Charity – Help Fight Cancer or Join Kiva and Team Stuck In Customs!

Here are a couple of great causes that we would love you to help with. The first is quite personal to me and the second, something I’ve really enjoyed participating in over the past few years.

Charity 1: The Healing NET Foundation

This one is kind of a big one, and my wife and I decided to share it together to help raise money for her cancer doctor’s charity that is directly related to her whole situation.

The short version of the story is that Tina was recently diagnosed with an unusual form of cancer — the same kind Steve Jobs had. Bad news, to say the least. It struck us especially hard because of our three young kids. It was probably harder on me than I wanted to admit, but our focus was of course on figuring out how to get Tina better. The exact diagnosis was Neuroendocrine Cancer and they found malignant tumors on her pancreas and liver. Super bad news. Having said that, the more recent progress has been positive and you can read more about that here but we’d love you to get involved in the campaign below.

The charity I’m supporting here is the one for my wife that was created by her cancer doctor, Dr. Eric Liu. It’s called The Healing NET Foundation.

Charity 2: Kiva

Come join Team Stuck In Customs! It’s a great way to intelligently move money and resources around the world.

Amazing job Team! Here’s a screenshot of just some of our global impact!

And here’s a very old video I made many years ago for Kiva!

 

The Greatness of Kiva

I have lent money to a small potato farm in Peru started by a 25-year-old mom named Elizabeth, a bicycle repair shop in Vietnam managed by a gal named Nguyen Thi Huong, a car mechanic’s shop in Lebanon run by a gentleman named Ali, an 18-year-old girl named Iris in El Salvador that sells pretty flowers, a small livestock operation in Tajikistan run by a 47 year old gentleman named Tochidin,
a family of 7 in Cambodia that does wooden house construction, a 39-year-old photographer in Mongolia named Batnairamdal who took a bad photo of himself, a small meat market in Ghana run by a 70 year old woman named Ama, a mom named Essi in Togo who sells dried fish, a 24-year-old gal in Ecuador named Cristina who sells rice, sugar, and tuna, and last, a 41-year-old woman in Nicaragua named Gladis who sells cosmetics and jewelry so her children can have a better quality of life. I do these things because I believe in capitalism and free trade more than government.

As a strong libertarian, I believe the government typically creates more problems than it solves. Their intent is often to help people, but it rarely does a good job of it. What really helps people is other people, freedom, free trade, cooperation and competition.

I believe that a good small business creates wealth. For example, the Elizabeth in Peru buys seeds and small plots of land to produce potatoes. By the time the potatoes have grown, they are worth more than the seeds and the time-cost of the land. Everyone becomes wealthier, happier, and more healthy because of this. So, in this case, money really can buy happiness!

I recommend a book called “Free to Choose” by Milton Friedman. If you’d like to find out more about this sort of thing from this Nobel-Prize winning economist in a very easy-to-read book, I highly recommend it.

If you would like to do the same thing, you can put in as little as $25 to Kiva.org. They are a great organization! You can donate easily via PayPal and you get regular updates as you are repaid. So far, I’m getting repaid at a steady click, so I have NO DOUBT about the system they have in place.