The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. - Albert Schweitzer

The Kids Wanted to Make Sure I Didn't Forget Them

Thanks to donations from my readers, seven Guatemalan students will go to high school, three villages have school supplies, one has a new refrigeration system for soy milk, 60 villagers ate meat, and 140 kids got ice cream. I also think I have lice, but I couldn't be happier!

Newly returned from one-week service vacation to the center of Guatemala, I urge you all to give this experience a try. I went through an Austin-based organization called Cultural Embrace, and came back more renewed than I ever would have had I spent a week sitting on a beach or skiing down a mountain.

So many moments playing like a movie in my head now, making me smile – like for example one of my last days, I went to visit the home of a little girl named Wesley because she wanted to show me “her tree.” When we got there, I watched her reach into her pocket and pull out a wad of cheese from the pizza we’d had earlier at the orphanage. She’d saved the best part to give her little brother!

Such generosity among these kids, such joy – and in that, so much hope for the future, despite so many challenges. While I was in El Hato, the village where we donated scholarships, I had an eye-opening moment. Early on in the visit, without even thinking about it – just making the kind of silly conversation adults make with kids – I asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” None of the kids really had an answer. It was shyness around this strange American, in part. But it was also because no one had ever really asked them to create a vision for their future.

I was so floored that I actually led the kids through a kind of mini-seminar on the spot – what was essentially an extremely distilled version of some of the work I deliver to global corporations, I kid you not. They happily worked together on goals and ideas for the future in small groups, with an intermission half way through to raid the ice cream truck – actually, a bike with a big ice chest strapped on and a boom box blaring the familiar tinkle of an ice cream truck.

When we came back together, I was amazed at these kids’ new confidence as they spoke to an audience (with foreigners even) about their individual visions. You could sense the support and confidence from the parents that surrounded the children in the room. The experience was a moment of universality – true flow – where I felt my work moving into an entirely new dimension.

This year I plan to try to find a local service project each time I’m on a business trip, especially the international ones, like I did recently in Israel, where I worked with Israeli and Palestinian kids while there for a corporate engagement. I’ll also continue to spend vacation time doing service. Finally, I plan to make service even more core to our team cohesion work, inside FG and in our work with other companies.

I urge everyone to find a way to work service into your professional life – with your team, your clients, and your friends. If you want to improve your relationships, SERVE and serve deeply. Start wherever, but do it. You will learn vulnerability and intimacy, you will learn generosity, and it will drive a level of courage for accountability and candor that will enhance everything you do.

The most profound gift that’s coming back with me from Guatemala (besides the head lice!) is the reminder that serving others creates an accelerated learning path for personal growth. Pity – remote and passive and isolated – resolves to empathy. We learn so quickly that people are more similar than they are different, and that's a lesson to bring home: simple human empathy through service.

10 comments // In Philanthropy

(Back in LA now but still getting all the posts up.)

Let me introduce you to Judith. I don’t have pics of her, but here are some pics of her kids, which is a good way to get to know her. Judith is a TOTAL PISTOL who forced me to sit through a one hour Powerpoint presentation with numbers!!!

She decided fifteen years ago to open up her home to the town children whose parents weren't doing the job or just single moms who couldn't watch the kids and still work or the occasional orphan who was possibly being shipped to Guatemala City... Today, Judith, her husband, her mother and father take care of 46 children.  They get a fairly regular contribution from a Canadian family of 850 US twice a year.  But this leaves them tens of thousands short of their need.  Which she begs and borrows from friends and family (and believe me she is persuasive- she could be teaching sales at IBM).

If she really had her way she would operate a $74k annual budget that would include school and teaching materials and uniforms and food for all the children.  She would run more programs to teach accountability by giving all the kids little chicks to take care of until it is a chicken to be eaten or sold.  They were able to do this with ten kids last may and it was a total success!  She teaches life skills like cooking and sewing and brushing their teeth and showering- believe me this is not something they could get practice in at home with no water.

So as I sat there through her whole presentation/lecture, I realized something.  Those 46 kids were waiting just outside the door, totally unattended, and I wasn't hearing a peep out of them!!  I mean – and this may not be that hard to imagine for those who know me – THEY had more patience that I DID!! And just outside, quietly, next to pizzas, 3 pinatas, and a huge cake!! They sat waiting for us!!

When the powerpoint was over, I met the kids and gave a little talk of how proud I was and said, "let's eat!!" But was corrected and asked by one lovely shy little girl if I could wait while they performed several skits they had created for us. And THEY did all the choreography themselves!!  Could I wait!?!? Oh my!  Of course. They were so creative!

As I walked home with Judith she told me that kids in this town actually begin to consider suicide at about 6. Judith has never lost one child.  She definitely needs our help.  I had dinner with Judith tonight, and I have to say, she is a Central American Mother Teresa and her husband a saint for dealing with this powerful Mayan on a Mission!

• To see the rest of my pics of Judith's kids, click here to go to the Facebook album.
• Donate here.
• Learn more about Cultural Embrace, the group that organized my "service vacation," here.

1 comment // In Philanthropy, Uncategorized

I spent today in the village of El Hato where I was introduced to seven children who are desperate for scholarships to go to private school in Antigua. They had excelled in middle school, and had high school tuition promised to them by a Canadian donor. Unfortunately he pulled out at the last minute.

The entire village made a case to me to help support them. Each of the kids introduced themselves as did the parents. One after another, I heard their stories.  One proud father talked about the fact that his father never let him get an education. Even though he was smart enough and wanted to go to school, his father told him it wasn't what men who were born in that village do. He was to go harvest flowers in the mountains.

This man committed to do anything to make sure his son had the chances he never had.  I looked into the face of this gaunt Guatemalan man but saw the spirit of my own father and his commitment to me and my education.

I couldn't stand to hear them plead for a minute.  I'm going to make sure these boys and girls get their shot.

This decided, we ate.  We had brought a ridiculous delicacy according to Cultural Embrace: Chicken.  I'm talking Pollo-Loco kinda chicken that apparently every kid in a village someday dreams of being able to eat.  So the kids and their families and supporters ate chicken.  What was amazing was that the seven students who were granted scholarships asked if they could SERVE their village, and when there weren't enough plates for all the kids, the seven donated theirs. And I'm telling you these seven were no more fed than the rest and had never ever had such a treat themselves, but they wanted the kids to be served. "They had already had their gifts today," they said - another shot at an education.

Every one of these kids told me that their future would include coming back to help their village. Watching them serve their parents and the other children, I believed them. This more than anything else gives me hope for the future here.

There's more to this story, but I'll save it for next week.

• See my pics of the children of El Hato here.
• Donate here.
• Learn more about Cultural Embrace, the group that organized my trip, here.

6 comments // In Philanthropy

My Guide and Aspiring Student, Jose

Today I met Carlos. Carlos is a social entrepreneur who no longer wants to be reliant on donations for the kids he’s trying to save.  He wants to help his village by creating self-sustaining entrepreneurial projects.

As for what the proceeds do, Carlos' earnings help educate and care for 150 children as an alternative to them hitting the coffee fields as early as 4 years old.  Even at that age, they can help their families make their 100 lbs of coffee beans picked a day – a feat that makes them enough money to live in small dirt shacks, 4 to a small mattress, and to eat a tortilla a day to have something in their stomach, and some beans and rice if they are lucky.  That's called doing well around here.

Carlos wants to set a new standard. He wants the kids to be able to choose to go to school.  Our self appointed guide for the day was a little guy named Jose.  He walked with us everywhere, even after we left the project.  Jose reminded me of me.  I remember so distinctly as a little boy overhearing my pop talk to the CEO of the company he worked for about his son's potential - if only he could get an education. I remember standing there, as if I was on show, thinking that if I just looked the right way, that my father’s hopes for me would be realized.  So I imagined Jose walking along side of me and feeling the same way about this American and his mother's hopes for him. She could have sent him to the fields, but she hopes for more for her boy and two girls.

Carlos has created a pre-school, a first grade, and a 2nd/3rd grade combined class for starters. Until recently he was able to provide nourishment for 40 babies once a week, but he lost his funding - and for this reason has vowed not to be in this position again.

At first many of the mothers sent their children to school as a way for their kids to get some nourishment. Now that this is no longer part of the program, fewer consider the education reason enough to keep them from the fields.

Carlos has identified five kids who have the support of parents and really have potential to break out. For those kids who have a chance, like Jose, $300 dollars per kid per year would give them schooling. The top five are Jose, Anna Bella, who has 14 siblings, Arolda, Ingrid, and Brenda, whose mom has 8 kids. When we went to Brenda's house I noticed that the joy and hope in the kids really doesn't show their desperate state.

To give more of a sense of how little it would cost to keep the school afloat: A project teachers' salary (Carlos has 3 of them) is 200 a month.

Anyway, Carlos, looking for self-sufficiency for the school, has decided to teach this village to fish. His resourcefulness has gained the village a soy milk production machine and 200 pounds of soy (about 60 bucks).  Grant Moncur, the head of our tech support company EStream, donated 500 bucks, which has now allowed the village the refrigeration system to store the milk for sale to schools in the area – so now the village has an industry. By the way, Carlos wasn't going to let doubt hold him back.  He started making the milk knowing that he would find a way to refrigerate and sell the product, and he did!

The pictures from the day together were joyful and heartbreaking.  But more joyful. These kids don't have water or clean living spaces, but they have joy.  I'm serious, they are constantly hugging and taking care of each other. They help each other do even the most basic things, like carry water to the toilet at the school when it’s time to flush (a few times a day). They are there for each other.

If you want to support Carlos' program or one of the kids, any amount is welcome from $10 (a significant amount of money which can feed a family for a week or more) or $300 to send a high potential child to school for a year.

I can barely keep my eyes open, but I’m going to bed at midnight thinking of Jose, who has not had light since 6.30 tonight.  What was he thinking as he lay in bed with his family going back over the day, the supplies he got and food he brought home for his family... I hope he had not only sweet dreams, but visions of a future that involves him finishing school.

To donate to the kids I'm helping in Guatemala, click here.

Click here to see my Guatemala album on Facebook.

3 comments // In Philanthropy