The Girl Who Dreamt of Founding an Orphanage
“Ever since she was a little girl Sarah Wallace has wanted to open an orphanage.” -CBC Edmonton
And guess what. That little girl grew into a grown woman, and went and opened an orphanage.
In fact, she’s done more than that. A lot more.
Sarah has helped countless women and children —entire families and their surrounding community in fact — find joy and stability in the face of groundlessness and despair.
Sarah has changed the face of women’s pre and post natal health care in Haiti. Because of Sarah, more families are healthy and whole and committed to bettering themselves; and because of Sarah, fewer families are destitute, isolated and alone, and suffering from preventable illness and disease.
The truly impressive part of all this is that Sarah’s impact reaches even further. A big part of Sarah’s mandate is to foster independence and empower the women she provides health care too, so that they may flourish.
The excerpt from Sarah’s account below describes it best.
I watched tears role down her face as Lucy told me that the fortified rice we gave her each week was the only food she had.
I saw her blank stare as she pondered how she would manage to care for her soon-to-be-born son.
We don’t encourage dependency. It was necessary to keep her healthy throughout her pregnancy, birth and postpartum period, but finally we told her that we couldn’t keep providing for her and gave her the idea of collecting plastic bottles to sell to our recycling depot.
By the next day she had already collected bottles worth more than $5USD.
I can only imagine the difference that this small, yet significant, income has made to her family.
I can only imagine her hope slowly growing and gaining momentum with each bottle collected.
I saw Lucy arriving at the bottle depot today to be paid what she has earned — she was beaming. She had been empowered.
(Click here for the full story.)
But when international oil prices fell the recycling business became unsustainable, and Sarah needed a new way to help women take control of their future so that they may flourish. The Precious Plastics project she’s embarking on with Simon and Diyode is a way for her to do that.
Now, there’s a phrase that Sarah’s quite fond of, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better,” which I think of as a less Neanderthal version of a phrase I’ve always found comfort in, “Stick to the plan till the plan changes.”
That tenet of iteration, of optimization and improvement, is one that’s common amongst problems solvers. So it makes sense that Sarah’s primary goal is to put Olive Tree Projects out of business, because the day that happens the problem that drove her to set up shop in the first place will have been adequately resolved.
“I am hopeful that … soon, we will see maternal care improve nation wide. Essentially, I am hoping to put Olive Tree Projects out of business. “ — Sarah
I draw attention to Sarah’s problem solving chutzpah because that’s where I see alignment between her and Simon. She, a trained medical professional, and he, a software engineer; both understanding of the need for sustainable social reform (a perspective traditionally rooted in the humanities AKA the arts) and both creatively empowered enough to take individual responsibility for that need.
For a much more sophisticated and dare I say it, theoretical, perspective on the matter, look to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Thanks Stephen Hawking!):
The convergence of art and science is not peaceful. There is a tension between them, and this tension cannot be resolved. Any resolution would make them dead. Peace is a beautiful thing, but not in the world of ideas. Ideas are alive when they fight. — Alioscia Hamma
To me, Simon and Sarah encapsulate just how powerful innovation can be when the arts and sciences come together.
Their collaboration helps me to understand why it’s so important to support and talk about organizations that bring these disciplines together. Organizations that do, like Diyode, empower and enable individuals like Simon and Sarah to create solutions to big problems (whether that involves creating a service infrastructure, or a set of tools and machines), and in doing so, foster a culture of compassion.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Sarah is doing. Her blogs are many, and there are lots of complex flavours of humanity in them to digest.
“Unfortunately, the only other option for [the women] really is the public hospital, which is labelled as the morgue. Many women are afraid to go…” — Sarah, CBC Edmonton.
(With a hospital named The Morgue, can you blame expecting mothers for being afraid?)
As Author Barbara Katz Rothman puts it,
“Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers — strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.”
And as Sarah puts it,
“The needs are too great to carry alone. We do not have the capacity to meet the needs except for as a part of a team.”
You can support both these initiatives by sharing their story, joining in on the conversation, and asking questions.
You can contribute financially to the Haiti Precious Plastics project by donating to Diyode (they’re raising $7000 CAD for the project, and are currently at $2700).
You can contribute financially to Sarah’s work with Olive Tree Projects by donating here.
I’m honoured to be talking about Sarah’s work, and I’m grateful to Simon Clark for connecting me with her story. I’m grateful to the members at Diyode (more on being a Members Run organization in future posts) who have come together to create an outlet for curiosity, and so have become confident enough to follow their curiosity through to execution. Because at the end of the day, what Makers make are solutions (or as Jay Silver puts it, “The maker movement is not about the *stuff* we can make, it’s about the *meaning* we can make.”). Not just cool shit. (Although, makers make a lot of cool shit too.)
Thank you for reading,
Donna
