John: Good morning Hank, it's the 2013 Project for Awesome. Huzzah!

So Hank, the 24-hour Project for Awesome live show begins at noon Eastern Time today - there's a link in the dooblydoo or you can just go to youtube.com/vlogbrothers.

And right now, click right here, cl- click anywhere to open a new window that will take you to the Project for Awesome fundraising page where you can get amazing perks like the Men of YouTube calendar or the Women of YouTube calendar. Or a twenty page snippet of the story I've been working on for the past few months.

One hundred percent of the money that we raise will be distributed to organizations that we, as a community, choose by voting at projectforawesome.com. All of these links are in the dooblydoo.
So we raise the money but then we also choose how to distribute it, so it's up to all of us to be good stewards of the money we raise. 

OK, three final notes: you can find Project for Awesome videos by searching YouTube for Project for Awesome 2013; every comment that you make on a Project for Awesome video, or tweet with the hashtag #projectforawesome, is worth a penny; and lastly, for the first hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, every dollar that you donate will be matched by anonymous donors, so your dollar is worth two dollars.

Alright, onto my Project for Awesome video. So Hank, there is a lot of World Suck. But there are two absolute humanitarian disasters going on in the world right now.

First, in the Central African Republic hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and thousands killed after a coup that eventually spiralled into sectarian violence.

Hank, right now there are forty thousand people in and around the airport in the Capital City of Bangui trying to get to food and medical supplies and to safety. Schools are closed and growing numbers of children are being conscripted to fight in militias.

And Save The Children is on the ground there. treating children who've been injured by machetes and gunshots, and offering basic health services to kids and their families.

And Save The Children is also working in the countries that border Syria, where more than two million Syrians are now living in sprawling refugee camps like this one.

More than half the residents of these refugee camps are children.
Okay, let's listen to this woman, Nora, trying to feed her young son back in Syria.

Nora: I had to cook anything soft like plain soup or tea with bread just to feed him. His teeth did not grow. Any child should have teeth by 1 year old. His teeth never grew. He has a calcium deficiency.

John: So Hank, no aid organization is gonna fix the disasters in Syria and the Central African Republic. Malnutrition and disease aren't just caused by lack of access to food and healthcare, they're also caused by war and politics and decaying infrastructure. And the problem is so complex and overwhelming that sometimes it feels like you can't do anything - that nothing you do can matter.

But it does matter. Okay, here's a kid named Sammy. 

Sammy: When there was no food, my siblings got very hungry and they would come to me or to mum and say, "Mum, we are hungry... we want..."

John: The good news is that Sammy doesn't have to worry anymore that his siblings won't be able to eat. That's what organizations like Save The Children and others in the refugee camps are fighting to accomplish, and it does matter.

I truly believe that Sammy and more than a million kids like him will be better off if Nerdfighteria partners with effective and efficient organizations like Save The Children who are working in these refugee camps. 

Hank, Nora's eight months pregnant right now and if we invest in her baby, that kid will have a better chance of going to school and leading a healthy life, which we know are two of the biggest predictors for adult success.

These people are worth investing in and while they may live far away from us, they are still our neighbors. And I am convinced that if we help these kids now, they will eventually help us to live in a more peaceful and just world.

So that's why I'm asking you to go to projectforawesome.com and vote for Save The Children and other organizations that fight poverty and disease in the developing world. 

Hank, again, links to everything below. I will see you on the P4A livestream!