11 PM - Christal Earle’s Blog

I currently live really close to the beach. The surfing beach, actually. Vaden and I are living in Dominican Republic as we wait and hope to bring our 5 year old adopted daughter home to Canada. I keep telling myself I want to get into surfing, because it just seems to somehow up your cool factor: casual conversation, dropping the ol’ line: “yeah, I surf” just seems to be so enviable. In fact, the whole concept of surfing seems to be surrounded in all that we pursue in life: looking for the best wave that will carry us through safely until it pops us out on the other side with only great memories and friends surrounding us and cheering us on. However, life is not always like that. I don’t actually think it ever is, to be honest. And until I met Carlos and his family, I thought that the possibility of surfing was something you needed a board and ocean waves to do. I was wrong: it could happen in a way that could be disastrous.

Carlos’ real name is Hilario. He lives on the edge of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic with his wife, Felicita and their four children (Jorkeli, Joskar, Jocairy, and Ruth). Carlos is a good man. He works long, hard hours, fighting to keep food on the table for his family and to keep his kids in school. He and Felicita only dream of the best possible future for their children. And since the day I met them, I only wanted the same thing for them. It sounds simple until you realize where they actually live.

Their community is called San Marcos. It sits on the edge of the city, connected by loose dirt roads that often wash out in the rain, with houses clustered around a river ravine at the base of the mountain. The trees are lush and the mosquitoes are plentiful, and yet it is the best they can do: here they own their own land and take quiet confidence in the fact that they are together. Carlos and Felicita’s house was tiny, with only two rooms. There was no running water or dependable electricity. As I stepped around to peak over the back of their house, I realized the full extent of the danger they lived in every day: their home was almost falling off the edge of the eroding ravine, threatened to surf down into the creek 15 feet below. It was held to the side of the hill with scraps of wood and other odd materials that they were able to collect to help them just a little bit longer. But how long before it was too long?

This past summer we were able to build a new house for Carlos and his family. It has a real cement floor, with enough foundation depth to keep his family’s precious new home secure. They are not going to be surfing down that ravine any time soon; they are going to be safe. If feels good to know that tonight, as I sleep with my little family and know that we are safe when it rains or storms, I know that Carlos and Felicita are also safe - thanks to so many amazing Canadians who joined with them this past summer and believed in the power of hope.

This Christmas, we are going to be delivering Christmas Hampers to Carlos and Felicita and many other families like them. The gifts will be filled with food, children’s gifts and needed household items. We need your help! Check out www.absolute.org/hampers. This is how hope begins!

I know Barbie gets a bad rap. I know she can be seen as a symbol of all that is wrong with our perceptions of how women should look and act. Like the multi-billion toy industry that North Americans are enslaved to, she is often over-priced and kind of ridiculous. However, this week, I saw Barbie do something I never knew she could do. Barbie brought hope to a little neighbourhood in the middle of the outback of Baja California, Mexico. Barbie reached out and touched a young girl’s life, and we got to be a part of it all.

Micaela moved to Baja California from Oaxaca (wuh-hawk-ah) in southern mainland Mexico with her mom when she was two years old. Forced to move to find work and survive, there were many years full of good memories but persevering endurance as she grew up. She gave birth to Octavio when she was 15 and Jessica when she was 18; sometimes life leaves us with few options and she was never given the option of family planning. Micaela sells items and handicrafts in the market in town. She is a good mother and a faithful daughter. Her husband had been in America working for four years. He missed most of his children’s early years, and last November, shortly after arriving back home, he left Micaela and the children and moved across town and in with another woman. Perhaps he couldn’t handle the uncertainty of what Micaela had no option of escaping: the uncertainty of how long Jessica will be around.

Jessica began to get sick a year and a half ago, when she was 5. A tumour began to grow on the side of her face, and tests confirmed it was cancerous. Micaela had no choice: she had to take Jessica two hours up the coast to the hospital. When she arrived there, without extra clothes, blankets or money, she was told that she would need to put Jessica in treatments immediately and it would take a month. She didn’t even have enough money to take a bus home. Our Absolute staff and students sent up emergency supplies and money and wanted her to know how much her and her family were loved and valued.

After two rounds of chemotherapy, Jessica is home with her mom and brother. School has been hard, as she has missed so much this year and she is easily tired and can’t walk very far. Though there are uncertainties as to her future, Micaela and Octavio work hard to make their home one of love and comfort for Jessica. And that is where we came in.

Like every parent, Micaela would like to give her kids the moon, but unlike many of the homes we all grew up in, there is no money after the necessities - and sometimes even those can’t be met. Our Leadership students were at her house, helping to build an extra room to give Jessica some space. There was nothing to put in that room. But Jessica had a dream of what she would like to see: a pink doll house full of Barbie’s.

Shelby was one of our Hero Holiday interns in Mexico this past summer. Moved by Jessica’s story, she sent money to help us and to remind them that they were loved. And this week we watched a dream come true as we pulled up to their house and made Jessica close her eyes as we set out a little girl’s fantasy: a huge pink Barbie house and camping van, tonnes of Barbie’s to complete the picture and a big pink quilt that said “Princess”. All of us counted to three in Spanish and watched as tears ran down her face as she tried to comprehend what she saw there.

For me, it was hard to decide what the best part of the morning was: seeing Jessica holding her Barbie’s close, helping to break the piñata outside to celebrate, or watching Shane, one of our Leadership students, work in a sea of pink as he tried desperately to figure out how to put the dollhouse together!

Will a dollhouse cure Jessica? No. Can Barbie change a life? Perhaps…when she is combined with a little dose of hope and a big serving of love.

To find out more about how to join us in Mexico for our Hero Holidays, check out www.absolute.org. This is how hope begins!

Light is made up of both waves and particles and its incomprehensible speed is what the basic measurement of distance is based on. It’s all around us and it is way more than what it seems. When we look at the world, science has proven that it’s not actually the objects that we are seeing - it is the light that has left those objects and reached our eyes. The truth is that light is the only real thing that we can see in the world, and that is kind of mind-bending when you first consider it. But when I look at the world around me, perhaps the most incredible property about light is something I discovered when I first encountered the beauty of a flashlight in a dark place: light is never overcome by darkness. Never.

At first glance, Aguas Negra can seem like a carbon copy of hundreds of thousands of communities around the world. There is the endless clamor of human life in close, unhealthy proximity: children calling out, babies crying, shouts of laughter combined with outbreaks of rage, and TV’s and stereos blaring. There is very little privacy anywhere, and the unceasing noise and chatter is combined with the smell of tepid water, human waste, mildew and garbage that threatens to completely overrun the community at times. And then there is the black water, the Aguas Negra that the community is plagued by when it rains or the river floods. It is there because, essentially, the community of about 7,500 people are living on top of an old landfill - and it’s a ghost they can’t ever get away from.

But for me, that’s where the similarities end between Aguas Negra and many places around the world like it. Because in Aguas Negra, there is light along the road - literally. The Light Along the Road is a Dominican based foundation that is run by the people of Aguas Negra with the help of organizations such as ours and many others around the world. It is a women’s cooperative, an adult education centre, an elementary school, a community outreach centre, a medical resource centre and even a church. It is the product of many people seeing the bigger picture that goes beyond the limitations of their poverty right now. At the head of it, steering the vision, is a woman named Sandra. A single mother who has lived in Aguas Negra for a long time with her four kids, Sandra believes in her community and in the potential of each person she encounters within. Sandra knows almost each person in that community by name, and she works to continually inspire them to live past where they are right now in their lives and dream and work towards what they believe can happen.

There are a lot of models for development around the world that are working and that can be touted as being highly successful in accomplishing their measurable goals. They are doing amazing, ground-breaking strategies to help conquer poverty’s pain and death grip. But none of those strategies ever reached Aguas Negra. They were a community getting sicker and sicker, whose children were going without an education because they couldn’t afford the $15-$20 needed for school uniforms and books, and who had nothing to focus on together but daily survival. All they needed to start to find a way out was someone like Sandra, someone who was one of them. People like Sandra are lights, and they will always shine brighter when they are surrounded by others like them.

Absolute’s Hero Holiday groups have done many projects with Light Along the Road. Many Canadian teenagers and adults have seen the power of change for themselves as they worked among the people that call Aguas Negra ‘home’. We have helped to build homes and structures that are giving hope where it is needed - and in the process, we are changed.

In a perfect world, there would be no poverty, sickness or exploitation, and in a perfect world no one would need us to believe that we can make a difference for those unable to do it for themselves. But we live in a very imperfect world, and in this world, in our lifetimes, we can shape the future by our actions today.

The way out is not easy, to be honest, many may not make it. Disease, sickness, violence, hunger and pure poverty will take many of their lives and destroy their futures. But it won’t get them all. It can’t when there is light along the road because that light shines in the darkness - it is never the other way around.

This Christmas, Absolute is returning to Aguas Negra in Dominican Republic, and we will be building homes for families who need it most - and we will have the best Christmas of our lives! You can join us! Check out www.absolute.org for more information.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. ~ Dalai Lama

Consistency is sometimes a value that is lost in our society. I think it could be better referred to as “keeping your word”. We make promises very lightly: we say we will get together with an old friend when we may not actually intend to, we say we will show up at an event just to be polite, we even disregard bill notices sometimes out of our own convenience. Have you ever wondered what life would be like if we all decided that our word was our commitment and that our life was built upon the strategy of putting relationships first, rather than second, or even further down the list?

One of the advantages I have realized that I have had in life is that I have been able to encounter many different cultures. I have been in many homes, sat at many tables, and had many deep conversations with the people around the world that we have been privileged to work alongside. It’s easy to appreciate the shiny layer of another culture when we are just visiting their hotels, beaches or shopping markets - but it is a rich gift to be able to listen to their heart and see their world through their eyes. Sometimes what we see there would surprise even the greatest skeptic or critic - because once you understand someone, the veil of judgment is lifted off. When you gain insight into what motivates them, you gain insight into yourself.

There is a little known area about four hours south of Tijuana, Mexico. The road to get there winds around mountains, passes many open spaces filled with cacti, and passes through many dusty, “one horse” towns along the way. Once you get there, it is at first very underwhelming. Back in off the beaches, there is little to see in the way of tourism and even less to see in the way of population. But that first impression may not be accurate. Down those winding dirt roads off the highways are endless stories behind faces that hold many memories, both good and bad, and many of those stories tell of struggles, hardships, and the power of hope.

He is one of those stories. Every day that he can, he is out in the tomato fields surrounding the community. On the days that there is work, it takes him over 12 hours to pick 80 pails of tomatoes. Those pails will earn him 180 pesos for the day. However, like the rest of the migrant workers in the area, work is hard to come by and the pressure to just be able to eat and find shelter can prove to be nearly impossible at times. But there is something different about him - something you would never expect from someone in his circumstances. Every time that we are building a house in his community, he manages to find time to show up and help our teams out - no matter what.

There are no email notifications, no phone calls to remind him to show up, not even someone running around trying to find him to let him know we are back in the community. He just finds us. And after he finds us, he insists on grabbing a shovel and helping. He is always there, armed with his infectious smile and eager willingness to help - without fail. He is always the first to offer to do the back breaking labour, fighting through the sandy earth to help dig the most non-glamorous portion of the house build: the hole for the outhouse. His only motivation is to help because he sees the bigger picture. Revolutionary, I know.

He helps us to understand something: that no matter who you are or where you are in life, being a part of something bigger than yourself is the best gift you could give and receive. It’s what we were created for. His name is Pedro. He will probably never read this, but this goes out to him - for all that he does, and for all that we are confident he will continue to do. He is a silent hero, who always steps up, without fail.

Absolute’s Hero Holiday program works in Mexico throughout the year - and you can join us. To find out more about our Hero Holiday programs, check out www.heroholiday.com.

When Danielle was seven, she believed she could fly. Throwing herself into the air with all limbs flailing, she would inevitably always land with a thud, leaving bruised knees and elbows. In her own words, she described it as, “The feeling that even for just one ‘Mississippi’ I could be surrounded by nothing but the air I breathed. It was my being, even if it was just for a moment.”

When she climbed out on that ledge that day, there was no other way down. She had to jump. The rocks were slippery and the climb was steep, but it was an intentional choice that she had made, intent on facing what she felt was an irrational fear. The fear of the jump. If she planned on getting home, she knew she would have to go against every instinct in her body and leap, leaving behind the sold rock that lay beneath her trembling feet.

Below her were her team members’ expectant faces, while inside of her was a voice frantically searching for a loophole to escape jumping. But there was none. Finally, her own frustration with herself won out, and she jumped - because she refused to be the girl who couldn’t jump.

But that day, Danielle learned a valuable lesson - perhaps one of her most meaningful to date. She learned what it was to feel helpless, to be lost in one location, unable to move in any other direction. She learned that just being there wasn’t enough - she had to jump.

When people join us on Hero Holiday, they join for many different reasons: some come to make change, some come to be changed, some come to find understanding. It is in this understanding that compassion truly happens. And compassion confronted Danielle this past summer, on her last day at the garbage dump.

During a quiet moment that day, while helping out a young Haitian woman, Danielle was invited to come join her in her shelter on the edge of the garbage dump. It was made of sticks and sheets, and it was the only reprieve from the relentless sun that beat down upon them day after day. She felt honoured to have been invited in, realizing that this was a life moment she would never soon forget. As she sat there with her friend and her mother on old, giant tins, the flies swarmed around them. Clinging to her sticky and sweaty arms, she would jerk her body and try to swat at them. She was disgusted by their quantity and endless buzzing.

But as she looked over at her new friends, she noticed something for the first time. They weren’t jerking and swatting at the flies; they were sitting quite still and simply enjoying the shade and their company.

I suddenly felt embarrassed - ashamed of myself for making such a fuss over something so normal in their lives, which they had no power to stop. I began to wonder what does it mean simply to accept flies; to sit, unmoved by their constant swarming and crawling all over your tired body? It is so wrong in so many ways but there was something inside of me that had to understand, I couldn’t bear to have our worlds separated any longer by something so simple. And so, for a moment, I decided to be still. I allowed them to land on my limbs and my sweaty back - and there I found myself, plunging into a new reality, so immersed that it filled my soul. It was my being, even if it was just for a moment.

Some people may wonder why she bothered. What difference does it make if we fully understand what it is to be in someone else’s shoes? Some may think she was wasting her time and should have been back out there working harder and helping that family get more money from the recyclables that they collect at that dump. But some of you may read these words and identify with Danielle: perhaps, sometimes you just need to jump.

Danielle’s story reminds me every day that if change can start in me, change can start anywhere. 

To find out more about Absolute’s Hero Holiday trips to Dominican Republic, or any of our other locations, check out www.heroholiday.com.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” ~ Bonnie Jean Wasmund

When Absolute decides to build a house for a family through our Hero Holiday program, there are two things we need to make it happen:

1. someone who knows what they are doing
2. someone who is willing to learn how to be a part of making it happen

And then, after you have secured those two items, jump in and enjoy the party!

Off the main highway, on the north coast of Dominican Republic, on the west side of a kite surfer’s paradise is a busy little taxi/bus/moto-taxi stand. Behind that stand is a long, narrow road, seemingly going nowhere. But, if you follow that road, you will soon come upon a quiet little Dominican village, called La Cienega. Here there are no tourists or foreigners - there are only quiet, humble people working hard day in and day out to try to keep their families provided for. Sometimes they succeed, many times they fall short, but each day they do their best. That village is where we first found out about Iris.

Iris (pronounced Ee-rees) is a single mom and like many single mothers around the world, she faces many struggles on a daily basis. Being a single mom is hard. Being a single mom in a developing country with very little resources to provide for her family is especially hard. But, above all of that, Iris is plagued with an unknown disability that inhibits her from working at any job: her legs are continually full of sores and lesions, and at times, the pain is excruciating. Because she is unable to work consistently, life has often been very uncertain for her and her kids.

But when you meet her, her disability, illness and her desperate situation is not what you see. You see her eyes, and they are kind. I like eyes like that: eyes that say, “You are welcome here”. Each day, as our Hero Holiday bus would pull up and 15-20 students would tumble out, Iris was there to meet each person, kissing them on the cheek, eager to make them understand how much this meant to her and how much we were welcomed into her world.

Each day that house came together, hope would continue to rise and an excitement filled the crowded little neighbourhood around us. Their previous house was little more than a shack that was falling down around them due to shoddy construction and termites. This new house wasn’t just a building to give them shelter - this was a house that would provide income for her and her family because of the second half that we attached to her family’s living quarters. Iris would now sleep a little easier, knowing that there was a source of income for them.

On the day we did the house dedication, it was hard to find a dry eye in the crowd. Many people came out from the village to show their support for Iris and their gratefulness for what we did in their community. This house, to all of us, became a symbol in La Cienega: a symbol that our circumstances don’t need to direct our life story.

Iris’ house was a lesson for all of us this past summer. It was a lesson for our participants about what poverty looks like and how they can each play a part in helping to fight off its grinding pain. Each day, as we worked on the house and took time to play with the countless kids running around the village, life took on a new perspective as many of our students began to grasp the disparity of the world and recognize that they could help bridge that gap. For Absolute, this summer meant that, together with our participants and donors, we were able to accomplish some significant projects that helped to change lives in a tangible way. And for me, each time I looked into Iris’ eyes, I learned about hope. It never gives up.

Absolute is returning to Dominican Republic with our Hero Holiday program in the year ahead - and you can join us! Want to know more? Check out www.absolute.org. Together, we really are making a difference - and this is just the beginning!

Grade 9 can be difficult and the challenges can seem endless: cliques, changing emotions, and moments of self doubt. But for Katie, grade 9 wasn’t only difficult, it was practically unbearable.

Her earliest memories revolve around pain. The pain of childhood abuse, a broken home, and the insecurity of poverty punctuate all the other memories she can recall. Words and actions that seemed to reinforce a lie that she was tempted, time and again, to believe about herself: you are never going to be enough. As she entered grade 9, she seemed to live in a world that didn’t exist - at least to all of the other kids in her school. Unable to fit in anywhere, she decided it was easiest to stay under the radar and not get noticed. It somehow made it easier to deal with the pain. But then, it happened.

She couldn’t remember when exactly it was that she started to get sick - moments of blackness and loss of vision, odd vertigo that would strike when she least expected it, and slight confusion at times. Until the day she was rushed to the hospital and whisked into emergency brain surgery. A mass was blocking her spinal fluid, basically squishing her brain. What ensued was a torturous six weeks in hospital, with a needle poking out of her back and constant physical pain.

Coming back to school proved to be even more difficult than before her surgery: now she wasn’t only the kid that no one noticed, she was the kid with the shaved head that didn’t want to be noticed. Feeling embarrassed and humiliated by all that she had experienced, Katie began to look for somewhere to fit in, and eventually, the inevitable happened. They accepted her and welcomed her on one condition: she did things their way. Over the course of the year that ensued, Katie’s life became a spiral of drinking, drugs and promiscuity - all to numb the pain that wouldn’t leave her alone. The pain of never being enough.

However, this all came to an abrupt end when she woke up one morning in her own bed, but with a hospital gown and bracelet on - only this time it was due to alcohol poisoning.

The first people she saw when she opened her eyes were her parents, but they refused to look at her. Their treatment of her only seemed to reinforce the lie: she would always fall short of doing anything right. It was a lie, but somehow, when you believe a lie long enough, it can become your version of truth.

Determined to prove everyone’s judgments of her wrong, Katie set out to remove herself from the friends that had helped to drag her into this mess in the first place. It was futile. Threats, abuse, attacks came relentlessly. The only people she had connected with had now turned their backs on her as well.

In a final effort to preserve her life and future, Katie moved out of her parents’ home and in with her aunt. A new school helped to give her a new start on life and eventually helped her to begin to believe that she could come up from all the pain. But it had to be a choice and she had to be willing to see the potential in who she could become.

Life sometimes has a way of tricking us into thinking that this is all there is. When it gets difficult or our circumstances seem to be too much to bear, we can tend to think that this is as good as it’s going to get - end of story. And out of all the things vying for our attention, pain screams the loudest - always. But, like each one of us, Katie was given the choice. Somehow, by grace, she chose to believe, one last time, that she was worth it. She chose to believe, one last time, that the pain didn’t have to define her.

This past summer, Katie led one of our teams on our Hero Holiday in Dominican Republic. There, her life was turned upside down, yet again, as she realized that there is so much that she is capable of doing, if only she is willing to believe. Today, along with her husband, Shane, Katie gives leadership to one of our high school touring teams. This week she will begin to step out onto a stage and share her story: the story of hope.

You can have us in your schools this year! For more information on how to have an Absolute Think Day presentation, email us at info@absolute.org.

“Dum spero, spiro” (Latin) “While I breathe, I hope.”

Humanitarian:

1. having concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people.
2. a person actively engaged in promoting human welfare and social reforms, as a philanthropist.
3. a person who professes ethical or theological humanitarianism.

They are everywhere I look:

They are the Davids and the Frantzos in Haiti. The ones who live and work among the world’s forgotten orphans. Each day, working to make sure there is enough food, safety, love and trust. Together with their wives and the tireless staff that surround them, they work to make sure that hundreds of children are safe from the dangers of slavery, exploitation, starvation and disease. They do it on a budget that is almost inconceivable sometimes in it’s limitations, and they do it with grace and love - always motivated by kindness. They reach out to restaveks, earthquake orphans, street children, and abandoned kids. They are true humanitarians, living out the fullness of the human existence each day.

They are the Garcias in Dominican Republic. The ones who pick up their family and move to a community because they realize there is no other hope for those people to ever be educated and move forward. They recognize the challenges and frustrations, and yet they choose to stay rooted there, believing that hope and compassion can change a community and that education that free them for the future. And they are right. They work hard to build something that will last and will shape the future, and their commitment is not forgotten.

They are the Kru Nams in Thailand, fighting the tide of human traffickers each day, continually working to free stateless children of the bondages of slavery, sexual exploitation and abandonment. Inspiring their fellow workers to be dedicated and always motivated by love and compassion, they work quietly and tirelessly to bring freedom and hope to hundreds of children, one precious life at a time.

They are the Andrews and Dawns in Mexico, selling their possessions and moving to the middle of nowhere because they believed that they could help to shape the future for countless migrant workers in a forgotten corner of the world. As part of the Absolute staff there, they work tirelessly to find families in need of adequate housing and hope. Each day they pour their hearts out and do so with kindness and grace, unknowingly challenging many people to aspire to the same end.

They are the staff I work with, like countless thousands in other organizations around the world, that are motivated not by a pay cheque, but by something much more intrinsic: they are motivated by a passion for change and the compassion to see it happen.

They are the hundreds of incredible people that join us on our Hero Holiday trips, volunteer on our road teams in Canada, and are motivated by love wherever they are. This is what it is to be a humanitarian: to live in the fullness of one’s human experience by living a life motivated by hope. Some of us are specially qualified and trained, some of us are willing to do whatever it takes, all of us are part of a bigger picture that is making a difference.

Thursday, August 18 is World Humanitarian Day. If you are motivated to bring hope and change to the world and are actively doing something about it, then Happy World Humanitarian Day. Have you hugged a humanitarian lately?

“By compassion we make others’ misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.” ~ Thomas Browne, Sr.

Today is Mother’s Day in Thailand, and our team had the incredible experience of sharing it with some of the kids from the children’s home. The children all go to one of four local schools (where they are allowed to attend but not use any of the government subsidies like all of the other children). Often in school, they are referred to as The Poor Burmese Children, or the Foundation kids, or any other litany of hurtful names. Almost all of the children are orphaned or abandoned. Some of them are in the home because their mothers that are too strung out on drugs that they can’t care for them and keep trying to sell them. All of them have a painful story that led them to this place.

However, today was about honoring mothers in Thai society and we had the privilege to come to one of their schools and represent their moms for them, so that they wouldn’t feel left out. Allie was one of the girls on our team who came a represented being a “mother” for the children at their school’s special program. These are her thoughts on the experience:

“Mothers. So many shapes and sizes and colours that there is hardly a simple definition for the word. She is the one who made you the nest inside herself, protected by layers of her own flesh. She is a woman with beliefs that rub off on your own. To scold you when you need it. To praise you when you need it. From a cut on your knee, sealed back together by the needle and thread of her lips, to someone stealing a piece of your heart as she presses your head in the fissure between of her breasts and reminds you to keep breathing. A Mothers life to me was like my grade five science fair on marigolds. They’d nurture us while they stood back and patiently watched as our bones stacked up and our heads popped up from beneath the soil. But now the word that was once so structured seems to have changed, replaced by a new set of eyes instead of the sleep covered ones I had in the early morning as I removed my shoes at the doorway and prepared myself for three hours of non-English speaking chaos. It was my first time seeing the kid’s at school in an environment outside their safety net and I didn’t know what to expect. We waited outside, a fair distance from the school,  until a man dressed in a lint brown suit, sporting a toothy smile and air of great importance waved us to come forward. He ushered us into a room packed with a swarm of mothers old and new, animal calls coming from the throats of adrenaline dosed children in bright dresses and smart high socks barely clinging to their tiny bodies, only competing in volume against the whirring from the tired fans above. We were able to squirm ourselves to a small recess way in the back and as the speeches were given I sat amongst the woman fussing to create masterpieces on the tiny heads of short, black hair, scraped into impossible twists and running sloppy lines of red lipstick to each corner of a moving mouths. Suddenly I couldn’t help but feel like I was part of secret group as I watched the kids I hugged and laughed with and cried for perform with their classmates. It was something I could only describe as pride bursting inside me while their cheeky, plump faces showed signs of concentration on the dance steps and constant distractions of flashes from cameras. For the last couple minutes of the assembly we were called to centre stage. Without looking I knew my white skin had tinged a darker shade, as all eyes looked me over as if I was a duckling thrown into a circle of swans. Though none of it mattered as our kids ran into our arms pinning each one of us with a flower, fake and cheap and absolutely the most wonderful thing I had ever been graced to adorn. I had been
the mother to those children. The one normal childhood experience intheir anything but normal life. The sniffles of runny noses could be heard on either side of me and I squeezed the little tribal girl in my arms harder before she could even clip the pin into place. But while the pin kneaded me under my shirt I didn’t think of the tears stains to come from the children’s glittered cheeks. Nor did I ponder on what their life once was. No, I could just think about the kids mothers still living. The Mothers scrounging around in the filth of humanity, in search to feed their ever starving addictions more important than their own blood. The Mothers who walk out the door completely when their husbands or boyfriends seek the sound of skin meeting skin, who leave unspeakable scars that tag along with them to whatever semblance of a life they fight for. Or the Mothers who missed their children’s make-up caked faces in their school performance, the kiss they didn’t press to the cut on their knee, the sounds from their breaking and healing heart. And I feel sorry for them. That they’d chosen to miss out on something so beautiful. Their children survive on.”

The bridge to get there was made of long strips of thin bamboo, loosely wired together. It was precariously laid across a rushing, muddy stream full of garbage and whatever else you can imagine, and I felt torn between taking in my surroundings and trying to focus on not falling through the bamboo to the river below.

We were there because our Hero Holiday Thailand team was taking a day with a drop-in centre to do some visitation to the families across the Burmese border. We had arrived there on a tuk-tuk, had walked through thick, red muddy fields, and were covered in mud up to our ankles as we inched our way across the tiny bridge. On the other side were small bamboo houses, covered with thatched, patchy roofs and clinging to the small hill along the river’s edge - each of them worse off than the last. The smell of charcoal smoke and grime filled the air. It was the familiar smell of desperate poverty: simultaneously drawing and repulsing you by what it represented.

Stopping at the first house, we dropped off rice for widowed mother of 8 children. Three of her kids were ensnared in the sex industry in the border town we had just come through, one was safe in the children’s home, and the rest were too young or too stoned on weird opiates to be of any use. As she explained how her husband had died in an accident five months earlier, her youngest child sat on her hip, barely a year old. She was dying of cancer and not sure what was going to happen to her family, but the team we were with were working with her to try to find solutions for their situation, and she was confident they would be ok. And now she wanted to show us a family that she felt needed more help in a different way. As we clung to the riverbanks to get to the other house, I was trying to wrap my mind around what she could think was worse than her situation.

Stopping at the entrance to another similar bamboo hut, we entered the back room and were beckoned to sit on the small, straw mat in the centre. A young mother sat there, protectively laying her hand on a small child who was writhing on the floor, her back and body grotesquely bending backwards and forwards as her eyes rolled back and forth. She was incredibly frail, and as she writhed around, she softly hummed to herself, seemingly oblivious to the world around her. Her name was Suzuchu.

Her mother held out pictures to me of a chubby, smiling baby: one of her sitting in a park, one of her perched on a table, laughing. Following those photos, she handed me x-ray images of a brain that was clearly not healthy. Through the translator, she explained that her child had water on her brain and spine and that she was dying. She was six years old, but she was clearly not going to grow past where she was when she contracted the disease - whether from a water parasite or some othe viral infection. But she was the centre of her mother’s world, and the look of tenderness on that mother’s face was unsurpassed in beauty. This child was beautiful and this woman’s world was in her arms at that moment. I looked past her to the other mother and saw her holding her own baby close, realizing that to that woman - and many women around the world - a far worse fate than dying herself was to helplessly watch her own children suffer.

“Is there anything we can bring you to help your child?” I asked, choking on my own words.

After a brief pause, she smiled shyly and said, “Yes, maybe one thing.”

Turning to the tin on the rickety shelf behind her, she pulled out a small foil packet. “This is special milk for my daughter. Could I have a few more?” As I stared at it, the packet looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place where I had seen it before. She handed it to our translator.

Smiling, he said to us quietly, “This is Coffee Mate. I think we can find this and something better for her child.” She smiled in thanks, not understanding the implications.

Earlier that morning, in my hotel dining room, as I quickly grabbed a cup of coffee, I had used the same package of Coffee Mate as I had lamented to myself that there was no fresh milk. Now I sat on this mat with a mother who believed that this same package could help sustain her daughter. We sat inches apart, but we lived in worlds that were miles apart.

I don’t know who originally gave this mother Coffee Mate for her child, but we went out and got her more - as well as nutritional supplements and formula. Will Coffee Mate change her world? Not really. But consistent love, compassion and support can help ease the pain and point to a future, and that is what the staff from the outreach centre do every day in that community. It was the least we could do for a mother who taught us about love on that bamboo mat, as her dying daugher sang to her.

We are in Thailand right now with our Hero Holiday team. As we are out on our adventures and working in the hot sun, we are each learning about how incredible compassion can be and realizing that we all play a part to end the cycle of poverty. You can join us on our next trip here! Check out www.absolute.org for more details.

“Do all things with love.” ~ Og Mandino