Yoshi Aono

by Asa Henderson 

Yoshi Aono is an artist and a humanitarian.  He has participated in relief missions to post-tsunami Thailand, Cambodia, post-Katrina, Louisiana, Kenya, and post-earthquake, Haiti.  He was also the lead guitarist for the Boulder-based Acoustic Junction from 1990 to 1995, and has worked as a music producer.  Her Many Voices assisted in getting contributions of aid for his recent trip to Haiti in March.  For this trip he co-founded Hope Delivers with Tamara Kerner to hold donation yoga classes.  He collected over three tons of aid, including yoga mats donated by Boulder residents and businesses to use as sleeping pads, and 500 self-inflating sleeping pads which Her Many Voices secured from Kelty.  He partnered with Patch Adams and his Gesundheit Institute to distribute the aid.  We talked to him about unforgettable experiences he’s had on missions, the uniqueness of Haiti, clowning with Patch Adams, and how you can help out.

HMV: Where have you gone on your humanitarian trips and what have you done there?

YA: Let’s see, to go back, Thailand, after the tsunami.  We went and worked with a lot of the orphans down there, and we went to their orphanages and built structures, playgrounds, and repainted classrooms.  We donated fishing boats to local villages whose boats were destroyed in the tsunami.  We had a lot of ceremonies where we bought the boats, painted them, and worked with the local villagers.  Experiences like that…they’re so different from, say, going on vacation to a place.  In these instances, we’re at these people’s homes.  The elder of the village, they’re inviting us into their home for dinner, and we’re spending time with them, and seeing how these people live.  And they’re checking us out at the same time.  It’s universal.  People are people, all over the world.  Sure, languages are different, but you have the same characters all over the place.  Some guy might remind me of my old college buddy, or something, or an old friend from high school.  You just never know.  Everyone has their quirks and their funny things, and it’s endearing to see that.  

I was in Kenya—Nairobi, Kenya— working in orphanages.  There’s a great story that comes from that one.  I’ve told this to a few people, but the Nairobi trip was really wild.  We were at an orphanage, and usually when we get to an orphanage we like to take an assessment of all the children, see what’s going on with them.  One of the kids was in a crib lying in his own crap and pee.  He looked like he was about two and a half to three years old.  He was actually five years old.  I asked the worker… I was like, “What’s going on with this one?” and the worker—it’s a problem, ‘cause you wish there was more education out there—the worker said to me, “That child will die.  He’s already dead. He’s got HIV.”  But you could tell there was something going on.  The kid wasn’t dying of AIDS at that point in time.  So we spent the next few days trying to get the child into private care.  The kid’s name is Zach, Zachariah.  He was just, you know… his eyes were all hollowed out; he was really emaciated.  Out there, hospitals won’t take children if they have HIV.  It’s triage, even though the government’s sponsoring HIV/AIDS drugs.  So we finally got him to the Kenyata Hospital in Nairobi.  He was admitted to the children’s ward, but when we got there, there was about… the capacity of the children’s ward was about 35 kids or so, and there were approximately 120-odd children in this ward.  It was one of the most disturbing sights to see: three kids to a crib, families lying underneath the cribs.  It was all dark and dank, and there was one doctor and two nurses for all these children.  And we found Zach, and he was bleeding out from his IV, and he would’ve died that night, just from bleeding out.  I talked to the doctor, and it’s sad to see, but the doctor was like, “What do you want me to do?”  He’s like, “I have so many children, I can’t take care of all of them.”  They’re helpless out there.  I wish that there was more medical help, but this guy was overwhelmed.  But anyways, we got him to fix the IV.  The next day was spent dealing with administration, trying to get Zach into a semi-private room or a private room.  Finally, after a bunch of hours running up and down stairs, we found the guy that we needed to talk to.  I’m sitting across the table from him.  I looked him in the eye. I was like, “What’s your process, what do you need us to do in order to get Zach into a semi- or private room?”  He looked at me—I knew what was going to happen—he looked me in the eyes, and he said, “Do you have 160 US dollars?”  And I paused, and I was like, “Listen, if we give you 160 US dollars, will you guarantee that, say, I can escort this child to the room and see him with a nurse specifically for him?”  And he said, “We’ll make it happen.”  So the next thing you know…we were sitting there, and I pulled the cash out of my pocket.  I knew I had it, and it was just… it was unbelievable, for 160 US dollars we were able to get this child into a semi-private room.  We left him there with a nurse, knowing that he was going to get care.  I didn’t know if he was going to live or not.  We had to leave the next day, back to the States.  We got the report that Zach lived, and what was going on with him was that he was dehydrated, and he had a chest infection.  So that was the only thing that was wrong with him, and he was going to die.  But for 160 US dollars, he lived, and it’s been five years.  I just got an email, I think, a couple months ago, from someone who was at the orphanage, and they said, “You have to understand that Zach is thriving as a ten year old child at this orphanage.  He’s a goofball.”  And they’re like, “What you did saved that kid’s life for 160 dollars.”  And that’s the kind of stuff that you’ll experience on these trips that will really—it truly will, it has to— affect you.  You can’t walk away from stuff like that and not feel some effect from it.  That’s just one story out of hundreds on these trips.

Where else? Louisiana was intense, after Katrina.  We were working with a lot of aid distribution.  We were in Slidell, Louisiana, doing mud-outs. When you have a flood of that magnitude, the water level was probably about, I’d say, eight feet plus.  So you have these houses that were submerged, and the water just seeped into the insulation, behind the drywall.  Mold starts forming.  So our job was to go in and [do mud-outs]: basically gut these houses down to studs, bleach out all the mold… just scrub and basically detoxify these homes for new insulation and drywall to come back in.  And that was intense because we’d be in homes, and the American people, actually, to me, had a harder time than, say, the Thai people after the tsunami, because we’re so attached to our stuff.  I remember being in a home, and we asked that all personal belongings be outside the house by the time we got there.  And we got to one home, and there was about a six or seven foot pile of mold in the middle of the room.  And you looked at it, you didn’t know what it was, but it was just all the personal effects of a couple.  And the husband was just pissed.  The wife was freaking out.  She was about to have a nervous breakdown… couldn’t let go of anything, and it was a bad situation.  She was literally about to implode.  And we had to sit her down and say, “Hey, how can we make this situation better?  We know you don’t want to throw this stuff out.  Maybe we can move everything to a carport, and you can take the next few months picking through it, seeing what you want to keep and what you might want to let go of.”  And we finally got that situation under control, but these are just the little things that you come across.

HMV:  You mentioned finance.  You worked as a mortgage broker for about six years, and you were also the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Grosh Guitars for about a year.  It seems like working as a mortgage broker in the US, in Boulder, and the orphanage in Kenya are kind of like the opposite ends of the world.  What have you learned about building bridges between those two worlds?

YA: Well, there are a lot of ways that you can bring that humanitarianism—being out there in the world doing things, getting things done— back to your home community, whether it be Boulder, or someplace in the Midwest, or the East Coast, or the South.  There are a lot of ways that you can bring that mindset of giving back to your hometown. [One way may be] looking at different causes in your area. I was having a conversation last night about just this area.  Even though this town is very affluent, there are a lot of people struggling in Boulder, a lot of the lower income people. And I’ve always thought to myself, I’m like, the people that are really most in need are the single moms.  Single moms, to me, have the hardest job in the world.  And that’s something that can be done.  You can bring that idea of giving back to, say, creating fundraisers in your local community for different groups that need some help.  It’s fun too, ‘cause you get to meet people who are like-minded, and understand that, hey, we really do have it so well here, so why don’t we take a little bit of our time in our lives and do something to make other people’s lives a little easier?  So, as far as bridging the gap goes, it’s something that you can just always do.  It doesn’t have to be in Africa. It doesn’t have to be in Haiti. You can just do it in your hometown, and that’s just as valuable.  I, just for me, I personally like being in remote parts of the world and giving back and then coming back to Boulder and being able to let people know of what’s really happening in some of these places around the world. 

HMV: Speaking of building those bridges and your experience in business, what’s your take on the role of large and small corporate sponsorship, like Kelty, Prana, ProVector, and Gaiam, who contributed to your recent Haiti trip?

YA: There’s a lot of great stuff going on with corporations nowadays, because, inherently, companies do want to give back.  Of course it depends on the company, but the companies that we’ve targeted really have some sort of conscious bent to them.  Whether they’re doing amazingly well or not, they’re still… they want to give back in some way, and a lot of companies have; they’re looking for outlets.  And it’s a win-win situation for these companies because they can give to some of these trips, and for them it actually helps the morale of the company knowing that, hey, the company that we’re working for is actually doing some good out in the world.

HMV: You clown on a lot of your trips.  What, do you feel, is the role of clowning?  How does that contribute?

YA: Clowning is an interesting thing.  I was introduced to clowning in Thailand about six years ago, and it all started from… it’s from Patch Adams.  He lives as a clown, you know, 365 a year.  But it’s very universal.  When you’re in clown outfit and you go into an orphanage, and you see these kids’ faces light up, it’s unbelievable.  They’re just freaking out and jumping up and down.  It’s really cool to see that.  You can change the whole feeling of a hospital or an orphanage or a refugee camp by coming in as a clown.  And you’re really lifting people’s spirits.  And that’s what Patch, I mean his whole philosophy, is. He could be practicing medicine all over the world, but instead he’s spreading joy to all these places.  It’s wild to see it.  The guy is larger than life when you actually meet him.  He is a full-on clown, and he’ll go all over the place and make kids laugh. They freak out! In Haiti there’s a big hospital, and we walked into the hospital, and it was just an air of gloom ‘cause people were amputees and all that stuff.  But then we saw Patch Adams come in with all the clowns, and it just changed the whole feeling of the entire place.

HMV: How is the Haiti work different from other missions you’ve been on?

YA: I don’t know if it’s completely different.  I mean, it’s disaster zone work.  You’re in places that have been screwed by tsunamis or earthquakes or flooding or whatnot, and it’s really about trying to help people’s lives get a little more balanced.  In the case of Haiti, I would have to say that if there is a difference, Haiti was in so bad a state even before the earthquake.  I mean, it’s the poorest country in this hemisphere.  Then you had the earthquake on top of it.  There was a cyclone there a few years ago.  I mean, that country is really not in a good state.  I’ve talked to a lot of people, been to some conferences, and there’s no set plan for Haiti.  That’s the big problem.  There are a lot of infrastructure problems, especially with Port au Prince.  That city wasn’t meant to hold three million people.  It was only meant to hold like 300,000 people.  So the proposed plan is to get everyone out of the city and create these sustainable villages, but the problem is a lot of the aid is in Port au Prince, and so people are flooding back in, which is not good.  And so I don’t know what’s going to happen.  It’s a sad deal down there.  I don’t know if there’s much hope.  You can do what you can and try and help out, but the country is really in for a lot of hard times coming up.  I always try to look at the positive, but realistically, their government isn’t functioning to help.  They’re looking for the—there’s a certain word that they use, but, you know, the white foreigners is what they’re looking for—the white foreigners to come in and help out.  So it’s tough.  It breaks my heart a lot when I think about it because these people are proud, proud people, and the odds are really against them.

HMV: I know that real life stories don’t usually have a moral, or one single moral, but if there was a moral to the story of what you experienced in Haiti, or one thing that you could say about it, one impact it had on you and your understanding of the world, what would it be?

YA: I would have to say the experience in Haiti, if I could just break it down… it’s inspired me.  I was already motivated throughout the years to go do this kind of work, but being in a place like Haiti’s truly inspired me to do as much as I can in this lifetime.  We’re not here for that long, really.  And seeing what’s happening down there and knowing what they’re going through on a day to day level, it really is an inspiring thing to see.  And how they’re surviving.  

HMV: What was inspiring about it?

YA: It was just… it’s inspiring to see that that population that has gone through so much hell throughout the years, and their level of day to day living is so…the poverty level is so low… it’s inspiring to see these people, these families, living and surviving and still being proud.  We were at the aid distribution, and these women were with their babies, and they were so proud.  You know, they’re beautiful people, and they just have that spirit to keep on going on, and that’s inspiring to see, even under those conditions that they haven’t given up at all, and they just keep on going.  And it just shows you the power of the human spirit.

HMV: Tell me about your next trip.

YA: Well, I’m slated to go back down to Haiti to work with the street children of Haiti.  They’re the kids that no one really wants.  A lot of them have cataracts.  A lot of them have a condition.  I talked to a nurse friend of mine; she was telling me what it was.  Their heads are enlarged because there’s fluid that’s building up in their heads.  In the US there’s a shunt that usually gets installed to drain the fluid out into the abdomen where it gets reabsorbed into the system. Down there, they don’t have access to that.  So these kids grow up with these really enlarged heads.  They’re almost alien-like, which is freaky. But this trip is to go down there and to do sort of an assessment—you know, we’ll bring aid down, but it’s more an assessment—of what the future might be for these children and how we might be able to help and bring teams down from, say, Colorado. 

HMV: What’s it like working with Her Many Voices?

YA:  It’s been great. Alicia has been a big, supportive force.  She’s very selfless with what she does. I mean, she understands the power of just wanting to help out for the sake of helping someone that she doesn’t even know, knowing that their lives might be easier.  Her cause is… I believe in her cause.  I know she’s going down to Haiti [pretty soon], and it’s exciting.  It’s exciting to see Alicia on that path, on that journey of going down and spreading some love, some of her goodwill, out in the world, and I know it’s going to change her life.  And it’s great to see that kind of stuff.  She’s just one of those people who wants to do well out there and give a hand somehow.  I appreciate what she’s doing immensely. 

HMV: There are lots of different kinds of humanitarian aid and some of them arguably cause as many problems as they solve.  What kind of aid or support do you think is actually most supportive to a community?

YA: I would have to say education is a huge thing.  Hygiene education can make a world of a difference.  Um, water: something that we take for granted.  It’s a huge commodity out in the world.  You know, there are so many different ways, but really I think education and empowering people with knowledge so that they… because you know people are intelligent.  They want to do well.  Women are out there who have families to raise, and they want the best life for their families.  That’s what they want to do, and if you can give them some education and empower these people, you might’ve helped out in some small way in their lives.

HMV: What legacy do you want to leave for our children?

YA: I don’t know if I’ve really thought about that.  As far as a legacy goes, I mean, to me…as long as I know that I’ve really tried the best that I can.  I mean, I’m human. I’m not a perfect man, but I just… I’m doing the best I can.  And if I just know that I’ve been able to touch some people’s lives out there in the world and make even the smallest amount of difference, then I’m satisfied.  It’s not even about a legacy or anything like that.  It’s just more about the action of just doing things out in the world that will help.  

HMV: And is there any information that you’d like people to have about what you’re doing?  Any ways that people can contribute to your upcoming trips?

YA: They can get in touch with me through Facebook, of course: Yoshi Aono on Facebook.  I work under the umbrella of different 501c3’s.  I’ve been pressured now to start my own 501c3.  I’ll probably get that set up soon, but until then, if people just want, you know, any insight or input about this stuff, that’s fine.  I think the main thing for people is just [to know] they can get out there.  They don’t even have to support me.  If they could just find a cause that they connect with, that they’re drawn to, and help out, whether it be the YWCA, or single moms, or whatnot, then they’re doing something.