I love my kids. A LOT.
There is a funny thing that happens when you have kids… besides learning how to function on less sleep. You start to care about things you didn’t really pay attention to before, like how many cuss words are on your favorite channel, or how fast the cars drive down your street. You know, stuff that you never blinked an eye at before. But life changes when you have a little one… you start to want to baby proof the world, and it isn’t always just for your children either. You start to recognize and pay attention to the well being of other children around you. Like when I am at the playground with Xander and notice that another child is unattended. I genuinely start to get nervous and begin scanning the playground for that child’s care taker. Normally I would just assume that their parents were somewhere around and that kid wasn’t my problem. I just think about how devistated my little Xan-man would be if he couldn’t find his Daddy… I think any child would be devastated…
Xander is three. He is gonna be five before I blink an eye, and I am pretty sure he will still love his daddy when he is five and I am pretty sure he would be devastated if he was lost on the playground.
Then I imagine Xander being five years old, alone and with a gun in his hands… (I am having a hard time writing this)… no daddy, no mommy, no cuppy at night, no one to cuddle him when he crys… just a gun, and someone telling him that he is going to use it and how to be a solider, a solider for a cause that he can’t possibly believe in or understand.
Sounds crazy right?
Well for thousands of Ugandan children this is a reality.
Thankfully I have a friend named Kamari, and Kamari has an idea, a really really good idea. In partnership with Invisible Children, Kamari has purposed a event called Le Carnaval Invisible. It will be a 21 and over carnival put on at the Grove of Anaheim to raise money for Invisible Children.
Invisible Children started with 3 USC film students who went to Uganda and made a documentary about this war that’s been going on since the 80’s. A man named Joseph Kony was abducting 5 years olds, brainwashing them, and by the time they were 10 they were full fledged soldiers. SO…Invisible Children began to try and help rescue those children, rehabilitate them and give them hope.
Kamari is hoping that by funding the Carnival and raising even more money from it’s proceeds will help Invisible Children make a difference in more children’s lives.
Right now Kamari is raising the seed funding for the event. She has raised $9,600.00 dollars as of the moment I am writing this and she only has 5 days left to meet her goal of $15,000.00.
Part of those funds were raised this evening at the spaghetti night at Cook’s Corner out in Trabuco Canyon. (Cook’s is a rather infamous biker bar out here in the good ‘ol OC. Lots of chrome, lots of leather and lots of beer.) Kamari worked it out with the owner’s of Cook’s Corner so that she could host the all you can eat biker spaghetti bonanza and hold a raffle. She had plenty of generous donors contribute everything from personal training lessons, to tickets to the Teen Choice awards up in Hollywood. It was a pretty fun evening, Xander and Austin stuffed themselves with spaghetti and Stacia and I stratigized how we were going to monitor all 90 of our raffle tickets (Stacia REEAAALLLY wanted to take Austin to the Teen Choice Awards) when they started calling numbers. In the end, we won some person training lessons and had a great time. And Kamari made a bunch of money for Le Carnaval Invisible.
So here is the deal folks; there is a link below… if any what I have written above has spoken to you and you want to learn more… maybe even give a bit to a very worthy cause… then click away.
Help give children hope by clicking HERE
Here are couple pics of all the fun we had to night at the fundraiser (Kamari is the vision in purple, and she is single… just in case you were curious. lol)
