a devastating tragedy, the numbers of dead and homeless equal 1/5th of the suffering in just the Sudan. 

That may make the world’s problem seem insurmountable. Yet if, as our charity partners Just A Drop have calculated, it costs $20 to provide clean water to a child for their lifetime, and there are 2.6 billion people worldwide without access to adequate clean water and sanitation, it would cost $52 billion to provide a solution.

That is 1.5% of the stimulus package just pumped into the world economy to stem the recession. Hopefully that was a one time spending spree, but how about the annual worldwide military spending budget. Our $52 billion would be just 4%. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think enough people are asking…yet….

Hi everyone, Mark has asked me to start adding to the blog, and I have to admit this is my first ever blog attempt – I am a blog virgin!

Let me introduce myself, I am Jackie, Mark’s other half, and I am in the driving seat of the charity side of Rally4Life, in an equally challenging race to save lives. To quickly outline our intent in case any of you are unfamiliar with our story, we are raising funds to support 2 charities, focusing on water initiatives. The charities are Just A Drop, who work to reduce child mortality by delivering clean water, health education and proper sanitation programmes to communities in need across the world. They are a very hands on group who literally dig wells, bore holes and latrines in very remote places! FeViva, founded by local friends of ours, work to meet the needs of underprivileged and orphaned children. They have built orphanages in Guatemala and their work has now expanded into Nicaragua and the Sudan.

There are 2 areas of activity for the moment. I would like to give you a brief overview in this first blog, with more details to follow later.