Skip to main content

Haiti Version 1.5

This Haiti thing is turning out to be bigger than just a single week-long trip. For a number of us, it's led to shifts in perspective, new directions of the heart, all of which differ according to how Haiti influenced us but all of which center on Haiti's varied needs.

First, a team plans to go to the same orphanage again next summer at about the same time.

Second, a member of the team is starting a fundraiser to send instruments to that orphanage. It already has a name, a nonprofit to receive contributions made to it, and even a Facebook group. A lot of people from the sending church, especially, want to help, a fundraiser at a local restaurant is in the process of being set up, and someone has already given a keyboard for the purpose.

Third, the team is making three separate presentations about our trip to the church that sent us. It's like we're ambassadors for the orphanage at Haiti.

Fourth, I talked to a fellow teacher today about the trip. She wanted to involve the students at my school (and the local high school) by setting up another trip to the same orphanage near the time our team plans to go. This comes after one of the co-leaders of the trip mentioned that my church should also go.

Fifth, there will soon be an article in our local newspaper about the trip.

It's like the sphere of influence has exploded to involve not just the eleven people who went there, but a whole community. Vision is contagious.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...

Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time ...