I just got a very interesting appeal in my inbox from Half the Sky. They've got a chance at winning (!) a slot as torchbearer for the 2008 Olympics. And they want to let the children carry it.

Can you picture that? And you can help.

Half the Sky, as the regular reader might recall, is one of the coolest, highest-profile charities working to improve the lives of children in China's Social Welfare Institutions (SWIs). They're big on hugging children, as well as setting up educational services and foster care systems intended to either move kids out of SWIs or make the SWIs kinder, better places to be.

Of course, in China, a big part of making SWIs better is making people aware that they exist - and letting a bunch of kids carry the Olympic torch would go a long way toward raising that awareness.

So here's the deal: China Daily has organized a contest for expats in China - foreigners living and working in China - to become torchbearers. They'll select 100 candidates and weed that field down to eight finalists. It seems like this is intended to be a symbol of how cosmopolitan and multicultural the new China has become.

They'll be using votes from the public to make their selection.

And here's Jenny Bowen's page in the contest. If chosen as a runner, she plans to take eight kids from Half the Sky programs in eight different provinces with her.

I was vote #1,873.

Currently, the most popular candidates include a Colombian named Luis Hong-Sanchez, who has 6,085 votes, followed by a Sudanese man named Omer Eisa Ahmed, with 5,567 votes. That's a bit of a lead, but not insurmountable. Hong-Sanchez is a charming 8th grader, born in Illinois, with an iguana on his shoulder. (In his picture, not at the moment of his birth, as far as we know.) Ahmed is a diplomat from Sudan. He's part of the government that's carrying out the genocide in Darfur.

I hate painting the world in good and evil, and I'm sure Ahmed would be a fine man with which to break bread, but, look, if yours is the vote that lets a genocidal regime take the limelight from the children of China, well, then I hope you can find a way to sleep at night. No, really. Do you want to be part of the problem? No? Then go vote!