It has been so moving & we are so pumped to see the world rally around Haiti. It’s all over the talk shows and news, prayed for in our churches and consistently in our conversations. The media seems to really have taken this cause under their wing which I think is a huge factor. We are all talking about Haiti, what’s going on and what we can do.

It makes me wonder… what if we just kept this up. What if after we helped stabilize Haiti, we did not give up the momentum and shifted our eyes to others kinds of distress around the world. It has been 8 days since Haiti’s earthquake and an estimated 200,000 people have died. The thing we forget is that on each one of those days, it is estimated that 25,000 children died from preventable diseases.

If we stayed in this state of action and once Haiti was back on its feet, we replaced Haiti with another country or another issue like fighting malaria or bringing clean water to the rest of the world, imagine the change we could make. One of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, said this world is “enemy occupied territory.” What if we constantly lived with this same sense of urgency in our hearts. Without a doubt we could meet the Millennium Development goal of ending extreme poverty by 2025.

One other thought. Do you guys know what Haiti was like before the quake? I remember seeing videos of kids eating mud cookies because they were so hungry. Give A Damn? considered going there when we did not know if we would raise enough money to go to Africa. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere and it would have been the closest thing to extreme poverty in Africa. My point is, why did it take an earthquake for us to wake up?

It kind of feels like our plane crash. We were on an awesome journey before that happened, really doing some incredible things to try and get the word out about extreme poverty and what young people could do. It was only our great group of friends and family who cared until something crazy happened, and then it seemed for a little while the whole world knew and cared about us. I just wish we could keep that battle mentality going even during the average days because no day is average in a world where 25,000 kids die a day from preventable disease. We are always in “enemy occupied territory.” 

-Dan Parris

Director of Give A Damn?