plantingpeace.org | Creating Change
here is an old saying, “Ignorance is bliss.” There is truth to that statement but only as long as you continue to live in ignorance, ignoring the death and devastation around you. I used to be a victim of this statement, doing whatever I could to shield myself from the problems and issues happening beyond my borders, or even my front door. That is until I stumbled across the Planting Peace website this Fall… and it wrecked my world, untying the blindfold and revealing statistics like: 30,000 people die everyday from starvation; 20,000 a day from water related issues; and 150,000,000 million children are living on the streets worldwide, to name only a few. I was shocked… and crushed in the light of my selfishness. The years that I have wasted, the money I have thrown away, the comfortable life that I have grown accustom to living. But guilt never solves anything, it only paralyzes us, making us further useless. So I turned regret into conviction and decided that I had to become part of the change.
How much you choose to give, or how you decide to act is up to you, but it is amazing the things that we use and consume everyday that can be cut back or even cut out of our lives with little to no affect on our quality of life yet will immensely impact the quality of life for someone that has nothing. I used to waste nearly a hundred dollars a month on things like soda, coffee, candy, etc. Things that would probably better me if I lived without them. Things that were keeping me from changing, even saving, lives. Even a little (like 2 cents, which is the cost of deworming one child) goes a long way. Planting Peace makes helping very accessible. Your group of friends can sponsor an orphanage for the price of an average rent, or you can deworm over a thousand children for fifteen dollars. So I started to ask myself what I could sacrifice and go without, and then a new revelation hit me. It wasn’t that ignorance was truly ever bliss, rather just a mask hiding the true joy and fulfillment found in helping another human-being.
Planting Peace started because the hard work and determination of someone our age living in a homeless shelter for years in order to make the payments of his orphanages overseas. Through years of hard work and relentless determination, Aaron Jackson now has a thriving non-profit that is saving the lives of millions every year, and makes it easy for us to get involved. I got a chance last month to speak with Aaron on the phone about the mission of Planting Peace, what we can do to help and some tips on getting involved and staying involved in the crisis going on in Haiti (where he has dedicated the last half of a decade of his life to).
Aaron, Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Tell us a little about how Planting Peace got started?
Aaron Jackson: Planting Peace was started roughly six years ago. I was living in South Florida at the time working at a homeless shelter and as I was driving in one day. There was a broadcast on the radio about a famine going on in Haiti. Since I worked at the homeless shelter I had access to food for really cheap, one ton of food for $300. So it just kind of clicked in my head to buy some food for them from this local food bank. I was a little naïve but that was my simple idea and it wasn’t my own charity yet but my girlfriend and I at the time started sending out between 1,000 and 2,000 letters asking churches to sponsor one ton of food. Only one church out of Alabama sponsored two tons of food. I had a little over $600 I needed to do something with but then I found out in the middle of it that the government of Haiti wanted to charge me a big tax. I think it was like $20,000 to bring in 100 tons of food. So I was just kind of doing some research and I found a charity out there called Map International and they’re pretty well known. This charity gets medication donated to them and they sell it out at a discounted rate. So I purchased the medication and a good friend of mine who is a doctor flew down and we started treating people. After that I came back and quit the homeless shelter and started Planting Peace.
“We were dead broke in the countryside and I asked how much it cost to deworm a kid and John said it was $20 to send a kid to the doctor to get dewormed and buy the medication. So that night I was going through my pants pockets and I found a twenty dollar bill so I pretended I never came across it and took a kid to be dewormed and John sent him off to
the hospital.”
You started out deworming children in Haiti and Planting Peace just kind of branched out from there, correct?
AJ: Well our deworming kind of started a different way. We were building a school in the countryside and while we were out there I asked John, the co-founder of the charity I started Planting Peace with, why kids have those big bellies. And he said its because there’s worms in their bellies. I had never heard of that before and it obviously grossed me out. Since we were a brand new charity and didn’t have any money, (my girlfriend at the time actually donated the money to build the school that we were building.) We were dead broke in the countryside and I asked how much it cost to deworm a kid and John said it was $20 to send a kid to the doctor to get dewormed and buy the medication. So that night I was going through my pants pockets and I found a twenty dollar bill so I pretended I never came across it and took a kid to be dewormed and John sent him off to the hospital. We left the next morning and we were so broke we actually had to hitchhike from the countryside back into the capital. The mother of the child ran up to me right before we left and said to John and me that the kid would have died if we hadn’t been taking him. That really hit me. I came back to the states and I started Googling around and found a guy who could help me get deworming medication for five cents a treatment. So I purchased the medication. I didn’t have much money at the time so I purchased 20,000 treatments off of him which I could sneak into Haiti in my book bag. So that’s kind of how it’s grown to just giving millions of doses all around the world.
What are some of the other countries that you guys work in?
AJ: We work in Sudan, we are about to start working in Kenya, [we also work in] North Korea, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. Those are our main countries.
What are some other projects you guys are working on right now?
AJ: We have four orphanages in Haiti and a school there. Even though plans have a changed a bit with what is going on in Haiti, we planned on opening some orphanages in India at the end of the month. India has more homeless kids than anywhere in the world so we’re going to try and start tackling that a little bit. Our goal is to plant a million trees every month by next year in Haiti. We also buy up rain forest land in Peru and we just put it into a land trust.
I’m blown away by how cheap it is for us to get involved. Like $18 a month to sponsor an orphaned child, $8 to conserve an acre of the rain forest, $10 to deworm over 600 people etc.
AJ: Especially with Planting Peace, we don’t really have any overhead. We’re just kind of fortunate we don’t really have to spend money on fundraisers because people send us money and believe in what we do. No one gets paid in the organization for the most part and up until a couple months ago our offices were being sponsored by another charity. We try to keep it really grassroots. The charity itself has only done two fundraisers, one of which was a complete failure which no one showed up to. Another one was a concert that we put together and only raised a few thousand dollars. You might go online and read about Planting Peace fundraisers but those weren’t put together by us.
I heard that in the early years of Planting Peace you were actually living in a homeless shelter so you could afford to run these different orphanages.
AJ: Yeah, I lived in a homeless shelter for about four and a half years to get the programs going. It was tough to raise money at first. I suck at asking people for money especially at the very beginning when you don’t have anything to show for it. I was living in South Florida and everyone there was already helping Haiti so it was a struggle to break into being a Haiti organization. Some people might say because there is a big Haitian population [In South Florida], but at the same time you knock on a church’s door and they say they already donate to this organization so it was a tough field to break into. It might have been easier trying it in a place where no one knows where Haiti is (laughs).
Yeah it’s sad but true. The other day I had to show someone where Haiti is on the map.
AJ: Yeah it’s sad that it takes something like this for the world to respond. It’s a beautiful thing but it’s sad. A reporter asked me yesterday “Do you think more kids will have infections now?” And it’s like, not really they already have the worst water in the world. Before the earthquake hit they were drinking out of a puddle and they still will now. Another one said something about “Do you think that it’s a story that there is no electricity?” Electricity not coming on is a part of every day life. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood [in Haiti] and we’re lucky if we get power to those homes two hours a day. Living in the dark is something that they’re used to. We think [in the United States] that there is like one star out there but there are literally trillions.
Is Planting Peace doing something to help with this earthquake?
AJ: Yes right now we’re raising funds, its monetary donations so we can focus on food and water that is already over there. It’s going to be very difficult to get things into the country. History tends to repeat itself so there is aid in the ports from a year ago that is still stuck there so I think on some level that people should send physical items but on another level it could get stuck somewhere and never reach the intended destination, but we’re trying to purchase water. I don’t know if the price has skyrocketed or not but on a normal day water is about 80 cents per five gallons of clean water. We can purchase water on the street where there is clean water and deliver that to people. Port-Au-Prince was hit very hard and there were towns that were not, so I think we can go to those communities and try to rent out homes that haven’t been affected. Homes are not that expensive. I think the best thing to do is find houses and put 2 to 3 families in each house. Bringing in aid to Haiti takes all kinds of different charities. Red Cross is doing amazing things but they offer one type of service. It’s an amazing service, don’t get me wrong, but you need other charities to bring in their method of attack. Red Cross would never go rent out houses like I would. At the same time, we won’t offer things that they’re offering. Its very important that a lot of other organizations get involved.
And you guys have a donations link on your site at Plantingpeace.org.
AJ: Yes. You can find our mailing address [at our site] and send in a check or donate online.
What would you say to someone who has dreams or convictions of a similar project but needs that final shove of confidence?
AJ: (Laughs) I think it’s very important for people to know that when you go out there and because your cause is worthy that people will connect to it right away. You say you’re going to go out and help starving children. You’re going to have to see a thousand people say no to you before one person says yes. I think what people really need to realize is that you have to just stay with it like the world is testing you and you have to survive the craziness. You have to earn your way. I always say that if opening orphanages were easy everyone would have one. Its easy in one sense but at the same time I see people get shot down again and again. You just have to keep working with it and then when one thing starts flowing, other things start flowing. One girl who we’re trying to open up an orphanage in India with, she runs a charity and has been trying to get money to open an orphanage. She has been writing to her friends and family and getting back $5, if anything at all, what do you do with that? We came in and said “Okay, we’ll pay for all the opening cost and we’ll do like 70% of the cost” and because of that she raised more money in the next two days than she did the whole year. People understand that it takes money to start orphanages. They want to be a part of something that’s moving. So just keep with it.
Please go visit www.plantingpeace.org for more statistics, contact information and ways to donate and get involved. We must be the change that we wish to see in the world. It starts with you and me asking ourselves what we can do to love more.
