PPB December 2019

so they can attend school. The homes are also built exclusively by hand, without the use of power tools—a decision made to teach the students basic carpentry and allow the families to make continual improvements to their homes. In 2019, Brown, his church and the high schoolers built 20 homes. “We, in our community, hope that just a small part of this experience will help mold and guide [the students] in a micro amount,” he says. “If you’re sending a man to the moon and you’re off one degree on your course, you can miss that moon by hundreds or thousands of miles. Over a 50-to-60-year adult lifespan, if I can contribute a course-correction to goodness, light, sharing and humanity, at some microscopic level, it becomes amplified over their lifetimes and can really change [the students'] lives. To me, that’s a tremendous opportunity.” After five or six trips to Mexico, Brown’s church partnered with the international Presbyterian Church to find a sister church—a church for Piedmont to connect with and provide support and resources. Piedmont was connected with Kafita CCAP in Lilongwe, Malawi, and soon thereafter, Brown learned of the Nkhoma Mission Hospital and the Embangweni Mission Hospital, and met Dr. Martha Sommers, a Midwesterner who has since retired, but spent 20 years as a missionary in Malawi. Many of those years, Dr. Sommers worked at Embangweni, where she was the only doctor for some 1,000 square kilometers, and where the patient-to-doctor ratio was a staggering 55,000 to one. Due to the lack of available health care and the high HIV rate—which peaked in 1993 at nearly 30 percent of the population, but remains in the double digits— there is a severe deficiency of clean blood. So when Dr. Sommers first approached Brown, saying, “If you give me a pint, I will save a life!” he quickly obliged. “How do you say ‘no’ to that request?” he says. Now, he donates blood during every visit. And even here, there was room for promotional products to make a difference. When Brown was asked to complete paperwork prior to donating blood, he was handed a “pen” he described as “completely broken”—only half the plastic remained, the cartridge was protruding from the barrel, and it had to be held very carefully to fill out the form. You can bet that Brown left behind a handful of pens for the health- care facility. “I’m the pen guy,” he says. “Everywhere I went, I was giving out pens to people.” In addition to 200 pens, several other suppliers donated products for Brown to bring, including four Ohio Roller Bags and 80 long-sleeve, lightweight, colored t-shirts from SanMar, 80 soccer balls from BamBams, 100 sunglasses from Hit Promotional Products and 25 solar-powered battery power banks from PowerStick. MadeToOrder also donated three laptops and 100 hats, and Brown personally purchased a camera for the senior reverend in Malawi, so he can send along photos from time to time, in addition to one ream of braille paper and 200 Tootsie Roll lollipops. Another trip or two to Malawi brought Brown to his current focus, which is helping the orphans attending the Chilanga School for the Blind. “It was here where I was most overwhelmed,” he says. The school, which was founded in 1952, serves 50 to 70 children; most are orphaned and all have vision impairments. The children there have undergone many hardships due to their condition, and although not all are technically “orphans,” they were cast out of their villages and abandoned in fear of their blindness being contagious. Because the gene for blindness is so closely connected to the gene for albinism—a genetic condition where the body is unable to produce the normal amount of melanin, causing a lack of pigment in the eyes, skin and hair color—about 15-20 percent of the children in the orphanage are albino. But being albino doesn’t only make the children vulnerable to the sun; it poses a serious and grave safety concern. In this region of Africa, there remains an old “witch doctor” mentality that Join Us For A Standing Ovation Plan to be there to honor Rod Brown, CAS, as he accepts the PPAI 2020 H. Ted Olson Humanitarian Award on Monday, January 13, 2020 at the Chairman’s Leadership Dinner during The PPAI Expo in Las Vegas. Purchase your event tickets when you register for the show at expo.ppai.org. Rod Br own , CAS 90 | DECEMBER 2019 | THINK