The History of Not Forgotten - Smarter Every Day 269

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hey, it's me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So every year I like to make a video about Not Forgotten, which is a Peruvian orphanage I work with. This year's a little different. I usually make one to update you on the progress of the orphanage. But for the Project for Awesome this year, I want to make a video explaining the entire history of the effort because a lot of you may not have heard of Not Forgotten or you don't know the history of how this all happened. So I thought it'd be really cool to put it all in one place. So here we go.

A Brief History Of Not Forgotten. Let's start by understanding the problem. There's a city in Peru called Iquitos. It is the largest city that's inaccessible by land. There's literally no roads in and out. You can only get there via airplane or boat. For whatever reason, in this particular place in the world, there's a lot of abandoned children, most of them boys. There's abuse, neglect, there's addiction. The people that were supposed to care for these children either can't or won't. There's some statistics that say that one in 12 children in this area of the world have been abandoned. That leaves them open to exploitation and abuse. All kinds of things can happen. And so what I want to tell you is how Not Forgotten started to work on this and how it's working today.

Alright, our story starts in 1978 when a young boy named Gene [Idlit] was born in Iquitos, Peru. Gene's mother was already abandoned by his father. And Gene escaped the difficulty of life at home with an abusive stepfather by seeking shelter in local churches and such. Gene spent a lot of time on the streets and eventually worked his way to the capital city of Lima, Peru, in search of a better life. Fast forward to 2002. A guy named Tyler Fiuque, a young college student, went down to Iquitos, Peru, with a church group from North Carolina to visit an orphanage. He hung out with the kids and when he left and went back home, he wanted to help these kids and let them know that they were not forgotten.

Around this time, Gene was working as a police officer in Lima, Peru, and one day he was tasked with clearing out the street boys, or what his superiors referred to as "getting the filth up off the streets". And that didn't sit well with him because Gene remembered what it was like to grow up in the streets of Iquitos. And so he decided at that point in time he was going to help vulnerable children. He didn't really know what that looked like, but he volunteered at a local area there in Lima, which was owned by the same people that had the orphanage in Iquitos that Tyler had went to. So Gene's working in Lima. And then at some point, an opening or a need arose over there in Iquitos. And Gene went. So Gene went back to that place in Iquitos and started helping kids there.

In 2006, Tyler and Allison, his wife, they went back to Iquitos, and they met with Gene and Gene's wife, Patty. They started to develop a relationship, and they started identifying key problems that seemed to persist, even with the children that were within the care of the orphanage system there. At that point in time, they identified the key factor to breaking the cycle of abandonment, and that is to center the care around the family unit and at home. Tyler, Allison, Gene, and Patty started coming up with a plan to make this thing real.

In 2008, I lived in a different city, and I went on a short-term mission trip to Chiquián, Peru, where I started to fall in love with the country. I had a blast. I fell in love with the people, and it was amazing. So in 2010-2011 timeframe, when Tara heard about another opportunity to go to Peru, we'd had two children, she needed a break. We were like, "Yes, you're going to go and you're going to go alone with the team." So she went. And this time she went to Iquitos, and that's a trip that Tyler went on.

Tara came back super excited. She was blown away, and she just looked at me when she got home and she said, "Hey, here's the deal. We're helping these orphans now. That's what we're doing." And I was like, "Yes, ma'am, we are. I don't, I've never heard of Iquitos, but we're doing whatever you say." And that's how our involvement started. Tyler came back from that same trip with a different vision. He had identified land that he wanted to purchase to make the orphanage. And so we went and talked to several key individuals and churches and businesses.

He secured the money, and then he actually purchased the land, which is where Not Forgotten was going to build its first site. Here you can see some footage of the dirt work being done on the property. And this is when I started asking questions because Tara was telling me all about it. My buddy CJ and I went and met with Tyler at a Chili's and we sat down and we started talking about this Not Forgotten project. And at this point in time, they had the land. They were pushing dirt, but nothing had been built.

So I was really forceful and telling Tyler, "Something's got to be built. You got to you got to do something. You got to put a shovel in the dirt, and do something." And so we came up with a silly plan to build a septic tank for what would become the guard shack at the gate. So I decided to go down to Iquitos and work with C.J. and Fidel and a crew to build a septic tank. And the whole purpose wasn't really the septic tank. The purpose was to, like, send out the message of Not Forgotten to everybody that watches Smarter Every Day. That was kind of the goal.

For the last week, a buddy of mine named C.J. and I've been working on a concrete crew we're working on a septic tank for an orphanage. It's pretty awesome. We submitted this video to the Project For Awesome. Good morning. Hank. It's Monday, December 18th, 2012. Which means it's time for the sixth annual Project For Awesome. So all over YouTube today, people are making videos about their favorite nonprofit organizations. And right now, you can go to projectforawesom.com and submit your videos and also vote for your favorites to help decide where the Project for Awesome Funds go.

A lot of money was raised through the Project for Awesome for Not Forgotten. And more importantly, people started supporting Not Forgotten on Patreon. The first few patrons that started that coming in that started to feel like a sustainable model because a certain amount of money was going to come in every month and you could plan on that. So it became a thing: Smarter Every Day, I made sure to make a video every year. -Not Forgotten -Not Forgotten -Not Forgotten -Not Forgotten -It's a really good thing.

And it was amazing! We got the first kids into the homes. -Okay, now it's time to show you what we've done on the orphanage. This is the fun part. There's a wall and let's go through a butterfly puddle on the way. Isn't that awesome? Let's go check out what's been built on the orphanage. The families started being established. House parents came and moved into these individual houses, and it was amazing. There was this huge transformation that started happening.

For people that had gone to Iquitos quite a bit to visit these orphans, there was this shift that happened. When you would go, they would be like, "Oh, well, I mean, the people from America are here, it's party time! We're going to have gifts. We're going to have a party", stuff like that. But then there was this subtle shift that those of us that had been down there noticed that was amazing. Instead of feeling like, "Oh, they're here, let's party", it was more like, "Who are you? And why are you visiting my home?" Which was amazing because that was the moment that you could see the vision. You could see that the kids were starting to feel secure in their family. It's like, "Why are you visiting my home? Because this is my home." It was huge to see that transformation, and you could almost see the cycle start to break right before your eyes.

-So we're just serving dinner. This is dinnertime at Moises's house. [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] In Los Lomas, there's a lot of childhood that's been lost. So that's where the boys on this 100-acre playground, so to speak, I mean you've got soccer fields, got the jungle, got the lake. That's where they can learn to be a kid again. That's where they can learn how to trust.

Everything's not fight or flight at that location. You're learning how to interact with people and how to trust people. But Gene and Patty realized that there's this other thing that needs to happen. There needs to be a transition from childhood to adulthood. And that's when Alporcar was started. That is a facility in the city where the boys are integrated into society. They go to school, they're learning all these different skills and trades and things like that. And when they're ready to go out on their own, they can do it in a more seamless way.

So there are two facilities that have two different purposes, but it works together to break the cycle of abandonment. One of the things that's amazing about Not Forgotten is the fact that there's all these staff that are Peruvians that are working there together to make sure these kids have the best care possible. You've got teachers, you've got literally their parents, their house parents, you've got psychologists, you've got people that help prepare food. There's so much going on, and it's great because these kids are very, very well loved and very well cared for. Not Forgotten is great.

I've seen it with my own eyes. I hope to see it again this summer if I'm able to travel down there. But it's totally worth your support. There are 35 kids in the care of Not Forgotten. There's two homes at each location as active. There's two homes at Los Lamos, two homes that Alporcar. The desire is to open a third home at Los Lamos. But the finances aren't there. The home is physically there, but they need staff. They need to make it happen.

So if you're interested in supporting Not Forgotten, the best way to do that is through Patreon. If there can be $4,000 additional per month given to Patreon, they can budget on that. It doesn't have to be a lot. Whatever you are comfortable giving for a long period of time, that's the goal. So please consider going to that link down in the video description. patreon.com/notforgotten if I recall correctly. And that would be huge.

Anyway, that's it. That's a brief history of Not Forgotten and why I'm involved in it and why I care so much. I hope you enjoy it. I know a lot of you are involved as well, and you've got your own story in relation to Not Forgotten and I think that's really, really cool. It's really cool that this is just happening and these kids' lives are changing and the cycle of abandonment is being broken slowly and I'm very excited about that.

Anyway, that's it. Link's down in the video description. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye. -Adios. Adios. -Goodbye. Oh, and that septic tank I worked on? Yeah, the guard shack never got built. However, there was a golden toilet placed on top to commemorate its special place in Not Forgotten history.