Transcriber: Julie Vital Reviewer: Denise RQ
My name is Pierre, thank you very much for having me.
This is a two-part story.
The first part is about me because I'm selfish and egotistical.
The second part is about the things I do on a day to day basis.
I was always one of those people
that thought everything has a solution, an answer,
there's always a way to do it.
I was very blessed growing up because my parents instilled that in me,
people around me instilled that in me,
Walt Disney instilled that in me.
You can do anything that you set your mind to.
This is a very key part of my growing up, a key part of my development.
It's a key part of my adult life now.
You can do anything you want to, achieve anything you want to.
All you have to do is put a little bit of time and effort into it,
So, I figured whatever problems there were in the world,
I could take care of it by just putting my mind to it.
When I was just a kid
and I saw that genocide and war was happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
I thought, OK, here is a problem.
People don't have food, people don't have water.
Let's do something to fix that, let's raise some cash,
let's fight the things we need to fight to be able to get these things to people.
On and on it went for a few years until I finally got to the stage
where I thought I need to do more, I need to be more,
I need to do a little bit more to help people.
So, in 2007, I applied
for the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development Program,
and somehow I was successful.
I applied to go to Cambodia, but then they rang me up and said,
listen, I know you applied for Cambodia.
You didn't get that, but there's this job in Bangladesh
that no one else wants because it's really difficult.
How do you feel about it?
Yeah, well, I'm pretty egotistical
so let's do it, let's go for it, let's have a go at it.
In September 2007, I went to Bangladesh
working with Habitat for Humanity.
Helping to build homes and recreate villages,
rebuild villages that had been destroyed by floods or natural disasters,
and bring communities out of poverty by helping them get housing.
In December 2007, we got hit by a cyclone.
One minute in and I'm already getting choked up.
My job was to write emails to people.
It's all I did.
I'd sit at a beautiful desk, air conditioned room
in one of the poorest countries on earth,
writing emails and sending pictures to people around the world,
telling them about what we do and how they can help.
Then, the cyclone hit.
Three minutes in.
The cyclone hit, and we lost 100,000 people.
We lost 100,000 people. That's not to say 100,000 people died.
We lost 100,000 people.
No phones, no communications, no way to track people.
So, my job went from being not stressful
and laughing about all the inconsistencies in the developing world
To having to figure out how we're going to find 100,000 people,
how we're going to re-house them, how we're going to find them shelter.
Probably the hardest time of my life was flying into the south of Bangladesh.
Walking through land that used to have villages on it.
And now there's nothing there.
The craziest part was the 150 houses that we had built in that area
were all still standing.
But there was no people, no cattle, no sheep, no nothing.
Stress levels went high, a very difficult time.
Somehow, we got through it.
Somehow, I managed to do what I could to help the situation,
but needed to find a bit of stress relief, which is where this comes in.
See, growing up, I'd play basketball.
And basketball is a form of stress relief for me.
So I figured, let me try and get some stress relief.
I hopped into a rickshaw with one basketball,
tried to explain to the guy to take me to a basketball court.
I don't know if you've ever been to Bangladesh,
but try to find a basketball court in a developing country that has no space.
150 million people in a place the size of about 3/4 of Victoria.
It's not easy to find a basketball court, but eventually we found one.
I hopped out of the rickshaw,
and for about 10 minutes...
Yeah, see, you got to pay attention.
For about 10 minutes, I just started shooting around.
It was amazing; for 10 minutes, you stop thinking about all the stress,
all the things that had been difficult for the last month,
stop thinking about
the faces of the people who were staring at me, looking for help.
It's a hard thing, wanting to help and not being able to help.
Finally, after 10 minutes, I look up.
There's like 100 street kids lined up on the fence.
You know they're street kids
because their clothes are tattered, quite small,
you can't really tell how old they are.
No shoes. Plastic bag wrapped around the wrist.
Now, having a plastic bag wrapped around their wrist
is a sign they're looking for stuff to find on the ground or trade,
pick pocket every now and again.
I motioned for the 100 kids to come on the court.
A bit of miscommunication because having a foreigner in the middle of the court
with a basketball, and go like this...
Is actually quite rude in Bangladesh.
I didn't realize this is a rude gesture,
so if anyone is Bangladeshi, my bad.
Finally, these kids got on the court and started running around.
Imagine one foreigner with one basketball, 100 kids running back and forth,
I'm trying to make sure nobody hits or hurts themselves
or run into each other.
I completely failed. They kept running into each other. It's fantastic.
Then I hear the screaming.
Nothing like a kid's screaming.
I turn around and there's a security guard with a big stick,
beating these kids on the back of the neck.
On the back, back of the legs.
More security guards show up.
Literally grabbed the kids by the ears, dragging them off the court.
I had spent over a decade working in development.
I had spent a decade raising money,
spent a decade reading,
spent a decade teaching even.
Teaching people about development, what it's like in the developing word.
I talked about how there is free education, free medicine.
I talked about how levels of investment in developing countries had increased
four, five, six, tenfold over the last however many years.
I talked about millennium development goals
like it was the be-all and end-all.
What I didn't realize... Good catch.
What I didn't realize was that it's not just about food,
it's not just about medicine, it's not just about water,
it's not just about going into a place
and trying to make the infrastructure better.
Which is an incredibly important thing, don't get me wrong.
But here I was standing in the middle of a basketball court
with kids who were getting beaten up because they had no value.
In so many places around the world, street kids don't have any value.
They just don't.
I spent my life being told, you can be anything you want to be,
you can be whoever you want to be, you can do anything you want to do,
and here, kids who just can't.
They had never heard that before. They had never experienced that before.
That you can be anything you want to be, you can be whoever you want to be,
because you don't have any value.
What value do you have?
In my 12 months in Bangladesh,
I saw kids getting run over in the street and left there.
A couple of weeks ago, one of our kids,
who did get run over in the street about a year ago, a year and a half,
passed away from the injuries that he sustained.
Because he was run over, and for a few hours, nobody stopped.
Rickshaws kept running over him, cars kept running over him.
This wasn't an issue about lack of infrastructure.
This wasn't an issue of access to health,
this wasn't an issue of access to medicine.
This was an issue of just too many people,
not enough values to make sure you don't run over a kid.
So, these hundred kids were getting beaten up,
and I'm thinking to myself,
this is unbelievable, how can this be possible?
How can anyone in the world feel like this about a kid?
That was a big lesson.
That was a lesson for me. That's where my story ends.
We all think in situations like this,
in groups like this
that the way we feel about the world, the way we feel about people
is how everyone around us feels.
This is how people see the world as well.
If I have a certain belief about how people should be treated,
then I must be right because I'm being empathetic.
And I'm trying to have good values,
I'm trying to make sure everyone has a great life.
But the reality is that it's not about good or bad
or wanting the best for other people.
If your circumstances dictate
that you never get around thinking that street kids are worth anything,
then the street kids are just not worth anything.
It's a rough time to go through.
A few weeks after this experience,
this experience on a basketball court in Bangladesh,
I met up with a few other guys who shared my love for basketball,
shared my passion for being in a country like Bangladesh,
and trying to help people,
and make things better for everyone around us.
What we decided to do was to run a small basketball camp.
Real simple: just open up this camp,
let as many kids from the street come in as they wanted to.
We had kids from all corners of the area that we lived in,
come and just play basketball for a couple of hours.
It was an amazing experience
because these kids had never felt as though they were worth anything
because no one else thought they were worth anything.
So, when they finally came onto the basketball court
and were given a shirt, a basketball, given instruction, given clean water,
little emergency packs full of oil and rice,
and all the things they need to live for a week,
It really had a profound effect on them, not just us.
That was an interesting little hand gesture, just then, OK.
It had a profound effect on them, not just us, because as I said,
for once, they didn't feel like they were worthless.
They were genuinely moved
by the fact that somebody cared enough to provide something for them.
which for us was a very strange thing because it's kind of hard to see a kid
and not think that the kid is full of potential
because we'd all been through that.
We'd all been through that experience
of thinking that we could do anything, that we could achieve anything.
That was in early 2008.
Since 2008, we have moved from taking care of 100 kids
to 3,500 kids in ten countries around the world.
We have gone from spending 1,500 dollars in Bangladesh
to spending over 100,000 dollars all around the globe
providing kids with opportunities to go to school, with clean water,
access to health, access to all kinds of educational benefits
they wouldn't have had access to before,
all by using a very simple concept:
that we have to teach people,
we have to remind people, is probably the best way to describe it,
that they have value, and that they have worth.
So, here's a second part of my story.
How do you develop aid?
How do you provide aid when aid has already been given?
Maybe that's the wrong way to ask.
How do you provide help to a community
that's already been given plenty of help
in terms of food, and water, and clothing, and infrastructure?
How do you do it?
That was a question we asked ourselves as we were growing.
Why is it? Why is it that these kids don't have a sense of self-worth?
What is it that removes that sense of self worth from their environment?
We talked about one of them already, overpopulation.
When you have that many people,
necessarily people start to matter a bit less
because it's hard to work in that kind of a context,
to live in that kind of a context,
it's hard to give everyone the same kind of value as you have
when there's such a huge range of people
with such a massive gap in terms of socioeconomic status.
So, what do we need to do to change that?
Our first idea was, let's get kids from high socioeconomic areas
to interact with the lower socioeconomic areas.
It's an amazing thing
to see these kids that live in these high apartment buildings
that overlook slums that are built on water,
literally on garbage bags and water,
and never have actually met somebody from those communities.
They live right next to each other.
The air-conditioned BMWs drive by the kids walking in the street
every single day,
but they never talked to each other, they never actually met each other.
So, we organized these tournaments and camps.
We'd bring these kids together and see if it had any effect on them.
Absolutely amazing.
That spark that somebody gets
when they realize that somebody they have never talked to before
is similar to them,
is profound.
That spark when they realize that the person
that they have just played the sport that they love with
has the exact same passion for this game as they do
is profound.
It's something that we seemed to have overlooked,
at least it's something that I seemed to have overlooked
was working in development that whole time.
Apart from delivering aid, apart from building houses,
apart from doing all these things
that build up the bricks and mortar of a developing community,
how are we dealing with the people?
It's not a new concept, definitely not a new concept,
but it's something that just hasn't been touched on enough.
And you'll hear a little bit from speakers today, I hope,
you'll hear from speakers
that have gone into developing countries and done aid work.
If you don't target local communities, if you don't work with people,
and only seek to provide goods or services without having that human interaction,
it becomes very, very difficult to change that paradigm,
it becomes very difficult to change the thought process of people
to start caring about their own communities.
We worked in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
In Afghanistan, there's no giving to speak of within the community.
People in the higher socioeconomic groups don't really have the opportunity
to provide funds or volunteer hours to people in lower socioeconomic areas
because it's just not part of daily life.
It's the same thing in Bangladesh. It's just not part of their daily life.
If we change that, if we find a way to provide people with that opportunity
- heads up, here comes another one -
if we find that way to give people that opportunity,
maybe the paradigm will shift,
maybe people will start caring about the people around them.
One of our kids that was run over about a year and a half ago,
as I said, passed away last week.
And I got the call that he passed away.
It was obviously a sad moment, it was a difficult moment to deal with.
So, I have to call around and tell everyone else in the group
and calling around to our board members
who now live in 12 different countries.
We decided that what we'd do is chip in to help with funeral costs.
We'd helped the kid in terms of getting an education,
clothing, and water, and food,
and making sure his family was provided for.
Now, let's see if we can pay for the funeral.
So, we ring up Bangladesh and say, hey, whatever you paid for the funeral,
please let us know, we'll provide you with that,
as well as a little bit extra.
The response was that he's been laying on the table
for the last four days, three, four days.
He'd been laying on the table that whole time.
And no one had bothered to bury him.
That's tough to deal with after 3, 4 years working in our group.
That's really hard to deal with.
Why was he just laying on the table?
He was laying on the table
because nobody had cared to put him into the ground.
It wasn't their responsibility.
Why would we put the guy in the ground?
There was no money to pay for the funeral.
But no one had reached out and said there's no money to pay for the funeral.
Nobody thought it was important that the kid get buried. Why not?
Isn't he one of our kids?
Don't we pay for his well being, and then provide you guys, this organization,
with some further funds to make sure everything's OK?
Yeah, but...
It's not something that we're occupied with right now.
It's not on our list of to-do's right now.
That's a harsh reality.
That's a tough reality.
I tell these stories, not to make you sad,
so I hope, as the first speaker,
this doesn't get you down for the rest of the day.
The reason I tell you these stories
is because I want you to have a think about your own situation.
I want you to think about
what are you doing when you want to do more?
Because this is an exceptionally unique group of people.
You're all here because you want to be here,
and you have a passion to learn more and know more.
So, I want you to question
what it is that you're doing when you want to do more.
Do you really want to stand back
and allow these kinds of things to happen in the world?
Or...
Or do you want to be responsible for more than just, saying, good things?
Do you want to be part of that conversation
which is about changing people's minds about how people are treated?
See, it's a simple thing to say
that we need to put more money into developing countries.
It really is.
And up to now, it's helped. It has helped.
But that kind of investment, that plateaus at some point
because we always forget to talk about people.
We always forget to talk about
whether we need to be addressing some of the social issues
on a more simple level than the high level thinking that we do.
What is it that causes people to not care about each other?
What is it that causes people
to not pay attention to the people around them?
What is it that causes people
to forget that everyone is exactly the same as they are?
I think the last four years, we have discussed more and more
that Disney movies should become part
of everyone's day-to-day curricular activities, right?
Big Bang [Ballers] was started in late 2007, early 2008
to try and take care of 100 kids,
and only four years later, we're taking care of 35,000 kids
on a daily basis.
Dealing with people helps.
Dealing with people around you helps.
Caring for the people around you definitely makes a huge difference.
I hope you think about that for the rest of the day.
Thanks for your time.
(Applause)