New Giraffe Heroes for you
The news around the world has millions on edge, angry, scared, worried about the future. It’s not unreasonable. And we need breaks, moments when we see glimmers of light in the darkness.
Here are ten such lights, people who are sticking their necks out for the common good, capital-G Giraffes who show us the way to lead meaningful lives, no matter what’s happening in the world.
As long as there are Giraffes, there’s hope.
—Ann Medlock, Founder
These are “teasers,” quick looks at the new Giraffes.
For each full story, click on the name (in blue)
and you’ll transported instantly to our free online database.
There, you’ll also find a link to the Giraffe’s website, if there is one.
It’s a way you can keep track of them in the future,
and support their work if you choose to.
In a time when many people—even doctors and nurses—thought the AIDS virus might be airborne, Ruth Burks was a surrogate mother to over a thousand dying men whose families had abandoned them. She listened to their fears, tried to get their families to visit them, sat with them as they died, and arranged for their cremations and burials.
10-year-old Sarah Haycox discovered that in 1969, a civil rights activist had been assassinated in her hometown, but no one knew his story.
She decided that an early learning center that was being built should be named for him and set out to make that so.
Thousands of petition signatures and many a school board meeting later, she had done it. Then she set about fundraising so his family can travel to the dedication of the new building.
Kaycee Hyatt could tell something was wrong with her newborn daughter, Allison, but doctors kept telling her either that the baby was fine or that they couldn’t figure out what the problem was. An MRI finally proved that Allison had suffered a stroke when she was a newborn. Hyatt has since devoted her life to not only helping Allison thrive but also to assisting other worried families whose babies have had strokes.
When she was a young pediatrician, Kiran Martin set up a free clinic in a Delhi slum where cholera was raging. The experience led her into decades of serving the city’s poor and to teaching others around the world how to do such work well.
The founders of Mission 22 want you to know that 22 US combat veterans commit suicide–every day. Brad Hubbard, Magnus Johnson and Mike Kissel face their own traumatic memories again and again as they champion fellow vets whose lives are still in danger, far from any battlefront.
When Vivian Nwakah learned that Nigerians were dying because of counterfeit prescriptions, she used her considerable business experience and all her savings to create a system that foils the powerful profiteers behind the fake drugs, helping people across the continent get safe medications.
Betty Obbo fought governments, corporations, and world banking institutions for 18 years to stop a dam on the Nile River. She failed. And every prediction she made about the damage the dam would do to Uganda’s people has proved right.
Calling herself a “practical environmentalist” she continues to work for farming and construction practices that respect peoples’ need to support themselves and their families.
Dilip Simeon, an academic historian and proponent of non-violence, led his college in a campaign to get a living wage for the college gardener. For his leadership, he was beaten so badly by hired thugs that he was hospitalized. The college president was removed for hiring the thugs and Simeon went on teaching peaceful problem-solving at his college and in venues in many other countries.
Aruna Uprety, a Nepalese physician, has been working for decades to stop the sex-trafficking of Nepalese girls, despite the sometimes violent people who profit from this horror and want no interference.
Her education and prevention programs have been so successful that not one girl enrolled in them has been trafficked.
Sonia Warshawski, the only member of her family who survived the Holocaust, leaves the peace of her quiet life in Kansas again and again to be a witness to the horrors she lived through, speaking at schools, conferences and houses of worship in a time when far too many people claim that the massive attempt at genocide never happened.