Imagine practicing yoga in India, educating communities about AIDS in Kenya, or working with orphans in Peru.  Volunteers For Peace  (VFP) makes it happen.

VFP is a non-profit organization located in Belmont, Vermont. Their mission is to promote international voluntary service as an effective means of intercultural education, service learning and community development.

They offer placement in more than 3000 projects, often referred to as work camps, in more than 100 countries every year. VFP also organizes 50-60 service projects in the United States each year.

Watching little Sasha Obama steal the show at the Democratic National Convention last night -- the seven-year-old blew kisses and happily intercepted the compliment her daddy, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, had meant for his wife -- I couldn't resist making the joke: Finally, the Cosbys are going to run the nation.

Of course, that required explaining to my teenage son just what The Cosby Show was and how, back in the '80s, the whole country had been delighted to tune in week after week to watch Bill Cosby play Dr. Huxtable, a wise-cracking but wise daddy who made it seem so much fun as he and his lovely, accomplished wife raised their adorable, if incorrigible, kids.

(The Cosbys were fresh in my mind because I was flipping back and forth between the convention and the HBO documentary The Black List, where comedian Chris Rock revealed that his daughters go to sleep holding Bill Cosby dolls.)

Then as I played out the comparison in my mind, I was surprised to realize that although TV's Huxtables and the Democrats' Obamas are both successful, photogenic, and intelligent African-American families, there's a very big difference between the two when it comes to community service.

Sure, Dr. and Mrs. Huxtable were in the helping professions as an obstetrician and a lawyer, but there really was not much of a sense in the show of the world beyond the walls of their well-appointed Manhattan townhouse.

By contrast, the Obama family lore that was playing at the Convention kept coming back to the community: how Barack eschewed Wall Street to serve the community; how Michelle left a high-paying law firm to serve the community.

The campaign video for Michelle even gave a big plug for Public Allies, the nonprofit that trains diverse community leaders, where Barack served on the board and later Michelle served as executive director of the Chicago branch.

That kind of community organizing is a big departure from simply doing the right thing, Huxtable-style. It's also a big departure from the public service generally provided by our leaders -- and from the community service generally rendered by our first spouses.

The community organizing that inspired the Obamas is not just about raising money or sitting on boards -- which is all great -- but about raising other people to become leaders and learn the skills to take care of their problems themselves.

That background is a lot more interesting to me than Barack's religion or Michelle's working class struggles. We've never had a First Family schooled in the principles of helping others help themselves. If the Obamas make it to the White House, I'll be eager to see how that experience leads them to govern.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Maybe Foreign Affairs is not the best choice of bedtime reading: Just as I was being lulled to sleep by former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's article on the daunting tasks facing the next U.S. president, I was jolted awake by what the author called a "cautionary tale."

Thirty years before Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for scaring people into going green, then-President Jimmy Carter went on prime-time TV to try to rally his nation to kick the foreign oil habit. As Holbrooke writes:

Wearing a much-mocked cardigan sweater, he said that his energy-independence project would be the "moral equivalent of war." When someone pointed out that the initials of that phrase spell "meow," the press had a field day, ignoring the substance of Carter's proposals.

Oh, yeah, Holbrooke adds, "One of Ronald Reagan's first acts as president was to remove from the White House roof the solar panels Carter had had installed." Genius.

So here we are, 31 years later, spending plus-or-minus four bucks a gallon on gas and sending billions of dollars a year to global bullies, like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. And instead of MEOW, we've got GWOT.

You'd think we'd learn. But here comes the McCain campaign, mocking the suggestion that Americans could save as much or more oil by properly inflating our tires and getting regular tune-ups as by off-shore drilling.

And recent polls show that more and more Americans are falling for it.

Looks like the new acronym is HISS: Ha-ha, I'm still stupid!

Kitty cardigan available here.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For the second day in a row, I'm shut in my house with my septuagenarian mom, my teenage son, and my four dogs, waiting out the tornado and flood warnings across the state of Florida that come along with slow-moving Tropical Storm Fay.

There's a lot of barking and sulking, but that doesn't sound so bad compared to what's happening elsewhere in the rain-whipped world.

Apparently, there are annual floods in West Africa which routinely wipe out roads and bridges and increase the spread of communicable diseases. This year, the dangers are more severe since many more people are malnourished than before, because of rising food prices. According to ReliefWeb, the World Health Organization requested $418 million for emergency health care in the region, but so far has received only 22 percent.

That doesn't even factor in the help needed because crops in these areas have been destroyed by the floods, pushing food prices even higher, or the number of people who have lost their homes: 12,000 in Togo; 24,000 in Niger; and 150,000 in Benin.

Call it a perfect storm -- of misery.

Meanwhile, 1,400 people have died so far this monsoon season in India. The season lasts through October, so there's still time to catch up to last year's devastating toll of 2,700.

At least in Thailand, where 8,000 have fallen ill to water-borne diseases as a result of flooding, the government is implementing a plan to get local folks to pour chlorine into the water and is sending out mobile medical units to check on children and the elderly.

While I'm lying around my house, listening to the storm outside, at least I can go online to offer a little help. I hope you'll join me.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.