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.

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.)

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.

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.

:: theme song rocked out by Christopher Faizi

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

And stay tuned for some candid convo on Life's Big Questions...

Rivers Cuomo from Weezer tries not to breathe around Rainn.

Spoiler alert: Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo sat down with Rainn to answer some of Life's Big Questions. Here, they talk about bodily emissions, but the actual interview ... well, we just like making you wait for it. 

Hi. Rainn here.

This here is the section where I get to do mini-talk shows with artists and spiritual thinkers and really dig into Life's Big Questions! I've always wanted to interview tons of really cool people about Life, Death, God, Music, Art, Faith, Being, and the Universe.

A few years ago, I had the idea to do that online and call it "Metaphysical Milkshake." What does `metaphysical' mean? Well, idiot, here's the definition:

I'm most interested in 2a and 2b. And this is my chance! If I can ever get around to doing the damn interviews.

(Eventually, by way, this idea expanded to a much larger vision and became the ever-evolving SoulPancake.com.)

I hope you like it!

Rainn

P.S. Don't try this at home: