All of Us

Goodbye Refugee Camp, Hello Strongheart House!

So much is happening here. Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana (my home away from home) is closing soon so we're working hard to help resettle some of the kids back into Liberia.

As part of that.....STRONGHEART HOUSE!! We've found a 13 bedroom house in Robertsport, Liberia. You can click here to learn all about our latest Ten Days trip to help get the house (currently without a roof) into shape!

The Freeman family - five of the coolest kids ever - are going to be among our first residents. They're a family of five orphans who have stayed together despite incredible odds.

Lovetta Conto, 15 and the fiercest former refugee/fashion designer to ever come out of an African civil war, is also moving in. You can read her remarkable story here.


Lovetta - 15 years old - sporting the jewelry she created from melted bullet casings from the Liberian Civil War. It's a beautiful leaf charm with the word "life" inscribed on it. Here's a pic of the bullets on the streets of Monrovia during the war. As you can see, there's no shortage of raw materials for Lovetta to work with to create her jewelry.

Madame Penda, only the most kick-ass woman on the planet. She stayed in rebel territory during the war in Cote d'Ivoire - shepherding over 1,000 orphans through the darkest days of that particular conflict. I helped get food and medicine in but she stuck it out there virtually alone with her small, brave team.

This is us, in easier times.

Hey, it's my bio.

Cori is a screenwriter and playwright, as well a former television executive. You can read her career bio here.

Cori’s life took an unusual turn in 2002 when she learned – through a random internet listing - of an orphanage caught behind rebel lines during the civil war in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa. Over 1,000 children, cared for by a handful of workers, were trapped without food or medicine. Cori raised enough money from friends through Paypal to purchase $100,000 worth of medicine and coordinated a convoy with the Red Cross to transport the shipment in through rebel territory.

From there, she began a second career of taking on relief efforts in Africa for urgent situations often overlooked by the mainstream media. She has since initiated programs that include training rural birth attendants in West Africa how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV (Cradle of Life), coordination of emergency medical evacuations for children requiring life-saving surgeries (The Next Right Thing), an education and feeding program for former slave children in the Gambia (The Cham Family Project) and leading groups of adventurous volunteers to Africa on missions to make a difference (Ten Days).

Her projects have been featured on BBC, NPR, The Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Recently, ABC World News named her “Person of the Week” and followed her to Ghana as she finished up the building of a school for unaccompanied minors in a Liberian refugee camp.

Currently, Cori is spearheading two projects: The Name Campaign, an urgent media campaign to help end the conflict involving thousands of children kidnapped by rebel leader Joseph Kony in Northern Uganda – and Strongheart Fellowship, a social entrepreneur residency program for exceptional kids from extreme situations.

On a less illustrious note, she has passed out cold during an amputation surgery, been caught in an election riot, crashed through a blockade of spiked-club-wielding highway bandits, and been stuck on a hotel roof for a week due to civil unrest with nothing but popcorn and her various Mac devices.

Click here for her old blog.

Writing Bio

Cori began her writing career as a playwright in Austin, Texas where she collaborated with a diverse series of co-writers ranging from Willie Nelson to incarcerated teens. She sold the second television series she ever pitched: Breaker High starring Ryan Gosling to UPN for sixty-five episodes and assumed it would always be that easy.

While working on the set of a series featuring two well-known and very wealthy teen twins, Cori wrote her first feature script in five days while holed up in abandoned production offices on the Universal lot.

Her second feature, the adventure comedy Knockdown Drag Out, was written from the jungles of Guatemala and emailed back in pieces to her manager whenever the generator was working. Focus Features covered it as “a summer blockbuster hit waiting to happen.” She is currently developing a project for David Kirschner Productions and is exec-producing a film for Miramax with the super styley Ben Affleck attached to direct.

This Piece of Truth & Beauty

"When all the words have been written, and all the phrases have been spoken, the great mystery of life will still remain....The world is a great mysterious place, and its possibilities are infinite, governed only by what our hearts can conceive. If we incline our hearts towards the darkness, we will see darkness. If we incline them toward the light, we will see the light.

Those of great heart have always known this. They have understood that, as honorable as it is to see the wrong and try to correct it, a life well lived must somehow celebrate the promise that life provides. The darkness at the limits of our knowledge; the darkness that sometimes seem to surround us is merely a way to make us reach beyond certainty, to make our lives a witness to hope, a testimony to possibility, an urge toward the best and the most honorable impulses that our hearts can conceive.

It is not hard. There is in each of us, no matter how humble, a capacity for love. Even if our lives have not taken the course we had envisioned, even if we are less than the shape of our dreams, we are part of the human family. Somewhere, in the most inconsequential corners of our lives, is the opportunity for love.... There is no tragedy or injustice so great, no life so small and inconsequential, that we cannot bear witness to the light in the quiet acts and hidden moments of our days.

And who can say which of these acts and moments will make a difference? The universe is vast and is a magical membrane of meaning, stretching across time and space, and it is not given to us to know her secrets and her ways. Perhaps we were placed here to meet the challenge of a single moment; perhaps the touch we give will cause the touch that will change the world."

Whoever you are, oh writer-of-the-above, you're amazing. I want to know you.

UPDATE: KENT NERBURN wrote this!!! Amazing writer, thinker, graciously willing to share his gift for seeing into the swirl of life and making sense of it. www.kentnerburn.com