Notice. Act. Teach. Sacrifice. Persist.
Not because we believe we can save everyone. Because the person in front of us is someone.
Read the stories ↓The choice
I could learn to walk past suffering. But only by killing the part of me that notices. And then I would no longer be me.
My students said one person could not change the world. I changed one number on the board. One small change altered the entire answer. Changing just one changes everything.
Danny, China
Danny failed the Zhong Kao, China’s high school entrance exam. His mother could not read. His father had completed sixth grade. Reaching ninth grade was already progress.
When we met three years later, Danny was eighteen, selling sugar cane on the street and earning about $1.25 a day. He became the first student in 1,000 Days to Educated.
Within a year, he learned English. Later he entered Miami Dade College and made the Dean’s List in both semesters of his first year. Then he left school, having finally learned the lesson beneath all the lessons: you do not have to attend school to keep learning. You do have to begin. And you cannot quit.
Today he is back in China, still learning, raising two children who are receiving the education he never had.
Danny’s real success is not where he landed. It is where his children started.
Greg, China
I met Greg on July 30, 2007, my birthday. He was outside digging through garbage cans, collecting plastic bottles. He had lost his job because cataracts were taking his sight, though he did not know what to call them. He only knew he was going blind.
He was not begging. He was not stealing. He was doing the only work he still could. I brought him home. He cleaned himself up, and a few days later we began the medical visits that led to his surgery.
Paying for that surgery was my honor. Greg never asked for anything. He wanted to see so that he could work. Mission accomplished.
A future can disappear quietly. Sometimes saving it begins with simply refusing to look away.
1,000 Days to Educated, Cambodia
They needed the chance to discover what they could do.
At first, the boys thought the idea was crazy. The ground was rough, the work was enormous, and they were certain the result would be no good.
Then they built what we believed was the best soccer field in Cambodia. They did not merely inherit a better field. They made it. The real thing they built was proof.
A different kind of lesson
We cleaned an old wooden rice mill. Nobody assigned the work. No prize waited at the end. We saw something useful that needed doing, and we had the hands to do it.
The lesson was all gold: hard work, the joy of achievement, and helping others simply because we could.
Every student came from a home without electricity. They attended public school four hours a day, five days a week. None of them, from grades six through eleven, knew the multiplication tables. Ten minutes a day for two weeks was enough for every one of them to master them. They were never incapable. They had simply never been properly taught.
They did not need a lecture about perseverance. They needed a mountain. Confidence came after accomplishment, not before it.
Michael, J.R., and Jay, Cambodia
The clothes in that bag, plus what he was wearing, were all the clothes he owned. Later I saw another young man wearing Michael’s shirt.
Michael did not give from his abundance. He gave from his need. He learned that generosity from his parents. I only had the privilege of praising it.
Jay had wandered about five miles from home. When J.R. and I found him, he was severely dehydrated and unable to care for himself. His mother had been searching for him.
The language used to describe Jay has changed. The reality has not. He did not need better language that day. He needed someone to stop and help.
Phoenix, China
I first saw Phoenix lying face down on a sidewalk in Shenzhen. People stepped over him. I’m ashamed to admit, but it’s important that I do, that I also walked around him. He was there the next day, and the next. On the fifth day, a storm was moving in. He was huddled against a planter, shivering.
I was afraid to approach him. He was almost catatonic and could not communicate. When I finally touched his shoulder, expecting a frightened or violent reaction, he hardly moved. I could see that he was kind. Somehow, he could see the same in me.
We brought him home. We bathed him, fed him, cared for him through the night, and walked with him during the day. He learned to use a spoon and wipe a table. He grew strong enough to stand and walk short distances.
He was there. He had always been there. He simply had no way to tell anyone.
About two weeks later, Phoenix was sitting on the little sofa in my office while rain hammered against the building. I began to think about all the years he had lived outside, unable to protect or explain himself. I started to cry.
I walked over and stroked his hair. The tears were still on my cheeks. Phoenix looked at me, and then a single tear ran down his.
Not sobbing. One tear. But it told me everything. He felt the pain, the fear, the years of being ignored, and the kindness now surrounding him. His limitations changed what he could express. They did not change what he was.
Another evening, all the boys were crowded into the living room for a movie. The only place left was beside me. Phoenix stood there and looked at me. He could not ask. I nodded. He sat down, and joy spread across his face. He belonged. He was loved.
I tried to adopt Phoenix. That effort ended with my detention, deportation, and permanent exclusion from China. Phoenix died on April 14, 2014, before we could be reunited. His life was not a lesson placed here for our benefit. It was a life, fully human, deserving of dignity, belonging, and love.
Sergio
I became an altruistic, non-directed kidney donor. I knew nothing about the person who would receive it until after surgery.
His name was Sergio. He was thirty-two, a father of three. His kidneys had not produced urine for more than two years. He had been on dialysis for five.
The transplant worked. The kidney began functioning during surgery, and Sergio left dialysis behind. This photograph was taken one year later.
Six months after that, Sergio died. He became gravely ill with a heart virus and went from healthy to gone in less than twelve hours. His immune-suppressing treatment may have increased his vulnerability, though no simple sentence can explain such a loss.
A gift is not made meaningless because it could not defeat death forever.
I wish I had a hundred spare kidneys. I would donate every one of them. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. No pun intended.
The programs on film
The photographs tell part of the story. These films preserve the movement, voices, work, and ordinary days around them.
A musical photo montage from the program. YouTube requires this film to be watched on YouTube.
Another view of the work and the students.
The answer
I cannot help everyone. But that has never been a reason to help no one.