As many you may know, I have had a rough last 6 months since the plane crash on Aug 1st. As a result of that horrible incident, two Christian missionaries, each with 4 children and a wife, died and for some reason that only God knows, Rob and I walked away. I personally had some significant injuries, a broken collarbone, an L3 compression fracture, a small fracture on my right index finger, and a paralytic ileus. The L3 compression fracture was the most serious of the injuries. My 3rd lumbar crunched about 40% and burst away from my spinal cord. If it had burst in the other direction, it would have most likely cut my spinal cord and I would have been paralyzed from that vertebra down. Numerous doctors have told me that I am a walking miracle.

Ironically, the spinal injury has not been the culprit of my pain these past 6 months, the paralytic ileus and digestive system have been. A paralytic ileus is where your entire digestive system shuts down, usually for a short period of time. In the hospital in Africa, I was in intense pain for a week because nothing in my digestive tract was moving and I vomited everything I ate. After a day or two, the doctors put a tube down my throat so that I would no longer vomit bile. After a week of the worst suffering I have ever been through, things started to flow and would not stop flowing for days. I was on the toilet for hours at a time and had to constantly wear diapers. For that first week, I could barely do anything on my own, including bath myself. After two weeks, I finally felt capable of leaving the hospital. The only thing still bothering me were these intense cramps, but since I was able to walk and eat, I figured it was time to go. I had no idea that those intense cramps would still be around today and the cause of them still unknown. Daily, particularly at night, I have bloating, cramping, and random pains in my abdomen, nothing but not eating makes them go away. I am writing this blog from a coffee shop in Atlanta, 30 lbs. lighter than when I left for that crazy adventure to Africa. For the last three months, I have been here with family trying to help me recover.

Today I did a capsule endoscopy, a test where you swallow a pill with a camera in it that takes pictures of your small intestines and sends them wirelessly to a hard drive. This test is the best way to get a look at your small intestine without surgery, and I am hoping that of the 50,000 pictures it will take, one will reveal the origin of my pain.

The whole vision was to make a film where we would experience extreme poverty first hand. We would live on $1.25 a day for 3 months and truly experience extreme poverty. The problem is that hunger, the main result of us living on $1.25, is only one aspect of extreme poverty.  If you look at the Millennium Development Goals (the global initiative to end extreme poverty by 2025 which Give A Damn? hopes to be apart of), gender equality, universal access to primary education, and environmental stability are 3 of the 8 goals that need to be in place to achieve an end to extreme poverty. Interestingly, the other half of the goals all have to do with healthcare. We realized very quickly on our trip that to truly experience extreme poverty, we would have to get rid of our health insurance, drink unclean water that would cause horrible diarrhea and contract malaria, TB, or HIV. Now we have proven we are not immune to doing idiotic things for this project, but purposely getting sick is on a whole other level of dumb. Those in extreme poverty would not want us to purposely make ourselves deathly sick to empathize with their condition. 

In the end though, God rewrote our story and a loss of my health is clearly how I have most directly gotten a glimpse of what those in extreme poverty suffer through. At one point, I had lost 40 lbs and you can see in some pictures that I looked like someone you see on the late night, guilt trip infomercials. USAID and the World Food Programme constantly deliver porridge to those living in extreme poverty; I had periods where I could only eat broth and for months had a zero sugar, gluten and dairy diet. Uhhh. Those in extreme poverty often have no work/job opportunities and die from diseases that are either preventable but a cure is just out of reach financially or from HIV a disease that has no cure at all. I am definitely blessed not to have been in that situation, but I have not been able to work much & thus far, have been unable to find a cure for my intestinal pain.

Overall, I have suffered more than I have in my entire life, and still only tasted a bit of what it means to suffer. The differences between my situation and those in extreme poverty are much greater than our similarities. What really stands out is the love I have received. My family and friends have rallied around me: the prayers, meals, rides to doctors, wet rags on the back of my neck after vomiting, laying beside my bed as I moan in pain, and patience as I get too confident and fall ill again. I am not saying those in extreme poverty have no love, the community in Africa often blows what you will find in the US away, but many of them lack this. So many are orphaned by AIDS, separated from family by war, or left alone for one reason or another.

One huge difference was clear immediately after the crash. So many imagined that we were rushed to a hospital in a big tent where American doctors worked on us with limited supplies. This could not be any farther from the truth. I was dropped off by two African guys whose names I never got and faces I will never see again at the best hospital in all of East Africa. In the first few hours, I was hooked up to an IV, given morphine, put through an MRI, CAT Scan, ultra sound and given numerous X-Rays. My diagnosis was reached accurately and quickly. Just a few miles away, there was another hospital. The one people in extreme poverty go to; one where people dying have to be turned away because they have no money. As I laid in that hospital, I wondered how things would have been if I had not been a white, American male, probably the most privileged demographic on this planet. Even more evidence of my privilege position is the tens of thousands of dollars in care I have had since arriving at home thanks to insurance. Health insurance is a completely foreign term to most of the world. I remember talking to our guides our first day in Africa and talking about insurance: car, health, fire, life, etc. You name it, they did not have it. We surround ourselves with this giant security blanket of insurance while most of the world struggles to even have a blanket at all.

What I was trying to do with this blog is update you on my health, compare & contrast my experience with sickness and suffering with those in the 3rd world, and share a little of how I have emotionally responded to all this. To open up a little further, the ironic reality is that for the past 6 months I have probably gave less of a damn about the poor than I have in the last 5 years. I wish I could say that all this suffering has changed me forever and made me even more empathetic to the extremely poor, but I am still not sure how I am going to be different after all this is said and done. My biggest prayer is that all this suffering will not have gone in vain. I am sure God is up to something big, just not completely sure what that is yet. I just know that our story is the way it is for reason, and must be told.

Adversity introduces a man to himself.  ~Author Unknown


Sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.  ~Johann Paul Friedrich Richter

I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. --Charles Dickens

In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. --Jesus Christ

-Dan Parris
Director of Give A Damn?