I HAD PLANNED FOR CHRISTMAS, 2004, TO BE A QUIET PERIOD OF REST after a hectic year. My travels during the year had taken me as far afield as Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and Ethiopia, and I had logged over 100,000 flight miles. It was time for a break, and my goal was to travel for pleasure rather than for work.
To celebrate the five-year anniversary of the official start of Room to Read, I did something quite unusual for me—scheduling an entire week of holiday. The last half decade was a blur of nonstop meetings, back-to-back phone calls, and mountains of e-mails to respond to at the end of each day. Erin and I had mapped out an aggressive growth plan for 2005, so my hope was to take some time off to catch my breath and return to the office ready to dive into the new year.
I first spent three days with friends at their beach house in San Diego, running at water’s edge at low tide, cycling up the coast trailing far behind my friend Julie (a professional bike guide), and enjoying some of the best fajitas the city had to offer. Hearing Christmas carols while sitting in bright sunlight at an outdoor beach café was an odd, but welcome, juxtaposition. After San Diego, I headed to my sister’s house, just outside of Boulder, Colorado. My parents were also planning to be there, so I had downloaded several gigabytes worth of photos of our new projects to share with them.
My first few days with the family were peaceful, and I counseled myself to stay off e-mail and enjoy a real vacation. I fed my passion for the outdoors with more hikes, long bike rides, and lazy afternoons with my niece and nephew getting wiped out in games of Uno. Unwound, relaxed, and ready to peel back another layer of stress, I received an alarming call from a friend. A tsunami had hit Asia, leaving a massive cut of destruction in its path.
After being totally switched off, I switched back on.
On CNN, BBC, and MSNBC were images of destruction that appeared apocalyptic. I knew that 24-hour news channels could sometimes overdo the “gloom and doom” thing, but there was no denying the images that were being broadcast hour after hour from Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other countries unfortunate enough to be situated along the Indian Ocean.
Thousands had been killed and the number was expected to go much higher. Entire villages had been washed into the ocean. Nothing had been spared—not private homes, nor hospitals, nor schools. Upon hearing that last reference, my mind began racing. Hundreds of schools wiped out. Thousands of orphans survived, but had few adults to help them rebuild their lives. Who would construct new schools and help the children get back to a normal life? As if to answer that question, I speed-dialed United Airlines from my cell phone to book an early flight home to San Francisco. The vacation was over.
THE NEXT DAY, DECEMBER 29, I LOGGED ON TO THE WIRELESS INTERNET at Denver’s airport from my departure gate. I fired off an e-mail to my friend Bob Uppington, who ran a Sri Lanka–based educational charity called Shiva. I hoped he was safe and knew that if he was, then he’d be a good source of information from ground zero of the tsunami. The devastation relayed by the television networks seemed incomprehensible to me, and I hoped to get an unfiltered report from someone I trusted inside the country.
Several hours later I returned to a quiet office. We had a skeletal staff on board to handle the usual rush of end-of-year donations, and they seemed surprised to see me. I explained my intention to round up a few friends who would write checks to help out in the rebuilding of schools in tsunami-affected areas. Before I could send a single mail, I noticed that Bob had already replied to my message from the Denver airport. As I gazed out at the Golden Gate Bridge framed against a perfect and calm cobalt sky, I took a deep breath and opened his mail.
The news was even worse than I had feared. Preliminary estimates were that at least 200 villages had lost their schools in Sri Lanka alone. With the devastation in Indonesia of at least equal scale, one could picture a world that suddenly had a deficit of at least 500 schools. We also knew that the count would go higher once communities whose roads had been washed away could finally be reached.
Bob was planning to load a rented van full of food, water, and medical supplies and depart the next morning for Ampara District—an area on the east coast that had suffered particularly heavily. I wished him luck on his journey and encouraged him to “not be shy” in committing to school reconstruction projects. I knew that Shiva’s budget was much smaller than ours and did not want him to feel constrained. If he visited ten villages that had lost schools, I did not want him to have to choose only one or two of them for support. So I typed frantically, hoping the message would reach him before he left for Ampara: “If you visit a village that has lost its school, tell them that we will find the money to rebuild it. Repeat as necessary. You have my commitment that I will help out as much as I can with funding.”
It felt like the early days of Room to Read, when I had no idea where the money would come from, but knew in my gut that we would not rest until we were able to help these communities. And just like in the early days, I brewed a pot of coffee to prepare for a late night of e-mailing and calling potential donors to ask for their support.
MY CELL PHONE RANG EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. MICHELE, OUR NEWLY hired PR consultant, was calling with good news. She had managed to book me on CNN to talk about our plans to help rebuild schools in Sri Lanka.
I was a bit taken aback. I asked Michele how CNN had even heard we were doing work in Sri Lanka.
“I called them yesterday after getting your e-mail asking for leads on wealthy people who might be able to donate. I know a producer there, so I called and pitched you. They need Asia experts to discuss the impact of the tsunami, and the future of these communities. Once I pitched you, they said it sounded like a great fit, so you’ll be on tomorrow or the day after for a live interview.”
I protested that I was in way over my head on this one. I did not want to go on television in front of millions of people to talk about the tsunami when our plans were really vague. I had never even been to Sri Lanka and could not yet name a single village that we planned to help. My “war chest” for Sri Lanka was at a paltry $12,000. Indeed, were they to spring a surprise spelling bee on me, I might not even be able to spell tsunami correctly.
Michele quickly set the record straight for me. In her laconic yet firm Texas accent, she filled me in on the way things were:
“You covered the Asia region for Microsoft for five years, and you’ve run an Asia-focused charity for five years that has built more libraries than any charity on the continent. Like it or not, you’re now an Asia expert, and this is a really good opportunity for you to tell millions of people about the great work your team is doing.”
THE EVENING OF JANUARY 1 MIGHT BE THE IDEAL TIME TO APPEAR ON CNN. After a big night of partying the evening before, many millions are curled up on their sofas, remote control in one hand and cordless phone doing the dial-a-pizza thing in the other. Viewership tends to be much higher as a result, and the tsunami was still generating large spikes in CNN’s ratings.
Knowing this made me even more nervous. I called my friend and neighbor Kim to ask if she’d pour me a Scotch to help calm my nerves. In just over an hour, over a million people would be listening to me describe a strategy that was, to put it mildly, embryonic and unformed. Room to Read had no people on the ground, no project sites identified, and at the time only a small amount of capital pledged.
Kim calmed me down. We talked through some potential questions as I sipped the Macallan on the rocks. She gave me a big hug of support as I walked out to the waiting CNN-sponsored Town Car.
Ten minutes later, we arrived at a San Francisco television studio darkened by holiday inactivity. The sole employee, a cameraman whose vacation had been interrupted by the randomness of news events, explained how things worked. Much to my surprise, I would not actually be able to see the CNN anchor during our interview. I would, instead, be staring at a wall. Although split-screen television interviews make it look as if the two talking heads were having a chat with the usual visual cues, the reality is quite different. My only connection to the anchor in Atlanta was an earpiece through which the questions would be delivered.
One other secret was soon revealed. The cameraman asked for my help in changing the large photograph that would appear as the backdrop behind me. A six-by-four-foot daytime cityscape of San Francisco was taken down, and in its place we hung one of the city postsunset, the lights of the Transamerica Pyramid twinkling in the dusk. You’d never know from watching the tape of my CNN appearance that I was not somewhere outside, a roof deck perhaps, with the city’s buildings right behind me. In reality, five different backdrops were available, including one of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Three minutes to air.” My musings were interrupted and I scrambled to take my seat and get the earpiece ready. Carol Lin, the anchor, came on to introduce herself and said that we’d be on in sixty seconds. The next four minutes flew by too quickly for me to be nervous. Carol started by asking me about why I started Room to Read, and I breathed a sigh of relief that we were starting with an easy question to answer. We next discussed our plans for Sri Lanka, and when I thought we might be able to get started. The producers were then kind enough to point viewers to our Web site to make donations.
It was all over even before it began.
Within three seconds, my cell phone rang, with friends from Seattle saying how shocked they were to see my face on CNN. They also said that I needed a better choice of tie, but I had to hang up as Erin was calling on the other line. She and her husband were also surprised, and she said I had done really well. My phone continued to ring throughout the night; this was only a harbinger of things to come.
For the next several weeks every cell phone, landline, and fax machine in the office was in hyperdrive. An overwhelming number of CNN viewers wanted to know how they could help. Old friends called to say they were running fund drives within their companies. The angelic daughters of my good friends John and Lauren took advantage of a cold Seattle Saturday by opening a “Hot Chocolate for Tsunami Relief” stand. A high school student in Bethesda, Maryland, was planning a “Battle of the Bands” fund-raising event. Another friend e-mailed to say that she was putting Room to Read on the home page of her company, shopping.com, one of the most heavily trafficked electronic-commerce sites, and that they would be matching the first $25,000 of donations to Room to Read.
My favorite creative idea came from Parkgate, a Montessori primary school in London. Catherine, the energetic founder and head-mistress of the school, called to say that her students had invented a new fund-raising technique. They offered their parents the opportunity to pay for what they called the Sponsored Silence. For £10 per hour, the parents could basically hit the Mute button on their children for the evening. Sales of this new luxury item were quite robust. I laughed as I thought about these kids having a much higher value per sale than my sailboat paintings.
We were blown away by the enthusiasm to help us get started in Sri Lanka, and also by the creativity shown by students. Children can be natural fund-raisers, and very entrepreneurial, if given the freedom to think creatively. I think they were also motivated because they would be helping other children to return to school.
The students would continue to inspire us in the days ahead. They were just getting started.
MEANWHILE, THE TEAM AT CNN HAD BEEN HAPPY WITH THE INTERVIEW and offered me a second appearance—this time on CNN Headline News. This promised even more exposure than the original interview, since the one-hour Headline News program was placed “into rotation” for six consecutive hours. Knowing that Kara, our office manager, was being overwhelmed with calls, I asked for her permission before saying yes. Fortunately, she had the interest of Sri Lankan kids at heart and said she’d work as many hours as necessary to handle the call volume.
I was more at ease for the second appearance, and as predicted, the multiple showings of the interview led to an even higher volume of calls. I walked into our office and noticed four employees talking on the phone, all frequently invoking words like schools, tsunami, and Sri Lanka. Our office felt like the Jerry Lewis telethon. I took as many of the calls as I could to help out and was moved by the spirit of generosity and the desire for immediate action. My friend Catherine called from London to say that instead of gifts for her upcoming birthday, she was requesting checks for Room to Read’s Sri Lanka program. Julie Trell, a long-lost friend who now worked for the salesforce.com foundation, told me over the phone that her company would be matching any donations made through their site to Room to Read, even if the money came from someone who was not an employee and not a customer. I e-mailed this news to Steve, a longtime supporter from New York, and he immediately made a $25,000 donation.
In between juggling calls with teachers, parents, and donors, I welcomed Bella, our newest employee, to the team. She had been working for us part-time and starting today was transitioning to a full-time role in fund-raising. Having just returned from a quiet ski holiday in Whistler, she was a bit taken aback by the noise of the ringing phones and asked what was happening.
“Uh…well, while you were gone, we launched Room to Read Sri Lanka.”
“No way.”
“Yes, believe it or not, we did. And here’s a stack of phone messages to prove it. Kara has been on the phone constantly, and every time she hangs up there are two messages that were left during the last call. We’ll need to get you started immediately in giving direction to all the people who want to donate or raise funds.”
“I can’t believe it. I go away for seven days, and while I am gone, you guys launch a country! I guess I didn’t have to worry about my transition.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was afraid that transitioning from the equity markets to Room to Read would mean that I’d have to deal with a slower pace. You’ve nixed that worry.”
THE NEXT CALL WAS FROM MY FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR KIM, ASKING WHAT she could do to help with the deluge. I proposed that she and her son’s nanny, a hardworking 20-year-old named Melanie, spend the weekend in the office with me. We had over 100 schools requesting that we send them brochures and documentary DVDs, and an equal number of parents and teachers who had ideas for fund-raising campaigns, but who wanted feedback and needed to have their questions answered. So over the weekend, Kim, Melanie, Kim’s 18-month-old son, Baker, and her black Labrador, Pakse, joined me in the office.
One of Kim’s first calls was to the Rasch family in Maryland. Their ten-year-old, Jacob, together with his twelve-year-old Boston-based cousins, had designed a “tsunami wristband.” Hoping to capitalize on Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong bracelets, Jacob, David, and Danielle had designed a three-color band (blue for sky and water, yellow for sun, green for earth) with the words “Rebuild. Restore. Renewal—Tsunami Relief 2005.” Their goal was to get the bands produced for less than $1, sell them for $3, and donate the profit to Room to Read. The three cousins had been on a joint family holiday in Miami on December 26 and had leapt into action at a speed that would have made any venture capitalist proud.
The cousins were initially driven to help but were not sure what to do. Jacob later told us, “We were watching CNN and seeing all the terrible things. We couldn’t bear to watch it. We decided that we were going to make an effort [to help]. We didn’t know what, we didn’t know how, but we knew we were going to do something.” Within a day, they had their moneymaking idea and by the next evening their design concepts were being faxed from Miami to a wristband producer in Guangzhou, China.
They planned to place an initial order for 5,000 bands, which would produce $10,000 of profits. I asked Kim to call both sets of parents to ask if they’d be willing to do PR. To me, this initiative seemed to have all the perfect elements for a good press story—the tsunami, a positive response to it, youthful zeal, entrepreneurship, and a new and timely twist on the wristband craze. The parents immediately gave us their approval. When Kim said they must be proud of their children, they immediately shared credit with the teachers, the principal, and other parents.
I got Michele, our PR person, on the phone as soon as we had the green light. Because the cousins were in Boston and in Maryland, we decided to aim for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. “Do you think you can get one of them?” I asked. Michele, in her understated but confident manner, informed me that she was confident that she could deliver both.
Within three days, the story of the entrepreneurial cousins ran in both newspapers. Now it was their turn to experience life as a call center. Schools up and down the East Coast were ringing to ask if they could place an order for tsunami bands. The request to the manufacturer was upped from 5,000 to 10,000, then 20,000, then 25,000 then 40,000, and still the phone kept ringing. An e-mail address—tsunamibands@aol.com—was set up. This in-box was soon clogged with over 200 messages from as far away as Hawaii and England. Soon the orders ran above 70,000 units. The hottest fashion trend among teenagers had been designed in less than 24 hours by three cousins not yet in their teens.
MEANWHILE, I WAS RUNNING AT A PACE EMULATING THAT OF THE cousins. On January 10 I hopped on Singapore Airlines flight #1, the midnight departure from San Francisco to Hong Kong. I had planned a round-the-world trip to gain media attention, and donor commitments, with stops planned in Hong Kong, Singapore, Zurich, and London. My board of directors, worried that I was burning out after working through the holidays nonstop, generously upgraded me to business class, on the theory that at least this way I’d get some sleep. Within minutes of takeoff my heavy head fell backward, and slumber overtook me for 12 hours of the 14-hour flight.
The board’s decision proved to be prescient, as the blur of activity awaiting me in Hong Kong required me to have restored energy. Edelman, one of the world’s leading PR agencies, had taken us on as a pro bono client and had overachieved by booking us three newspaper, one magazine, and two television interviews. In between, I took a phone call from a family foundation that wanted to donate $50,000 toward the rebuilding, and over a breakfast meeting a Hong Kong company chipped in $100,000.
But the most important meeting of the trip lay ahead, in Singapore, even though I did not yet realize it. Edelman’s Singapore office had set up additional media interviews, and one of them proved important for our nascent efforts in Sri Lanka. The journalist writing the story, Suba Sivakumaran, told me that she admired our efforts to rebuild schools in the aftermath of the tsunami as she herself was originally from Sri Lanka. She then let slip an important piece of information—she was planning to take time off from work to return there as a volunteer and wanted to find a group with which she could make a difference.
I pounced. I encouraged her not to make any commitments until she’d talked to us about helping to get Room to Read off the ground. The tables quickly turned, as I went from interviewee to interviewer. She answered my questions about her background. Her family had left Sri Lanka shortly after she was born, due to political violence. They had emigrated to Australia, and after finishing high school she left for the UK to study at the London School of Economics. She then took an analyst position with Morgan Stanley and was now “killing time” before starting graduate school in the fall. She was obviously smart, as Columbia, Georgetown, and Berkeley were all competing for her with scholarship offers.
And what could I offer her? An unpaid position with an organization she had known for all of 45 minutes, that had yet to hire its first employee in Sri Lanka? And that was leaving out that we did not yet have a business license to work there, had zero contacts in the Ministry of Education, and had a headquarters that would truly be halfway around the globe.
What the heck, I thought, launching my pitch: “Look, I think you should talk to Erin, our chief operating officer, about getting involved with Room to Read in Sri Lanka. We need somebody to go there as soon as possible to represent us. We’re currently working through Shiva, an NGO partner, but we need to have oversight on the ground and find other groups with whom we can forge relationships. I’ll admit up front that we don’t yet know what we are doing, but hopefully that will make it all the more alluring to you. We are not going to tell you what to do; we are instead going to ask you to figure it out. If you want a chance to help Sri Lanka, this could be it. We have an extraordinary amount of resources flowing in, so you will not be constrained in thinking big. And we have amazing teams in India and Nepal who will be close by, so they can mentor you along with Erin and the team in San Francisco. Think about it, okay, and I’ll e-mail you later today and introduce you to Erin.”
With that, Jason from Edelman was dragging me away from the coffee shop, on toward an interview at CNBC.
Erin made the call. She was impressed. Within a week, Suba was winging her way northwest to take up the unpaid position of interim country director for Room to Read Sri Lanka. Within a month, she had opened an office, fitted out a book warehouse, and hired our first staff.
MUCH OF OUR ORGANIZATION’S ETHOS AND VALUES CAN BE SEEN IN OUR initial response to the tsunami. True entrepreneurs are not afraid to declare to the world that they are going to fill a market gap or offer a new product or service, even if they are not yet entirely sure how they are going to do so. They simply take the leap.
In our case, the Room to Read team decided that if schools had been destroyed, then of course we most certainly had to determine a way to rebuild them. Did we know our exact strategy the day I went on CNN? No. But sometimes if you wait until you have your entire plan figured out and buttoned-up, the world will have moved on and passed you by.
The other important lesson is that once we declared a bold goal, thousands of people rallied around it. Sri Lankans like Suba and my old friend Meera now living in the United States and in Singapore volunteered to go back to their country, at their own expense, to help Room to Read get started. A donor offered frequent-flier miles to get Erin over to view the potential projects. Room to Read chapters threw fund-raising events. Several hundred schools—ranging from Malaysia to Tokyo to Vancouver to London—initiated fund-raising campaigns. Companies like Accenture, ING, Prudential, Credit Suisse, and XL Capital offered large grants. Scholastic, the biggest publisher of children’s books in the world, called to offer us half a million books and even volunteered to pay for the shipping.
In retrospect, I believe that the majority of these people were motivated by the fact that we did not yet have a complete strategy or solution for Sri Lanka. In the absence of such, each individual was able to exercise his or her creative muscle and invent his or her own role. Had we been 100 percent buttoned-up, the prospect of volunteering for Room to Read would have been inherently less interesting as it would not have made a demand on people’s creativity.
IN APRIL, ERIN LEFT FOR HER INITIAL TRIP TO SRI LANKA. SHE WAS EXCITED to meet Suba, with whom she had only spoken via Skype and e-mail. Suba and the team had already adopted over a dozen projects, and Erin was anxious to visit them and to see the progress and the barriers. She braved the long set of flights: from San Francisco to Seoul, then on to Delhi, then to Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo.
Meanwhile, I flew east to attend the Skoll Foundation conference on social entrepreneurship at Oxford University. Four days later, I awoke at 6 a.m., my body confused as usual by the sudden change of time zones. I followed my nose to a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and logged on to e-mail. The first message I noticed was from Erin, titled “A Message of Hope from Sri Lanka”:
Dear Room to Read Family and Friends—
I have just returned from an emotional trip to the eastern coast of Sri Lanka. The Ampara District is a remote area on the southern half of the east coast. It took us over nine hours by car on a badly paved two-lane road through the central mountain region to get there—a road shared by trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, tractors, and cows! In other words, a typical developing-country road!
We met up with Shiva Charity, who is our partner for rebuilding preschools damaged or destroyed by the tsunami. They have two construction teams working full-time to build the 20+ schools funded by Room to Read. But before visiting the school projects, which are built away from the sea given the new buffer-zone regulations, we toured the tsunami-impacted areas. It is hard to describe how devastated these areas are. As we walked through the piles of rubble just feet from the sea, I tried to imagine what it must have been like on the quiet Sunday morning when the big waves came. It is estimated 12,000 people died in Ampara District, making it one of the hardest hit in Sri Lanka. In some areas there is nothing left standing at all. In others, one brick wall is left to denote where a home used to be. Story after story you hear from the locals about how this house was home to two parents and five kids and now there is only one child left…or how a father lost all six of his children and wife. Everybody lost someone near and dear to them that quiet Sunday morning.
There are refugee camps everywhere and temporary tents line the streets. People have tents, clean water, and food in ample supply thankfully. But people complain that nothing else has happened. They have heard much was given but they have received little to rebuild their lives. The government and international relief agencies are plentiful in the south where there are good roads (tourist beach area) and it is a government-controlled area. Ampara is at the border of the Tamil Tiger zone, however, which means the government and the rebel Tamil Tigers have been fighting it out for years. Thus, these areas have not developed as much, and now the government assistance even in the face of this immense tragedy is less forthcoming. The people are attempting to clear the rubble by hand—one piece at a time of their former homes, their former lives. Mostly the women seem to be doing the work. The men point out to sea and say there should be hundreds of boats given how much money has been donated, but they have only received a few dozen.
On the brighter side though, we at Room to Read have just gotten to work despite the challenges and through our partnership with Shiva have managed to have built 3 preschools already with 17+ more in the pipeline. We are one of the first organizations starting reconstruction projects. The schools serve about 50 children each and are a meeting point for the women of the community. Preschools are outside of the government school system, so in partnership with Shiva (who will pay their operation costs going forward) and The Social Welfare Organization of Ampara District (who will manage the teachers and oversee the curriculum), we are quickly building a network of new preschools. The kids are already swinging on the swing sets in three of them with smiles on their faces. The mothers tell us we are helping to bring hope back to their communities after so much sadness. It is indescribable the feeling of positive energy and change we are all helping to bring forth.
A bit of humor on the trip: In a Muslim community in this district (Muslims are some of the most underserved in Sri Lanka) we are rebuilding two schools. We visited one of the construction sites and I was telling the community members our name—Room to Read. The main English speaker of the community said—“Ah, Room to Breed, yes, with the preschools we have more room to breed.” After much laughter, I tried to explain we were trying to promote reading, not breeding, and let’s hope my message got through!
I could go on about so many other things—the 100+ military checkpoints I have been through already in just a week of being on this very divided island, the tsunami scare the other night that reawakened many emotions in people, the horribly inefficient and corrupt system permeating the tsunami relief work, the helicopter tour I took of the tsunami areas with the secretary of defense and Mary Eisenhower (granddaughter of President Eisenhower), the great Sri Lankan volunteers Room to Read has found to help launch our effort here, or the wonderful evening we had the other night in a girls’ orphanage in a small town on the east coast (no hotels to stay in) where the girls taught us some Hindi-style Bollywood dancing and we taught them the hokeypokey and the Macarena:)
Anyway, this e-mail is too long already so I will just say this country has found a special place in my heart quickly and I feel so blessed to be part of the solution.
All the best to you all,
Erin
There was a separate mail, addressed only to me, in which Erin said that she thought our initial estimate, that we should rebuild 20 schools, was too conservative. She had seen so many villages whose buildings had been flattened and whose people had been demoralized. She and Suba asked if we could double our plan. And as had happened so many times in Room to Read’s brief history, I answered yes despite not knowing where the money would come from.
Judging by the 100-plus messages in my in-box—most of which carried titles like “How can I help?”—funding was not going to be a problem. As if to prove that my optimism would be rewarded, a group of Oxford students tracked me down later that day to present a check for £9,000 (about US $16,000) that they had raised to help tsunami-stricken countries. Right there, we had one of the 20 additional schools funded. I just needed 19 more days in a row like this one.
HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD, THE TSUNAMI FUNDS RAISED BY MANY thousands of students were being put to good use in the rural village of Munamalpe. This small village in southern Sri Lanka was mired in absolute poverty, and life was difficult for its residents. When the tsunami hit and wiped out what few resources the people had, life went from difficult to nearly impossible.
Thankfully, one of the community’s leaders, and her family, survived and played a vital role in the rebuilding of the community. Chintha, a qualified Montessori teacher, quickly mobilized three generations of her family to bring hope back to this ravaged village on the coastline. She approached Room to Read to help rebuild the village preschool, which served 35 children. In addition to this school, she proposed the creation of a library in the building, to be used by all local students during the hours after 3 p.m. when the preschool was no longer in session.
Suba and the team in Sri Lanka were impressed with the spirit and resilience of Chintha and her husband, Shantha. At a time when many village residents were understandably traumatized by the destruction, Chintha and Shantha decided that it was their duty to leap into action. Shantha was so excited by the idea of building a combination preschool and village library that he offered to volunteer for Room to Read full-time. He told our team that he did not need money, and that for him it was enough to gain access to resources to help the village’s children to begin their journey back to a normal life.
Each morning the couple and their four children came to the building site to organize the day’s labor. They were grateful that Room to Read had bought the building materials and wanted to help hold costs down by having as much volunteer labor as possible.
The youngest volunteer was their youngest son, Kavith. At the tender age of four, he carried bricks, one at a time, from the brick pile over to the busy masons putting up the walls. Suba sent us an e-mail in which she reported that “just like his father, there are no complaints, [he is] just doing what he thinks he should be doing.”
Kavith also boasted to his friends that the new preschool belonged to him. When told by our local team that the school would actually belong to the entire community, and would he like something else instead, he asked if he could have a new Room to Read school bag like the one all the students would get the day of the school opening ceremony.
Chintha’s parents are retired and live near the school site. To do their part, they volunteered to cook a large lunch for the team of laborers. Each day steaming pots would be delivered to the building site, and 10 to 15 people would dig into heaping plates of rice and curry.
Three generations of a single dynamic family had come together, each doing what it could do to help rebuild in a devastated community. In October, only ten months after the preschool had been destroyed, the new school was officially reopened. If ever there was an opening ceremony I regretted missing, this one was it. I vowed to visit Munamalpe one day to meet this extraordinary family. I’m also excited to try the curry.
INSPIRED BY STORIES LIKE THESE, MY TEAM AND I CONTINUED TO WORK insane hours, flying around the world to pitch companies, foundations, and wealthy individuals on the need to help Sri Lanka rebuild. Thankfully, the funding continued to flow, and by the one-year anniversary of the tsunami, Room to Read had reopened 22 schools and had 16 more nearing completion. Not content to stop there, Suba and her team began planning the construction of 60 more schools over the next two years. Each school represented some degree of hope and a return to optimism for each village.
I also think they were emblematic of humankind’s unique ability to create order out of chaos. Much of human advancement depends on overcoming setbacks and making progress despite obstacles and tragedy. My personal heroes are the doctors and journalists who throw themselves into war zones, famine-stricken nations, and areas hit by natural disasters such as earthquakes. They are aware that they cannot control or change the past, but believe strongly that they can have an influence over the future. Rather than being paralyzed by tragedy, they are catalyzed into action.
A victim of genocidal violence in Rwanda, or an Iranian woman pulled from a building leveled by an earthquake, may have no idea why a French doctor suddenly appears to tend her wounds, but she is most certainly thankful for this unexplained act of mercy and compassion. Each of these acts is symbolic of the best that exists inside all of us.
In my own life, I had never before responded to a disaster, nor had I expected to. We had to invent a lot of it as we went along. Our first year of work in Sri Lanka proved that people are capable of amazing work when given the latitude. Our team in Sri Lanka spearheaded an impressive number of projects. Thousands of students at 250 schools around the world participated in our Students Helping Students campaign. They raised over half a million dollars even though we were too busy to give them much direction. Our development team in San Francisco, working closely with our volunteer chapters, locked down $2.5 million in capital commitments in just nine months—enough funding to cover our first three years of work in Sri Lanka.
As for me, I will always remember one seminal moment during our initial response to the disaster. On January 4, 2005, we had a team meeting to discuss our plans to rebuild schools in Sri Lanka. Knowing that some of the team were fearful and were walking around the office with a “deer in the headlights” look, I wanted to assure them that we were smart enough to figure this out. I thought of the Ed Harris character from the film Apollo 13, who watches his colleagues panic while he methodically determines a way to get the astronauts back to earth safely. His team is pessimistic, focusing on obstacles and doomsday scenarios, while he is reaching deep down to find the Right Stuff that made the original NASA astronauts the American heroes of the 1960s. With this example in mind, I had printed for each team member a handout with a photo of the Ed Harris character, speaking the immortal words:
“With all due respect, gentlemen, I believe this will be NASA’s finest hour.”
If you ask people to reach deep, to think creatively, and to produce extraordinary results, they usually will. Too often in our modern world, they are simply not asked.
As predicted, Sri Lanka became one of Room to Read’s finest hours.
POSTSCRIPT: JACOB RASCH WAS HONORED FOR HIS WRISTBAND CAMPAIGN by the Congressional Committee on Human Rights. He proudly told an assembled group of congressmen how he and his cousins had raised enough funds to build five schools in Sri Lanka (see photo insert).
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?
ADVICE ON CHANGING THE WORLD
Stop Talking, Start Acting
If you are thinking about making some adjustments in your life to allow you to help change the world, my heartfelt recommendation is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just dive in.
I know that all kinds of practical considerations make this advice difficult to embrace. There might be student loans to be repaid, the need for advice from friends and family, and the desire to write a serious business plan. I am not saying that you should not do any of these things—just that you should not spend too much time on them or you will lose momentum.
The biggest risk is that a lot of people will try to talk you out of pursuing your dream. The world has too many people who are happy to discuss why something might not work, and too few who will cheer you on and say, “I’m there for you.” The more time you spend navel-gazing, the longer you give those negative gravitational forces to keep you in their tether.
As an example, I would cite our work in Sri Lanka. After the devastating tsunami, I had to prove to myself that I had the guts to follow my own advice. News reports indicated that hundreds of schools had been destroyed in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Room to Read did not work in either of those countries, so it was difficult to decide how we could help. But I knew deep in my heart that “We don’t work there, it’s not our problem” was not an answer worthy of a bold, young charity that had never been willing to accept limits.
So I proposed to our team, and to our board, that we immediately launch operations in Sri Lanka, raise a million dollars to get started, and begin to identify communities whose schools had been destroyed. There was, needless to say, a Greek chorus telling me why we couldn’t do this—“We don’t have staff there.” “Room to Read is not licensed to work in Sri Lanka.” “We’re already busy enough with our existing five countries.”
On January 3, I convened an emergency call of the board of directors, and we included Erin, our chief operating officer, to gain her invaluable perspective. All of us were united in our desire to help tsunami victims, yet also scared of diving into something so new.
I made my case:
“We’ve been working in South Asia [Nepal and India] for over five years now. We’ve partnered with over fifteen hundred communities throughout Asia to get new schools and libraries built. We know how to do this. Yes, Sri Lanka will be new for us, but it’s not as though we have not launched new countries before. And I think it’s important to remember that Room to Read is an organization that has been built on an ethos of bold thinking and direct action. Do we want to say to these devastated communities, “Sorry, but this is not part of our business plan, so we can’t help you?”
There was dead air on the phone. I was sweating. This was potentially a moment that would cause me to lose faith in our team’s ability to think big about creating change. The silence was broken by a member of our Board, whose opinion I greatly respected. “We know very little about Sri Lanka. If we want to make this decision, we should do a three-month study of the situation, then decide.”
More dead air. Now I was really sweating.
Another Board member responded immediately. “With all due respect, if back in 1998 John had decided to do a three-month study of the situation in Nepal, he would have probably never even launched Room to Read. The study would have revealed so many daunting obstacles that he would have become a pessimist, and none of the great accomplishments of the last six years would have been reality. I think that we should go in.”
A third member of the Board opined, “You’re both right in your own way. We should move quickly because the children of Sri Lanka should not have to wait. But we have to realize that with a fast launch without a detailed study, we will hit obstacles. We should think about them in advance and plan our responses. We also need to trust our team to adjust and to figure things out, just as they always have.
Internally, I cheered, then suggested a vote. The board was unanimous in approving the immediate launch of Room to Read Sri Lanka. In our rookie year there, we began construction on 40 schools and also opened 25 libraries.
Sometimes, it’s really important to move with all deliberate speed. If there is something out there that you want to do to make the world a better place, don’t focus on the obstacles. Don’t ask for permission. Just dive in. Don’t let the naysayers get you down.