Wzup Everyone! Hope you enjoyed those pictures from our trip! It was really amazing for me to see the kind of connections a few guys from Missouri can get with God's help (obviously this is a Dan blog) and a little emailing/phone calling. With the free access to information available to us, you can get anyone's email or you at least know someone who can get anyone's email. This can be nuisance if you do not want to be reached, but for guys like us, that are trying to get in contact with people of power, it is definitely a blessing. We have already connected with tons of big names and organizations that I never imagined would care to get involved with us. The list grows weekly.

This reminds me of something Jason Russell, one of Invisible Children founders, talked about in his interview. I asked him if he really thought this next generation could make a difference in this world. What can a bunch of punk kids in America do about the world's issues? He had a great response.

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I have a quick story for you: I was at the Sundance Film Festival this past year, and my favorite film was titled: Triage, Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma. During the Rwandan Genocide, all the NGO's fled Rwanda, Dr. Orbinski's organization (Doctors without Borders) was the only one to enter the country. Orbinski's job was to number off victims. 1 meant a person needed immediate attention or they would die, 2 meant that they needed to be treated within that day, and 3 meant that they did not have a chance to make it. He decided whether victims would live or die. He also did surgery after surgery on people and the film chronicles him returning to all the countries he worked in as he prepares to write a book about his experiences. In these countries, so many people are still in tough situations, maybe not in war or genocide, but living in huge slums and struggling in extreme poverty. As he walks around the slums remembering what had happened there, people missing limbs hobble up to him and tell him thanks for saving their life. You realize this one man literally healed and saved the lives of thousands of people.

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Written by Rob

Hey everybody, I hope you're doing well.

If you've been keeping up with our blog, you know that the Give A Damn? team has been all over California for the past 9 days or so. We spent some time in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco as well as a brief trip to Tijuana, Mexico. During our stay we conducted a total of 7-8 scheduled interviews, on top of doing "man on the street" interviews at each location. Needless to say we are all exhausted but the trip was the epitome of productive.
We shot around 16 hours of footage, and over the next few weeks I will be editing a lot of the interviews so that you can see what we've been up to. I plan on having a new video/blog posted every 3-4 days and in each one I will feature one of the organizations or individuals that we encountered on our trip. I'm hoping that we can help spread the word and enlighten you about some of the amazing movements that are currently taking place. If you read this blog, do me a favor and post a comment and let me know so that I feel motivated to keep up with it on a regular basis. Bottom line, the more comments I get, the more blogs that I will post.

So stay tuned.

Less Important But Still Entertaining:

YOU DECIDE IF I GROW OUT THE MOHAWK!

Let me explain a bit. Dan and I are in very tight financial positions right now; and we both have a large amount of student loans on top of a lack of steady income due to our high involvement in the production of Give A Damn? With that being said, about a month or so ago, I shaved my head in attempt to save cash on haircuts as well as simplify upkeep for the next few months while we're on the road. As much as I thought I was going to look like a cancer patient, the baldness has really grown on me and I feel that "the chop" was a very good move. Being the documentarian that I am, i filmed the head shaving in time-lapse, watch the video below, and during the process we cut a mohawk just to be goofy. After publishing that video, there has been a good amount of people who thought the mohawk kicked ass and they said I should have left it. So after 10 days or so of not shaving on the road, I'm at a place now where i can either re-shave or start working on the mohawk. I don't care one way or the other, so it's up to you guys to decide.

SUMMARY:

I shaved my head to save cash, during the process we cut a mohawk.
YOU DECIDE IF I:
1. Re-shave it
2. Grow out a Mohawk.

Please vote in the comments section.


If you're reading this on Facebook, please visit the original post location on Conversant Life, Conversant Page, you can also comment by logging in with your facebook log in. Be advised, CL is a Jesus website but the admins have proven thus far to be tolerant of other ideas, so dont let the Jesus thing scare you away from participating and perhaps starting you own blog.

-Rob
Give A Damn?

More pics.
Because I love pics, and honestly who wants to read when there is pretty colors to look at.

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Hey kids, how's things.

Tuesday morning we left for California earlier than blue jays wake up and it's been non-stop filming/ man cuddling since we left. About an hour or two after our plane landed, we were already setting up for our first interview with the founder of The Falling Whistles Project, Sean Carasso. It was amazing and we all felt that we enjoyed almost everything that he brought to the table. In the past Dan has been asking most of the interview questions, but this time I made a point of shooting a few out there. I think the best part of this interview, not to discredit Sean, would have to be that we did the interview in a warehouse, with Dan and me seated on a shop vac and a bucket respectively. I dont know about you, but shop vac chairs scream Give A Damn? to me.

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I'll start by introducing myself; my name is Rob and I look forward to conversing back and fourth with everyone through this blog. I will gladly answer any questions you might have about myself or the film, but I'll warn you that most of the time you probably wont like the bluntness of my answers. Bottom line, I am offensive and I'm way past the point of dancing around the issues and people's feelings when we could be cutting through the crap and getting somewhere.

If you have seen the trailer then you most likely have a basic understanding of who I am, or at least who you might think I am. To the average viewer, I most likely come off as the atheist asshole who doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself. While I don't believe this to be the case, I certainly wont be so bold as to try and demand you think otherwise. I would also argue that my viewpoints are not a product of apathy and/or selfishness, I more so believe that I am the product of years of having propaganda-guilt-trip bullshit crammed down my throat. I think deep down a lot of people can relate to where I'm at, but most people just don't want to admit it and be the douche. Basically, I have no idea what my responsibility is to people half way across the world, but I'm willing to look into the issue and find out if we can make a difference.

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Hows it going everyone?

We thought you might be interested in where we are at with this project.

As of right now, we are stationed in an office in St. Louis working all the time to try and get the word out about the film. We are consistently creating videos for our youtube/facebook/myspace/conversantlife pages (all those links are below.) Every day people come out of the wood works offering their help and support.

Next Tuesday, Rob, David and myself are headed to LA to get interviews with the people who run Invisible Children, The SOLD Project, and a few other non-profit organizations (Big thanks to our friend Rachel Burney for hooking a lot of that up.) We will be there for 9 days, getting interviews, promoting the film at concerts and events (a Big thanks to Rock 4 Justice) and doing some man on the street interviews.

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