fixing slow loading site

Hello everyone,
We have a drupal website www.cerclesocial.org for our non-profit organization.
We need help fixing the website slow loading time. Any help or suggestion is truly appreciated.
It takes a while for the home page the open, and we still cannot figure out why.
Can you replicate this issue, and tell us what to do ?
Website: www.cerclesocial.org
We are willing to offer a small compensation if necessary to whoever can fix this in a timely manner.
Contact: cerclesocial@gmail.com
Thanks very much

9-24-09 Update
Thanks for all the really great advice from this group. We really were able to improve it from a go-cart to a rocket. The site is amazingly fast now and the client is happy. I thought we would share what helped, we did several things:

1. Hosting company increased number of Apache and PHP requests allowed (big difference)
2. Added a white background for faking the visual blinking/redraw time (thanks C for that suggestion)
3. Tuned all the performance settings in Drupal (one of the settings in hidden and separate from the others)