Musical Musing, “With My Own Two Hands”, Ben Harper

I went to ignitetulsa last night, and got to see some really exciting talks. There were the fun ones, talking about music, about why flying cars are improbable, about gamers. There were the techy and business focused ones, about being an entrepreneur and using the media around us more effectively. There were the ones about motivation and being a better you, about being manly men and strong women. But at the end of the night, the ones that stood out to me were the three that talked about making a tangible impact on the world around us. And this morning, when I got up, I found tweets from Shaun Groves who is currently in Kenya, touring the Compassion centers there and seeing the work being done. I drank the water I’ve been drinking every day since February 17^th for the blood:water mission’s 40 days of water drive, and I realized how much all of these little things make a huge impact on the world around us.

I want to talk about each of these projects separately, and please understand that while I work with some of them, I’m not exactly an expert. Please, follow the links I provide, go explore on your own the organizations I discuss, and consider what you can do to get involved. Keep in mind that I’m just highlighting a few projects here; if I were to try to make an exhaustive list, it would form a book by itself.

The first of the three projects discussed last night is something called the FabLab. Born in MIT, FabLab is short for Fabrication Laboratory, and is quite simply a sort of shop class for anyone and everyone. You walk in with an idea, and with the help of the experts, tools, and materials on-site, you walk out with a product. You can do patent searches or seek a patent with the help of their patent lawyers. Best of all, FabLabs are spread across the world, with locations in Ghana (on the African continent), India, and Afghanistan. In developing nations like these, the ability to walk in with an idea and walk out with a product can literally change or save lives. We were told the story of a girl in Ghana who made a milk tester. Now she knows when the sellers in the marketplace try to sell her bad milk, and she doesn’t buy from them. She protects her family, and she’s earning a new respect that she didn’t have before. You can find more out at http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ .

The second of the three projects is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. A foster mother (Oh, sorry, the PC term these days is “resource parent”) got up and talked about why to become a foster parent. She pointed out that you don’t have to be married, young, Christian, straight, or any particular race. You do need to be physically and emotionally healthy, and you do need to be able to take care of yourself and another human being without the financial support of others (the financial support from the state is only approximately 60% of what it actually costs to raise a child).

I’ll be the first to admit that becoming a resource parent isn’t easy. John and I are currently waiting to adopt, and we had to go through all the same steps that foster parents have to go through. I’ll even admit that I don’t have it in me, at least not now, to be a foster parent. Part of fostering children means that you work with the child and the parents to help reunify the family, making it a stronger whole than it was before. That’s an awesome goal. But as a former foster child, as the oldest sister who watched two sisters spend more time in the system than I did, I tend to be too skeptical to hope for successful reunifications. I tend to love forever, and I don’t know how to let go of someone, and yet, as a foster parent, that’s the nature of the job. You bring them into your home, you love them with every thing you have (because they deserve no less) and then you help them transition out.

Oh, but the impact that foster parents have on their kids’ lives. You are a sea of normalcy to a child who has no concept of what normal looks like. You are health to a child who’s never had it before. You are stability to a child who’s known only instability. You are love, you are safety, you meet basic needs that they learned early on they couldn’t count on to have met. These are kids who have been broken, and you are wholeness. These kids are wounded, and you are healing. You can be the difference between them repeating the cycle of substance abuse, poverty, neglect and abuse, or them breaking free of all of that, and becoming thriving, successful, joyful members of society. As a foster parent, you have the opportunity to do for your kids what my parents did for me; they took an angry, flailing teenager in, smoothed off the rough edges, loved me faithfully, and watched me blossom into a woman who is now turning around to give other children the same gift through adoption.

No, it isn’t easy. But it’s rewarding. It’s something you can do that makes a huge impact in the life or lives of another. Adoption.com has more information in general on foster parenting, but if you’re really interested in finding out more, contact your local state government. Or, if you are of Native American heritage, and can prove it with a CDIB card (Certified Degree of Indian Blood), then contact your tribe. Because the Indian nations serve as sovereign nations, they often have their own adoption and foster care departments, and by law, they give placement preference for their children to Indians.

Speaking of the Native Americans, that brings us to the third topic from last night. The Native Language Project was presented last night. This project has some awesome goals; not only are they aiming to preserve the languages of the Native tribes while there are still people around who speak them, but they want to do it in a way that reconnects the elders of the tribes, who are guardians of the language, culture, and stories, with the young people of the tribes, who tend to be more drawn to technology and modern life. It’s also working to give these same young people the sorts of marketable skills that will make them valuable in the marketplace, giving them confidence in themselves and a step up that they might not have had otherwise.

In short, (Yeah, too late for that, I know), the project is working to get audio and visual recordings of the elders telling their stories and relaying their culture, in their native language, and then to post these recordings in an online archive in a way that makes is accessible and navigable to others. It’s also excited by some of the progress in technology that makes accessing the written language easier, such as the keyboard overlay developed by the Cherokee that allows them to access the syllabary the same way we access an English language keyboard. You can follow their progress and get in touch with them at http://www.nativelanguageproject.com/ .

Blood:Water Mission is an awesome project. They focus on Africa, and on two of the fluids that are desperately needed for life, liquids that we, in the developed world, take for granted as safe. But in Africa, a continent where AIDS is decimating the population, where malaria still kills, where the blood supply just isn’t safe, no one can count on safe blood. And with the Sahara desert growing every year, much of subSaharan Africa torn by war, drought, or just lack of infrastructure that allows diseases long wiped out in the rest of the world to thrive, access to safe drinking water is often at best a day-long chore that keeps young girls out of school just to help keep up with the demands of their family.

The Blood:Water mission works to combat those problems. They work to restore destroyed wells, a task that is far cheaper than drilling new ones, but just as effective at providing a village with water. They raise money to buy simple, sustainable, long-lasting filtration systems, things that will filter out most of the disease causing organisms in the water the people drink, making it cleaner and safer. These two things alone have an enormous impact; by making what water the people have safer, fewer people die from water-borne pathogens, more time can be spent in school learning, giving the children a chance to escape poverty, more time can be spent working instead of sick, giving the family a chance to escape poverty & subsistence existence. Even the ability to have water closer has a huge impact; because water is such a precious commodity, the same water is used to drink, cook, wash clothes, body, and dishes. The mother is often busy with her younger children (which she has more of, because children aren’t as likely to live long enough to take care of her when she’s older, so she has more, in hopes of some of them making it that far), and the tasks of the home, so the task of getting enough water for just that day falls on the girls in the family… meaning they don’t get to have an education. By bringing water closer, it’s no longer near as scarce, and it doesn’t take the girls away from school anymore.

So how do you get involved? Well, John and I got involved by participating in the 40 days of water challenge. By drinking only tap water for 40 days, and saving the difference that we would have spent on other beverages (milk, juice, soda, tea, coffee, sports drinks, alcohol, whatever), then we are able to send that difference to the project. And while we could certainly designate an amount to give without making the beverage sacrifice, drinking only water serves as a reminder that when we bemoan the “hardship” of drinking “only water”, we’re actually taking part in unspeakable luxury. We have all the clean, safe, drinkable water we want, right there, when we want it, available from the nearest sink. For more information, go to http://www.bloodwatermission.com/ .

The next project is called Compassion. There’s a similar one called World Vision, but I’ve not worked with them, so while I’ll link them at the end, I can’t speak to any of their details. Compassion International was started 50 years ago and now has one million children being sponsored by one million sponsors. With centers in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, they reach out to kids in desperate poverty and offer them an education, clothing, food, and medical care. Sponsors write to their sponsored children, and the children write back, exchanging photos, drawings and letters. Compassion sponsors trips to the countries where the children live, allowing the sponsors to go meet the children they’re supporting and what the money they’re sending is actually doing. Further, Compassion works in the community, rushing aid in times of disaster and bringing basic improvements to everyone around them.

This morning, I shared some tweets from Shaun Groves, who is on one of the Compassion tours in Kenya. He shared a picture of a water treatment device that Compassion put in, giving the children access to safe, clean water. It looks to be about the size of a 55 gallon drum, but this little drum is a life saver. He shared a picture of a little boy, who 4 years ago was mute, malnourished, and couldn’t move. Today, because of what Compassion does, this little boy is alive. These kids don’t just learn and get the necessities of survival; they get to play and be safe.

Compassion was one of the first ones on the scene in Haiti, because Compassion had dozens of locations in that country. They quickly rushed to work, digging people out of the rubble, assessing the damage, rushing in humanitarian aid, and notifying sponsors who’d lost their child. And that’s the heartbreaking side of sponsorship. Your sponsored child is far away from you, and you fall in love with him or her or them, and you share your lives together, always knowing that the reason you met is because they are in a place of desperate need. You hope that they will be one of the thousands upon thousands of success stories that Compassion has to tell, the children who grow up, who are successful beyond anything they ever hoped or imagined, who go back to the centers to work with the children themselves, the kids who give back the way you gave to them. In the end, that’s all you can do; hope, pray, and love your kid. But what an impact it has. And what does it cost to sponsor a child? $38. For $38 a month, you have the privilege of falling in love with a kid who needs your love, your encouragement, and your hope as much as he needs the change you send. And yeah, Compassion will ask for more. They’ll ask you to contribute to a fund that helps support the kids that don’t have sponsors yet, so that they can provide life-saving medical care to kids who need it, even though they haven’t found someone to cheer them on. They’ll ask when disaster strikes, to help offset the funds they’re spending to rescue the ones in need NOW. But what they ask for is chump change. Your gift gives LIFE. You can contact Compassion at http://www.compassion.com/ . World Vision, which has a similar program, is found at http://www.worldvision.org/ .

I could go on. I could list awesome programs where a little bit makes a huge impact all day long. Soles4souls gives shoes away to people who have none. Heifer International provides livestock to people to help them earn a living for themselves. The Salvation Army not only provides for the homeless and does disaster relief, but it also runs rehabilitation centers and after school programs. The Hanna Project brings medical aid to people who need it all over globe. And that’s just the first 4 I thought of right off.

The point? I’ve decided to make the world a better place, a brighter place. I don’t have the resources to go out and single-handedly make a huge philanthropic gesture. I can’t be an Oprah an open a school in Africa, or be Angelina Jolie and tour the globe raising awareness for this cause or that problem. But I can make a huge impact with the little bit I have, in little steps, in little ways. I can change the world with my own two hands. But to be truly effective, I can’t do it alone. It works because I’m not alone. You’ve got to use your own two hands. Won’t you join me?