Peru Orphanage Update 2017 - Smarter Every Day 183

I can't tell if it's focused. Stay right there. Hey! It's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. This is my wife, Tara. My better half. [laughs] Every year in December, I make a video about an orphanage in Peru called Not Forgotten. Tara went down and visited many, many years ago and came home and said, "Hey, this is our thing now. We're gonna help this orphanage." So, I went down. There's this guy named Tyler Fuqua and a buddy of mine named CJ Jacobs. It was their vision to build this thing, and I got behind it. And, you got behind it.

I did a "Project for Awesome" video years ago, and money started coming in. Now, the thing with giving money to organizations is "Sometimes helping can hurt." I wanted to say that this has worked, and I'm super excited about this. Every year, we have taken our hand more and more off the tiller. This is a project that's being run by Peruvians, and it's working. It's a family-centered model, it's not like "hey, let's get a big house and let's shove it full of orphans and try to keep them alive until adulthood."

Way different than that. It's a family-centered model, which is very unique. Tyler and his wife, they came up with this model, and we got behind it in a big way. And you got behind it in a big way. Well, usually I go down and I make a video and I make an appeal every December for support for Not Forgotten in the form of Patreon donations. But this year, a guy named Jordan went down. The cool thing about this is Jordan is a videographer, and he's really, really good at what he does. And he made a video about just the fact that this thing is running on its own.

There's no... I don't know. It's just running. By itself. It's sustainable and it's working, and there's 25 kids with a home, and I want to play this video for you. The first time I saw it, I cried. A lot of donation stuff is like, "Oh, for the price of a cup of coffee a day, you can have a blah blah blah, you can help a blah blah blah." No, we're not gonna do that to you. We're just gonna show you what's working and it's happening, and thanks for everybody that has been a part of it. And if you want to be a part of it, you can. We'll explain it after the video.

There was nothing here when we started. And we've done this together. And it's really cool. So watch this.

TYLER FUQUA: Iquitos is in the Amazon basin and it's really remote compared to anywhere else in Peru. It's not accessible by road, so the only way to get there is through flying on a plane or doing it by boat. It has created this isolated world where a lot of the problems that we deal with can live and fester without really being addressed from a socially progressive mindset. It really has allowed all the problems to persist that we are addressing on a day-to-day basis. Las Lomas is the property and the home that we have in Iquitos. It really is a special place. It really creates a safe, fun environment for kids to grow up in the childhood that's been, in some ways, robbed from them by their circumstances.

A lot of our kids have different stories, but all of them have some similar themes. They've often been abused, abandoned, neglected, maybe just forgotten or uncared-for by their families or by their communities. When they come to Las Lomas, they are delayed physically and emotionally, educationally. At Not Forgotten, our goal is to provide holistic and comprehensive care for these children. We want to meet their physical, educational, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. We feel like it's very important this is balanced; otherwise, they're not gonna have the skills or tools they need to really be breakers of the cycles of abandonment, abuse, neglect, poverty, and addiction that they came from.

GENE IOLETT: We have to recover the years they did not receive quality attention. Quality attention is not only providing material support but also providing the spiritual support and the emotional support that a child should have and that our children have never had.

TYLER: One of the biggest problems that we face is the brokenness of families. Our goal at Not Forgotten is to try to recreate that family model.

GENE: Normally, a children's home hires individuals but they don't hire a family. We hire families to demonstrate a model of family to our children.

TYLER: That cycle of mistrust is broken through providing food, a hug, helping with homework, helping them get dressed, helping them brush their teeth, welcoming them when they get home from school. All these things are small little things, but they add up to meeting these bigger needs of what a true mother and a true father should be doing for these children, and that's something that they never had before. Not Forgotten is completely led by Peruvians, and I guess a really integral and key part of what we do. We recognize that the best and most important parts of our home are our staff. It's been really amazing to see the change to these kids' lives. To see them just blossom and grow is really, really cool.

GENE: What I want for the children of Las Lomas is that they find healing for their wounds, that they find healing for their souls. As a result, we will have good professionals, good fathers, good citizens, good men.

TARA: That's good.

DESTIN: It's amazing what soft music can do. [laughs] Alright, so that was the video. And we're excited that it's off the ground and running. Right?

• Oh, absolutely.

Yeah?

• That's touching.

• Yeah. Are you crying?

I might have gotten a little too...

• Okay, so here's the deal. Every year we do a Project for Awesome video in December, and you can go vote at projectforawesome.com for Not Forgotten. But, the thing we're pushing towards nowadays is direct donations via Patreon, and last year everyone who donated, we gave them this patch. It was a 2016 Not Forgotten patch. We're making 2017 Not Forgotten patches and 2018 Not Forgotten patches. And we would love to send those out to anybody who supports Not Forgotten on Patreon.

That's really all there is to it. There's two steps if you want to help to do this really awesome thing that we've been working on since 2012. Number one: go vote for Not Forgotten at the Project for Awesome by clicking the first link in the video description. And number two is going to patreon.com/notforgotten. Going to Patreon and supporting is really the best thing you can do to get involved in this. We send you updates on the kids throughout the year; it's really an awesome thing. Thank you so much for considering doing this stuff with us.

And for all you who've done it in the past, man, this is so cool to see this come together since 2012. Again, there's two things to do, there's link 1 and link 2 immediately below this video. Please have at it and jump on board of this really cool thing.

TARA: I'm excited for how a few years back it was nothing but a piece of dirt, and now there's dozens of boys who have families and that eventually they'll be...

• Making mischief. [laughs]

And eventually it'll be dozens of men who are leaders in their society. So, I'm excited. We're the Sandlins, you're getting smarter every day. Have a good one.