SoulPancake

Now comes our time with Planting Peace and its fascinating founder, Aaron Jackson.

We get picked up in their enormous ambulance, which was a donation from a church somewhere in Alabama and was driven to Miami and then shipped to Haiti.

I told you all a little about Aaron before. I’ve never met anyone quite like him before. I don’t know where Aaron gets it, but he is wired to selflessly give and fight injustice and take care of problems as he sees them.

On one of his first trips to Haiti, he had run completely out of money, but, upon leaving the country, he noticed a small child lying listlessly with a swollen belly. He asked what was up with the child and was told it had worms, and that it would cost $20 to de-worm the child.

[LIFE'S BIG LISTS]

“Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all; ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.” —Marquis de Sade 

“Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.” —Buddha

:: kate supreme by @plasticflora

List 5 things you LUST for.

1. Deep dish sausage and ricotta pizza with crushed tomato sauce and fresh marjoram.
2. A long desert highway and a 2010 Chevy Camaro with a 6.2 liter, 428 horsepower V8 engine.
3. Millions of people waiting in line to buy the book I haven’t written yet.
4. Pete Townshend’s black Les Paul autographed to me and proclaiming my superior guitar virtuosity.
5. That one night of endless Kate Moss possibilities.

:: @CSW

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

The couple was warming up, but every third shot was either in the net or out of their partner’s reach. After two years, they should have been better players than this; something was off.

“We got into a fight,” Steffanie told me as an airplane roared overhead. Jeff, unable to hear, moved closer to the net.

“When?” I asked.

She looked over to Jeff, whiffing her racket through the air, and asked, “When, did the fight start, honey?”

Jeff cracked his neck. “Which one?”

“Funny, honey. This morning’s.”

“5:45.”

“On or off the court?” I asked.

They responded simultaneously: “At 5:45 in the morning?!?”

“In the bedroom,” Steffanie said as she flicked the ball to Jeff, “but it may as well been on the court.”

“Yeah,” Jeff sighed. “Same crap happens here, too.”

I remember one time that my wife and I found this back road through the California High Desert from Joshua Tree to Big Bear, along a ridge of mountains. It was terrifying. Potholes the size of meteors. Steep drop-offs. Creeks running through the road. I drove in a cold sweat, vowing to never take that road again.

That’s what EVERY road is like in Haiti. Just throw in piles of garbage, goats, kids, bicycles, and countless, colorful, jerry-rigged Toyota pickup-truck taxis, stuffed with commuters, that are called “tap-taps.”

We drive what looks like a short distance on the map but ends up taking us nearly four hours. To the town of Le Petite Riviere Artibonite, in the central flatlands of Haiti.

This is our first taste of rural Haiti. Wow, it’s poor here. Subsistence farmers.  Drying their rice on plastic tarps laid out on the roads. (I didn’t know rice came in shells. I thought it was just, well, rice. Like in the bags and the boxes. Silly me.)

Tel Aviv, Israel

:: masterminded by @Aviv and @Tsiona :: edited by Ryan Lash :: music by MJ Cyr.

Sodom and Gomorrah. The Great Flood. The Apocalypse. Sure, we were all taught in Sunday School that God’s wrath is dished out with love for his creatures, but isn’t the whole "I made it, so I can unmake it" thing a little sophomoric?

Is there a sense of enjoyment in having enemies and punishing His children for their shortcomings? Or perhaps God, in a way, is prescient enough to balance his own impulses.

Would God create something just so that he could exercise loathing for it?

:: say NO to shellfish spied by dustout

Our first full day in Haiti starts early. At 7 a.m., 13 of us pile into two battle-worn SUVs. Battle-worn because the simplest drive on Haiti’s roads is like going to war. Pigs, bicycles, old women balancing bags of rice on their heads, moto-taxis darting in and out of traffic. It’s like a giant Haitian version of ‘Frogger’ for any driver.

We arrive first at the home of Sue Puzo. She is one of the founders of the Zunuzi School who has now taken in about a dozen or two local street kids and is educating them out of her home. They just showed up, sleeping on her doorstep after hearing that she was a kind lady who educated kids. That’s how bad the children here want education. After being orphaned or else kicked out of their homes by abusive parents, they would do anything to learn. Including sleeping on a doorstep.

Like so many of the selfless people I’m meeting on this trip, she’s paying for everything out of her own pocket and sacrificing everything to simply be of service to the children of Haiti.

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

I live near Dodger Stadium, close enough to see the big lights, close enough to hear the announcer’s voice. And even though I know I must be imagining it, close enough that I can hear the sound of the leather ball against the bat.

People park on my street and walk to the game. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say 75% wear blue, the team color. I can see them from the window near my desk: Entire families in blue shirts! They know there’s a chance they might leave the stadium with a broken heart, but they are positive—they are ready to cheer; they are hopeful.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, since I live near the stadium, I have to endure game-day traffic. People take over the playgrounds with their grills and loud music and coolers of beer. Don’t they have jobs? And then the games: They are slow! Sometimes nothing happens! What can you do but sit in the blazing sun and eat a $7 hot dog?

But still. I am sentimental.

Hi there. Rainn here. Last week, I went to Haiti with my wife to check out first hand the work of some charities that I’ve been raising money for. Should be an adventure!

I’ve never blogged about a trip before. I hate that word ‘blog,’ by the way. It reminds me of poop, for some reason. Why couldn’t they have come up with a better name for web log? Who insisted that it be called blog? I didn’t vote for that name. Did you? 'Post' is a good word. Solid. Proud. Dependable. 'Diary' feels a little bit girly, as in The Princess Diaries or The Notebook. But it works, too. Personally, I’d like to try to replace the word blog with … ‘Webary.’ Boom. New word. That’s how I roll. Webary is like “web diary.” Sounds Web-y, which is spidery and almost rhymes with aviary, which is beautiful.

So this is my ‘Webary’ of my trip to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

[LIFE'S BIG LISTS]

"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."—Alison Boulter

:: odd man out by Candy Critic

List 3 incredibly idiosyncratic ways in which you are NOT like everybody else.

1. I drink two pots of coffee a day and have zero issues falling asleep.
2. I toss my own pizza dough every Tuesday night and speak with a fake Italian accent the whole time I’m doing it.
3. I can recite every word of every line to the very first episode of Three’s Company.

:: @CSW