This week I speak with my friend, filmmaker and author Gerry Straub about his life making films about extreme poverty around the world, and then his move to Haiti where he founded the Santa Chiara Children’s Center, an orphanage for children in war-torn Port au Prince. Last year, he had to flee Haiti because of the total violence and anarchy that has swept through the country. Since then, he’s been living in Florida and helping the orphanage online and via zoom. He has now written a new book about his mythic journey from Hollywood, where he was once the director of the soap opera “General Hospital,” to Assisi, where he wrote his award- winning book about St. Francis called The Sun and the Moon Over Assisi , to his founding Pax Et Bonum Communications, where for twenty years he traveled into the poorest slums on the planet and made some 20 movies about extreme poverty. All those films can now be watched for free online at www.paxetbonumcomm.org (including the film he made about my work for nonviolence, “The Narrow Path”). “I was just trying to understand St Francis' love of the poor and poverty itself,” he tells me at the start. “I knew could put the power of film to the service of the poor.” Gerry moved to Haiti himself and started the orphanage. His new spiritual memoir, The Cross of Love, The Pain of Poverty , (with a foreword by me) is available online and all proceeds go to the orphanage. To learn about Santa Chiara, or offer a donation, please visit www.santachiaracc.org . “We wanted the children to live a nonviolent life. In this horrible place of screaming kids and gun shots, something beautiful was created.” Listen in and be inspired! www.paxetbonumcomm.org www.santachiaracc.org
