I spent this past Christmas in the Philippines paying respects to my grandma who passed away after a long battle with cancer. Thankfully while we were there, Grandpa seemed his usual self. We stayed at his house to keep him company, and he seemed to be taking the news well.

One afternoon, I walked downstairs into the living room and saw Grandpa watching TV. He beckoned me over to watch with him. The date on the ancient VCR recording flickered 1995. On screen, a chorus of young children no more than ten years old were singing what sounded to my unfamiliar ears like traditional Chinese opera. As I patiently watched the children recite verse after verse, I could only imagine how many times Grandpa must have watched this same recording over and over through the years. Interrupting my thoughts, Grandpa informed me in broken English that these children were all part of a nonprofit established in his home village – a nonprofit he had funded in its entirety for seven years.

The delight in his voice couldn’t be masked by his halting speech. This was my grandfather’s pride and joy – establishing a nonprofit that would preserve culture and tradition to his village in Fujian, China for years to come. Never did he tell me how he came about the money to support this charity. It was only hearing from my mom (who heard from my dad) that he had owned a very successful export business many years back. Yet Grandpa didn’t brag to me about the sales he generated over the years, or the profitable contracts he landed. At the end of the day, this charity was his greatest accomplishment, and it was this charity he wanted to share with his grandson.

“Look! Look!”

Grandpa nearly jumped out of his seat as he motioned at the screen. On screen, the camera had panned away from the performers to focus on one dignified member of the audience. She sat pristinely watching the performance unfold before her. The image flickered with years of wear, but the figure was still recognizable.

“That’s your grandma! .. That’s my wife!”

I looked from the screen back to Grandpa. There was a sparkle in his normally sleepy-looking eyes, a bright smile filled his weary face. As he settled back into his seat, his bright smile faded slowly into a peaceful, meditative one, the sparkle never leaving his eyes.

What are you doing today that will bring a smile to your face years from now? What part of your life will you jump up to show your grandchildren decades from now?

Another purpose of The Legacy Movement blog will also be to tell of the legacies that others have left behind. Many of these people are ordinary people coming from ordinary backgrounds, but what set them apart was the vision they saw to improve the world around them and their determination to let nothing stop them from making that vision become reality.

One such person is Dr. Paul Farmer. Many people living in the US grew up with more than Paul had in his childhood. He spent much of his childhood living in a bus with his six other siblings and mother and father. In spite of his upbringing (or perhaps because of it), Farmer dedicated his life to the fight against poverty. After working his way through Harvard Medical School, he founded Partners in Health and helped raise the money to build the Zanmi Lasante Clinic in Haiti. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and its people live in fear of crime and oppression. Farmer spent the next several years splitting his time between working in the States to pay his bills and building up the Zanmi Lasante Clinic from scratch. Since its inception in 1987, the Zanmi Lasante Clinic has reduced infant mortality and malnutrition dramatically, vaccinated all the children in its area, and built schools, houses, and water/sanitation systems in the neighborhood. The most amazing thing is that Partners in Health has brought tuberculosis infection to a standstill on the island.

Fmr. President Bill Clinton wrote about Dr. Farmer in his book Giving and asked him why he didn’t simply volunteer a couple weeks out of the year and spend the rest of his time working for his own benefit. Paul’s answer was that even while he grew up in hard conditions, his parents were always concerned about those who were even worse off than they were and showed as much generosity as they could afford. The families he met in Haiti lived in conditions that made his bus look like a palace. Paul wanted to empower the people he met in Haiti with the same medical conditions available in America, and his vision resulted in changing the way health care works in an entire country. That is the kind of legacy that one person with a vision can leave on the world.

Dr. Paul Farmer is now in Rwanda implementing his Partners in Health model and leaving a legacy there.