Good morning Hank, It's Friday December 9th 2016, the beginning of the 10th annual Project for Awesome! You can head over to projectforawesome.com now to watch the 48 hour live stream and to watch and vote for P4A Videos or head over to projectforawesome.com/donate to donate and get great perks, from socks to signed books.

So during the first half of the Project for Awesome we're raising money for Save the Children and Partners in Health. Two of the most highly regarded and efficient non profits working in global health and education. I wanna give you an idea of what they do and given that this is the 10th Project for Awesome, I thought we could we could look at the difference 10 years can make.

Like, 10 years ago the Rwinkwavu Hospital in in Rwanda was extremely dilapidated and barely functioning. Today it's a safe and sanitary hospital providing high quality care. Ten years ago in Rwanda's Burera district there were no hospitals at all. Today they don't just have a hospital, they have a hospital with a cancer center and a neonatal intensive care unit. And Partners in Health lead the drive to build and fund and staff both those hospitals They also work around the world to train and employ community health workers like Muhammad from Sierra Leone and tens of thousands of people like him.

Muhammed: I am the most sophisticated, least expensive technology in Sierra Leone.

John: And it's pretty astonishing just how effective this work has been. A decade ago almost 13% of children in Sierra Leone died before the age of 5, today it's under 9%. In Rwanda life expectancy was 56 a decade ago today it's 64, and there are similar stories around the world.

In the last 10 years the global absolute poverty rate has fallen by more than half. In 2006 18% of the world's children were under weight because of malnutrition, today it's down to 14% and world wide 4 million fewer children died last year than died in 2006.

But there's a coldness to numbers, right? Like it's hard to imagine the millions of parents who won't have to suffer the unbearable grief of losing a child or the tens of thousands of kids who wouldn't have mothers if not for the gains in maternal health in the last decade. When you hear, for instance, that Save the Children provides nutrition and health care and educational opportunities to millions of kids every year, that's not a picture. I think sometimes statistics can be a barrier to empathy rather than a path to it. So let's look at one family.

Save the Children is very active in the ongoing South Sudanese refugee crisis Providing education and safe spaces for children and also trying to reunite families who have been torn apart by war This woman, Grace, was separated from her two daughters during an attack in her community and she hadn't seen her kids in 2 years. In fact, she didn't even know if they'd survived. Save the Children case workers were able to connect Grace to her two daughters Through a database of missing kids and reunite the family. This moment didn't end the war or end the refugee crisis, but for this one family it meant everything.

Whether reuniting families or saving lives through health care and nutrition these little successes are not little when they're yours. Of course the scope of the challenge before us remains overwhelming as Muhammed put it

Muhammed: There is no easy solution to the war on suffering.

John: But our support for Save the Children and Partners in Health enables them to hire more community health workers, build more hospitals and schools and reunite more families. And maybe a decade from now we'll be able to look back and see how those little successes were part of a much larger one.

For the first half of the Project for Awesome every dollar donated up to $300,000 will be matched to $4 you can have have a huge impact right now at projectforawesome.com/donate. And also you can get great perks there's everything from tote bags to commemorative pressed pennies to the first new writing I've released in several years. During the second half of the Project for Awesome we'll be raising money for charities chosen by you via your votes at projectforawesome.com so head over there to watch and vote, thank you happy Project for Awesome, DFTBA. Hank, I will see you in the live stream.