Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

In your last video, you asked me how I traverse the Sad Gap; how I overcome feelings of despair and discouragement and helplessness in the face of big problems and come to believe that something can actually be done about them. Well, today I want to tell you a story.

So, we started working with Partners in Health in 2010 in response to an earthquake in Haiti which was one of the biggest news stories in the world at the time, so we were focused on it because everyone was focused on it. As a community we felt powerless before the immense suffering caused by the earthquake and raising money gave us a way to help. But for me, anyway, this strategy was inefficient for a few reasons. First, the suffering caused by the earthquake in Haiti was not caused at its core by an earthquake; it was caused by human choices and human-built systems that had impoverished Haiti for centuries. And so, when the earthquake came, everything from healthcare systems to infrastructure systems were not strong enough to address the crisis.

Understanding that the suffering caused by the earthquake was not really a "natural disaster" helps us to understand how to respond. But because I, like many donors, didn't understand this, a lot of the money that was raised for earthquake relief in Haiti didn't even get spent in Haiti and most that did was spent on short-term interventions, some of which were very important. But they didn't strengthen systems in a long-term way. Now fortunately, Partners in Health did make long term investments in the healthcare system in Haiti, which is why today we have the University Hospital in Mirebalais.

But just to be clear, I wasn't responsible for that. I was all about short-term thinking and short-term solutions to merely natural disasters. The other issue was that a lot of our philanthropy at the time was about us, our feelings of helplessness; our desire to do something. It wasn't really grounded in listening or becoming close to the people affected by these crises. And so, when the world's attention shifted, our attention shifted as well, to the tsunami in Japan, or to the Syrian refugee crisis, or to the Ebola crisis.

Because I didn't have a first priority, it felt to me like there were always new crises and none of the old crises ever got better, which left me perpetually in the Sad Gap. And then, my life changed in 2014 during a conversation with PIH's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Joia Mukherjee.

I said that during the Project for Awesome, we really wanted to raise money for Ebola response efforts and asked if PIH was gonna be a part of that. And in response, Dr. Mukherjee explained to me that fifteen percent of Sierra Leone's healthcare workers had already died of Ebola and so, if charities came in and only stayed until that crisis ended, it would be catastrophic because the healthcare system in Sierra Leone would be even more fragile than it was before the crisis. "So yes," she said, "we are going, but we are also staying. We are staying to help build a stronger healthcare system so that the next catastrophe will be less catastrophic." And then she said, "and we want to ask you to stay too," and that request changed my life.

Staying, learning and listening through open-ended, ongoing commitments: that's what helped me cross the Sad Gap; to understand that our shared problems are tremendous, but so is our shared capacity for addressing them.

Now, I want to be clear that raising money to address crises is very important, but so is having priorities and understanding that other people will have other priorities. Like, you can't go deep on everything, and the deeper you go on one topic the more valuable you become. I've tried to go deep on maternal and child health in West Africa. Hank goes deep on climate change. Our colleague Rosianna Halse Rojas is getting a Masters degree in refugee studies. Our priorities are different, but because we can learn from each other, we all benefit from each of us having priorities.

So I think that is one way to cross the Sad Gap: choose priorities and try to go deep. Not just by listening to podcasts and reading books (although that's very important) but attend meetings and symposia to learn directly from the people making the change because then you will understand and believe that the change is possible.

I'm gonna list some other strategies people recommended in the comments of Hank's video in these comments below. Please add to them. Hank, here's to traversing the Sad Gap together. I'll see you on Friday.