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My inspiration, colleague and friend Gilda out in San Diego (and what I wouldn't give to spirit her over to a house next door to me!) makes an interesting suggestion about how to cost out what it is you are actually spending.

I was musing that it would be cheating to bring my laundry over to my own house to get it done, but maybe not if I took it to my son's house, since he lives at about the same level I'll be living when I move to the West End.

Gilda makes the point that all those kinds of barters should be figured in as "in-kind" costs, giving me a much clearer picture of how high on the food chain I'm actually living. If I don't pay for my own washer and dryer and electricity or gas to run them, then lower on the ladder is simply washing everything by hand. If I barter or in the case of Raf, just show up at his door because I'm his mother...then the cost of those appliances is still there, somebody else is donating that to me-- in this case, the Association of Retarded Citizens of High Point, which provides the subsidy so Raf can afford his housing.

When you run a nonprofit, many grants from foundations and the government require some sort of "matching" amount, much of which can be provided in "in-kind" donations. Sweat equity, for instance.

Gilda says that when I go visit my "real" house on the weekends, that should be considered an in-kind cost, since somebody has to pay that rent and utilities.

I told Gilda that I know she's absolutely correct, but there is a deep laziness in my bones that balks at all that accounting. I need a bean counter at my elbow, a volunteer accountant. But wait! That would be an in-kind expense as well!

I started the search for affordable housing by calling Diane Westmoreland of S.H.A.R.E. of North Carolina. I don't seem to find a web site for them, so maybe I need to offer to do one! Anyway, Diane is the one who does their publicity, and they are the most visible force for affordable housing in the West End neighborhood, so I thought it was a good idea to start there.

SHARE builds homes in the neighborhood, nice places that are eligible for various housing support programs offered by the city, state and feds. I'm not looking for a place to buy, however, and neither are most of the folks who are looking for housing in the West End. I need a place to rent.

"I think it might be possible to find you a nice place for $800," Diane said to me early in our conversation.

"Uh...no...$800 is what I have to live on all month," I clarified. Oh.

The West End has a total of just over 600 places to live, including some apartments, lots of individual houses and a few duplexes. There are over 170 empty houses in the neighborhood now. I know because we do a mailing to every house in the neighborhood, and we're down to about 430 that the Post Office can deliver our newsletters to. Many of the empty places are just that...plain old unoccupied, not on the market to rent or sell. Just nobody living there. As you can imagine, that's part of the neighborhood problem.

Don Stevenson, my former executive director, and I toured one of them a few months back. There was a big old hole in the roof, water damage, and lots of debris around. It was for sale for $25,000. Later, some workmen showed up, put on a new roof and now the place is for sale again.

Jim Summey, the guy I call "the crime fighting preacher," board chair and acting executive director of West End Ministries told me at staff meeting that his church, English Road Baptist, owns a place I can rent for $250. I haven't seen it, but it is definitely in my price range. I figure that with my take-home pay ($396.19 every two weeks), I shouldn't pay more than $300 a month in rent, figuring to put at least $100 a month in utilities. I am probably not going to have an all-electric home or anything exorbitant in the electricity department, but I have to have enough left over for food and some gas for the van.

Iris, a great West End resident and teacher in my computer center, tells me there's a two-bedroom place next door to her that is going for $330 a month, but I don't need that much space and at that price, with utilities, I'm afraid I'd be eating rice and beans the WHOLE month, not just the two weeks when I'll be paying rent.

My husband Jean-Francois is not planning to do this experiment with me. In fact, since his semester ends at the beginning of April, he's likely to skip town for a couple of the months so as not to miss me too much over here on Blain Street. Darn. I was hoping for that easy camaraderie I once found in Iceland, where I met a married couple who lived next door to one another. Seemed to work beautifully for them. Everybody got his own space, but they were also near enough to have dinner, share a movie or a play, and enjoy each other's company.

I'll be walking the streets of the neighborhood soon, checking out the For Rent sign. For now though, with the temperatures over 90 degrees Farenheit, about 33 Celsius.

I'm also thinking about how to eat cheaply. I'm wondering if there might be a group of women in the neighborhood who'd be willing to contribute to pay the gas for us to go to the farmer's market in Thomasville. It's a great place with a wonderful Asian atmosphere and low, low prices. I also heard about this site, www.angelfoodministries.com. For $30, you get a pile of food, and I checked it out. I have no interest in the breaded chicken breasts or the instant mashed potatoes, so maybe this isn't for me.

Iris reminded me that I'll be eligible for the every-other-month food pantry box, the Friday bread giveaway, and the Thursday community meal offered by West End Ministries. Maybe that and the farmer's market will be enough to get me through. I'll need to do laundry, and I'll be sorely tempted to bring my stuff over here on the weekends and do it at home. But that would be cheating somehow, so I'll have to think about that. My son Raf, who lives on about this amount, $800 a month on SSI Disability, has a washer and dryer in his apartment. Or maybe I can barter some kind of a deal with someone in the neighborhood. I'll mow your lawn and you let me use your washing machine. Hmmm...I'm looking for swaps, barters, connections, and deals.

There's lots to explore in this Experiment in Frugal Living.

I'm a VISTA volunteer. That means many things-- some simply personal to me, others Federal policy-- but the general idea is that you spend a year or two dedicated fighting poverty by building up a local grassroots organization. This is not a job where we play with the kids in the day care center or we serve up the food at the soup kitchen. This is the job where we create the day care center, find an advisory board, work on structure, publicity, fund raising, volunteer recruitment and then move on to another project.

I work at West End Ministries in High Point, NC as a technology maven. Last year, I created a computer school, started a paper and online newsletter, redid the web site, instituted an eBay store, populated a free but well-designed database with mailing addresses, emails and donations, and served as the organization's technology director.

But something has been bothering me all along. The basic premise of both the Peace Corps and the VISTA project is that one lives in the communities one is serving, at the poverty level of the folks one is serving. Okay, you could say that I live in what we euphemistically call "core city," meaning the poor parts of town. My house is in the geographic region and we do have some problem houses around us as well as a burgeoning gang issue...but it isn't the West End.

So after a lot of soul-searching and waffling, I've decided to go live in the West End on the salary I make. I make $800 a month. Eight hundred. Last year I used my salary to take me back to one of my favorite regions of the world, Nepal and the Himalayan mountains of India, where I worked with several nonprofit organizations to bring technology to bear on their missions-- web sites for a disability organization and documentation of a Rotary Club health camp (funded by my own nonprofit organization, Worlds Touch), with photographs and videos of local doctors donating a day of their time to the people of a remote village far from any medical care whatsoever.

This year, I want to take four months of my service with VISTA to live in the West End and manage on the money I make.

"So you want to find a place for $800 a month? " asked Diane Westmoreland of S.H.A.R.E. of NC, an agency dedicated to providing affordable housing in our town. Diane was the first person I called to start a search for housing I could afford on my salary. "It will be difficult, but we can probably help you find something."

"Oh, no," I told her. "I have $800 for EVERYTHING. Housing, food, transportation, utilities. Everything."

"But your husband will contribute, right?" She knows my husband is a college professor at the local university.

"No! That's the whole idea. I want to see if I can live on my salary."

Actually, I want more than that. I want to see if I can do it AND create a bond with my neighbors...I want to build community, something I found devilishly difficult last year. We got that computer school off the ground, but we don't have any community members on the advisory board, and this summer I lost the only community member who was teaching in the school. She's taken over the child care of her neice's boy and has to be home in the evenings. We give a neighborhood association meeting and nobody comes...or, more accurately, the usually ten suspects show up. We walk the streets, knocking on doors, and everybody seems closed up, locked in and suspicious...or apathetic...or, well, stoned or drunk or both.

"But that's a terrible neighborhood!" I've already heard four times.

No it isn't. It's a neighborhood where there are lots of transients, where people land on the way down or the way up on the social scale, where there used to be a steady solid blue collar furniture industry worker population but the furniture industry has moved to China. It's an old story, neighborhood blight, deterioration. West End Ministries has been fighting -- and making some progress -- the downhill slide of this neighborhood. I want to spotlight the neighborhood with this experiment, to focus on the problems of living on a miniscule budget there, and to challenge myself and my neighbors to grab more LIFE, even on less MONEY.

I don't pretend that I am without a safety net. I have advantages, many many of them, that my less fortunate neighbors do not. I have a job. I have health insurance (albeit only if I get sick, not the "wellness" approach.) I have a place to get away for the weekends (my regular house.) And I have years and years of frugal traveling and frugal living experience under my belt, having CHOSEN that way of life. It makes a big difference, and I know this, if you don't have a choice. Of course, I also believe that all of us have more choices than we generally see, and I'm no exception.

Tomorrow: First problem: Housing.

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Computer Training, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Ramesh Prajapati, director of Resource Center for Rehab and Development (RCRD) and Ramesh Shrestha, director of Community-Based Rehab of Bhaktapur are all ears when we are discussing how technology can work for their respective organizations.

I spent three weeks in Bhaktapur with them this summer, and produced two web sites using WordPress and Flickr. I left them with a week's training under their belts as well as an operations manual that gave them complete control over their own web sites.