Editor’s Note:
About a year and a half ago, writer Will Laughlin decided to abandon his 15-year career as a mental health executive to see if he could cobble together a less structured, more creative career featuring his passions for adventure, writing and philanthropy. He didn’t want to just work for a living or to pay the mortgage, he wanted to live for a living. Laughlin describes it as a terrifying leap — would he succeed or fail at the things he cared about most? Was it foolish and selfish to abandon his career during a recession?
Laughlin decided he needed help for the journey. He started interviewing other people who were living unconventionally, people who were making changes or sacrifices in order to do what they loved.
This week, Tonic presents the “Living for a Living” series. It’s a personal exploration for Laughlin as well as a writing project (he may turn this into a separate blog and book), but also an inspiring look at a handful of people around the world who have left something behind for something different, something they love doing. Their stories are wildly different but share a common thread. Who couldn’t use a little motivation in this New Year?
Three years ago Tanya Monalisa Pinto had it made. The beautiful young executive lived in the comfortable Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas, was rocketing through ranks of the biggest independent advertising agency in the country, traveled the world visiting major clients, and still had plenty of time for friends, dates, yoga, vacations and movies. Everything was on schedule and in its place. Life was good.
“I was little miss perfect advertising executive,” she says of her first six years with The Richards Group. In the last three years, however, Pinto hasn’t taken a single vacation. She’s moved back in with her parents. She’s forgone expected promotions. Her friends complain that they never see her anymore. She doesn’t have time for movies or dating and rarely touches her yoga mat. Pinto has been hospitalized four times for dysentery and malnourishment, and her disposable income has shrunk, she estimates, by nearly 50 percent. Why?
“I’ve found my calling,” Pinto explains.
Her calling is Baal Dan, or “Child Donation” in Hindi, the NGO she founded and personally funded in 2005 to serve the kind of impoverished children she met during a trip to Calcutta that same year. Pinto now runs both the US and India operations of the growing non-profit and personally funds those operations so she can keep her promise to donors: 97 percent – 100 percent of funds donated to Baal Dan go directly to the poor. She’s also decided to keep her day job at the Richards Group.
“I’m at the office from 8:30 to 6:30 every day, travel quite a bit for work and keep my phone on for clients into the evening,” she says. “So that leaves lunchtime, weekends, and nights for me to work on Baal Dan.” Pinto also uses all of her vacation time and takes unpaid leave — up to six months a year — for trips to India so that she can be on the ground doing legwork for Baal Dan.
A Genetic Homecoming
Pinto was “an Indian girl who had never been to India,” she says of herself prior to visiting Calcutta. Though born in India, Pinto moved to Dubai when she was only six months old. Subsequently, her father’s work in the travel industry took the family to Australia and finally to the US. For years, Pinto had longed to visit her place of birth and ancestry, but other travel had always taken precedence. So she finally just made it happen; Pinto bought a ticket, packed her bags, and told her employer she’d be back in a bit. Though her peripatetic childhood had forced Pinto to cultivate a global identity rather than a single cultural or national affiliation, she felt, immediately upon stepping off the plane onto Indian soil, “this genetic connection, like, “Oh, I’m from this place. I belong here.’” It’s a feeling that’s never left her.
Not one to do things halfway, Pinto stayed in Calcutta for three full months and spent her entire sabbatical volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Shishu Bhavan orphanage and Nirmal Hriday home for the dying. Despite her extensive international experience, Pinto was confronted by extremes of suffering and poverty she hadn’t experienced anywhere else. But rather than recoiling from the situation, she found herself softening.
Pinto taught, played games, changed diapers and held children who were sick, malnourished and, in some cases, dying of hunger. After her daily duties at the orphanage, she would wander the streets surrounding the orphanage, befriending some of Calcutta’s 200,000 homeless children. She was amazed by their ability to radiate joy in the midst of profound suffering. Even the poorest people she met in India, Pinto says, “make you feel welcome, share what they have … and give you a smile.”
Immediately upon her return from India Pinto founded Baal Dan without any specific goal and, to hear her tell it, without any choice about it either.
“It was just inside me,” she says of her calling to serve India’s poor. “I didn’t choose it. I just saw something I had to do.” Thus began the loneliness of 100 hour work weeks, the trading of her apartment for a small bedroom in her parents’ house, the loss of her social life, the slowing of her professional ascension, and the onset of stress and travel-related health issues.
Little Miss Perfect’s life would never be perfect again.
Peanut-Butter Powered Education
So Baal Dan was born of an unexpected surge of emotion, inspiration and, perhaps, simple obedience, according to Pinto. There was no plan behind it except to “do something” about the suffering of children in India, 40 percent of whom are malnourished.
“There was a poster in the orphanage in Calcutta with a quote from Mother Teresa that said, ‘If you can’t feed a hundred children, then feed just one.’ I chose to follow that line of thinking when I started Baal Dan, rather than be overwhelmed by the scale of the need and do nothing.”
From the beginning, the organization has been driven by passion and directed, it seems, by a higher power.
“If this were goal driven or all planned out, the level of effort it has required of me would be unsustainable.” But despite its grassroots nature, Baal Dan has evolved a crystal clear, two-pronged mission that now directs all of its efforts and initiatives. “Food gets kids to school. School gets kids out of poverty,” Pinto says simply, summing up her organization’s mission to combine food and education to fight poverty in India. As tidy as this dyadic mission may sound, though, it was born out of Pinto’s own messy experience.
“I know personally how these children feel,” says Pinto. “On one of my trips to Calcutta, I caught the usual bug. I’m already small but I lost a lot of weight and became dehydrated and malnourished to the point of being hospitalized.” Pinto was hospitalized not once, but four times with life-threatening malnutrition. She remembers being listless, unable to think, unable to write a simple email. Pinto suddenly understood at a visceral level why even mildly malnourished children found it so difficult to make it to school and, once there, to concentrate and learn.
As a result, all of Baal Dan’s education programs include lunch, both to motivate attendance and to fuel the brain functioning necessary for learning. Since Pinto’s own journey back to health included peanut butter therapy, peanut butter has become a school lunch staple, supplementing the standard Indian fare of lentils and rice with a nice shot of fat and protein.
But while Pinto sees nutrition as fundamental to helping children survive poverty, she sees education as the key to escaping it.
“My own grandfather was an orphan in Mumbai,” Pinto explains. Though Pinto never met her grandfather, his story has been central to the family’s understanding of society, culture, privilege and poverty.
“Growing up, my father often spoke of my grandfather, reminding us that it takes just one person, just one generation, to permanently end a family’s cycle of poverty. In my family, my grandfather was that person simply because somebody fed him and put him in school.”
Two Lives in One
While Baal Dan has mostly funded the efforts of other non-profits that support Baal Dan’s mission, Pinto’s future plans include building schools — the first of which is already funded — and leading a peanut butter campaign to get the super food into school lunches to fight malnutrition.
Even though Pinto started out with the idea, she says, of “just helping a few kids if I could,” her organization has already fed and educated 3,000 children. Because of this, she says, packing two identities — ad executive and NGO director — into one life has been well worth it.
“Whether you call it a vocation, a calling or a passion, it’s not a choice. It’s just what I need to be doing.”
Pinto wonders out loud, though, how long she’ll be able to keep up her current level of output, admitting to an unsustainable level of workaholism. But for now, while she’s young and unattached, she says, “I just want to make a difference and do some good, thanks to the grace of God and the wonderful people who support Baal Dan.
Photos courtesy of Will Laughlin.