Home to Generations

Posted by Bronson Enriquez in NEED Magazine, Uncategorized Edit

Photos | Bronson Enriquez

I traveled to Haiti with regular contributor Paul Corbit Brown to shoot a story for the magazine. We were flying into the capitol city of Port au Prince, and spending the first night at a boy’s home. I figured it would be a guest house behind an orphanage or something. Just a place to sleep before heading north to Gonaives, where the organization we were covering helps people affected by Hurricane Gustav.

I didn’t expect the beautiful home we found on arrival. The building itself is gorgeous, and all of the walls inside are decorated with fantastic artwork. A miscommunication regarding travel arrangements resulted in our spending two extra days there. Despite the time crunch this created, I am grateful for the opportunity to get to know more about this wonderful place.

The Giving Trip

Posted by Jan Hanson

In early January 2007, I boarded an early morning flight from Minneapolis. While boarding the plane bound for Lima, a woman asked in broken English where I was going. I told her I was serving as an international volunteer in Ayacucho, Peru. She said, “It’s very poor there.” That is precisely why I chose to spend two weeks working with orphans in Ayacucho, and it was a trip of a lifetime.

My volunteer work with children in Peru was simple. It involved being taken by the hand of a small boy and sitting close on the dirt playground while we wrote our names and English words in his school notebook and read them out loud. I spent other days cutting out paper dolls for amazed eight year olds at a girls orphanage, reading Mi Papa es un Gigante to toddlers, teaching basic English to teenagers and even piling 20-30 pound blocks to build a fence around a school so children could have a safe place to play. True joy filled my heart as I thought about the joy these simple gestures would bring to children.

That experience galvanized a passion inside me. I realized that my professional career of marketing financial services for a nationwide banking company was no longer satisfying. Instead, spending my life and talents doing something to make the lives of orphans and poor children just a little bit brighter was what I was built to do.

Months after volunteering in Peru, I began to shape a plan for a nonprofit called 200 Orphanages Worldwide Inc. I built a web-based nonprofit that would serve as a forum for existing organizations worldwide to raise awareness and funds for building projects that serve orphans.