Oct 2010 // Kevin Whipps
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the American way of life. We have our cell phones, our iPods, and sometimes we even complain when our Starbucks coffee isn’t done with exactly the right amount of soy milk. These, and many more products that make our life as idyllic as they seem to be are thanks to advancements in microchip technology. Unfortunately, it’s also part of what’s killing children thousands of miles away, far away from our eyes.
Sean Carasso was living that idyllic life. Right out of college he worked as an assistant to John Paul DeJoria, the CEO of Paul Mitchell, which required him to really live it up. Trips on private jets, expensive cars, and lavish meals were all a part of his day-to-day routine, but somewhere along the way, he decided that things needed to change. “I mean, it was just there was nothing that we didn’t do,” Carasso says. “I mean, the presidential suite in the Venetian, and the Mandarin Oriental, and all of this stuff — the private jets and the luxuries and all of it. And in the end, you know, what you realize is that the only thing that matters is people. It’s just one another, right?”
Carasso decided that he wanted to give back to the community, so he hooked up with a friend of his to go to Africa and donate shoes to needy kids through TOMS Shoes. Once he arrived on the continent, he helped to put shoes on around 2,000 children, and then decided that he wanted to go exploring. “And to be entirely honest, for me, from there, I just wanted to get lost,” says Carasso. “There’s this great quote that we use by Herman Melville. He says, ‘It is not down on any map. True places never are.’ And so that was the idea, was to find true places. Sort out true people ripe with sounds I’ve never heard before, smell smells that I never smelled before, and just go.”
So off he went, spending the next three months backpacking through the deserts and jungles of Africa, trying to get lost. At the end of it all, he ended up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is where his true journey would begin.
“So, just before I had left for Africa a friend of mine named Bobby Bailey had sat me down for a drink and said, ‘Look Sean, they say the biggest war in the world is happening in Congo, but we don’t know anything about it.’ And it was like the biggest war in the world, what the heck does that mean? How is that even possible that that’s even happening and we don’t know anything about it?” Carasso says. It turns out that the Congo is an area ripe in natural resources, particularly the ones used in microchip and computer manufacturing. This has led to wars over who owns those minerals, but also has evolved into a horrible genocide and mistreatment of women the likes of which have never been seen. And here in America, this is just another war happening on another continent, that no one wants to talk about.
Except Carasso. He decided that he wanted to find out what was happening in the Congo, so he spent five days wandering through the jungle, trying to find the true story. It was on the fifth day that things changed. “So we went in, and we were sort of sticking our noses where it didn’t belong and at the end of the fifth day we found this military encampment that is beating former child soldiers. Treating them essentially as war criminals,” says Carasso.
He spent the next few hours talking to these children, trying to learn more about who they were and what they came from. As it turns out, even though oceans and cultures divided them, they both had commonalities. “But as we’re sitting there and we’re sort of speaking to one another and sharing each other’s stories, we realize that we feel hunger the same way, we feel thirst the same way, we sort laughed at the same jokes — although there’s like a 30 second delay because of the translator,” Carasso recalls. “I mean, I was away from my family for four months; they’ve been away from theirs for four years. We’ve longed for our families the same way. Despite the differences, the commonalities were overwhelming.”
That’s when he first found out about the whistles. In the Congo, everyone who can carry a gun does. But those children who are too young to carry a weapon are given whistles that they wear around their neck. Their job is to go out into the jungle and find the enemy. When they do, they blow their whistles loudly to alert the soldiers to attack. This also alerts the enemy, and puts the kids in a precarious situation. Either they fall down and feign death, or get shot by the enemy. Either way, the whistles go down with them. Carasso knew he had to do something about this, he just didn’t know what.
“And I went home that night and literally just balling through tears and sort of chugging down red wine, punching holes through walls, and I just wrote this blog called ‘Falling Whistles,’” says Carasso. “I sent it out to 80 friends and family, and they literally forwarded it around the world. I woke up the next morning and had thousands of messages in my inbox just saying, ‘What do we do?’ ‘How do we help?’ ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘What’s going on?’ And it was like, ‘I’m 26, I have no idea. I just got here.’”
But he knew he had to do something. At first, he spent some time trying to just figure out what and how this was happening, meeting with rebel leaders, warlords, and politicians. Then he returned home and it was all he could talk about. He had to tell everyone he knew about what was happening in Congo, and that they needed to do something about it. That’s when he was given a gift.
“One of my best friends, in of one of my midnight fits, he gave me a gift,” recalls Carasso. “He went on eBay, bought a vintage whistle, put it around my neck, and said, ‘No matter where you go, keep those boys alive in your heart. Keep them at the forefront of this fight.’” That opened the door up. Now Carasso wasn’t the guy ranting at parties about trying to fix a problem that no one understood. Instead, people were asking him about his new bit of jewelry, which opened up the door for further conversation.
At just 26, Carasso had found his calling. Now he just needed to figure out how to make that work, because the only thing he had on his side was a lot of inexperience. “So we have five dollars and we have this whistle and we started saying, ‘Make their weapon your voice and be a whistle blower for peace.’ And we literally started selling whistles out of our pockets.”
That started the movement. First, they raised enough money to send one of their friends to Austin to setup a fundraiser. That brought in $300, so another friend hitchhiked to New York, stopping at every town and city along the way, bringing the message to the country. The movement continued with a trio of college kids who bicycled from Florida to San Diego, spreading the gospel even further. Another guy slept in an attic for four months so he could design the Falling Whistles website. But it’s all been worth it.
“Almost 2 years later, we are working with local leaders in the war region to rehabilitate 267 kids,” Carasso says. “We have opened up an office in D.C. We’re in 50 of the best retail stores in the country, and we are moving. We have whistle blowers in like 30 countries, in the states, and we’re building the most dynamic force for peace in Congo in 100 years. And it’s moving. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a whole lot further than we were 2 years ago.”
There’s still much more work to be done, but Carasso and the Falling Whistles team is up for the challenge. They’re currently on tour, driving across the country in a van, speaking at colleges and workshops and spreading the message. Their goal is to make sure that every child in the Congo goes to school, and make sure that corporations are 100-percent committed to seeing peace in the region.
But really, it comes down to that first day that Carasso met the kids in the middle of the jungle. It was a powerful moment that changed his life forever, and something that he’ll never forget. “You can’t help but be transformed when power and poverty collide. You just can’t help it. That moment, that moment of collision really is ... it’s transformative, it’s cataclysmic. I think it’s the most powerful moment there is.”