From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Street fighter

Born into a family that had everything, Aaron Jackson gave it all up to help people who have nothing.

by Bob Weinberg

August 23 2006

Without the dark, heavy beard he grows on occasion, Aaron Jackson looks younger than his 24 years. Sporting a white T-shirt with the image of Albert Einstein, the lanky Destin native greets a visitor in the lobby of his current residence, the COSAC Foundation's homeless shelter on Federal Highway just north of Johnson Street in Hollywood. When he scrapes some money together, however, Jackson will not invest in digs of his own. Instead, he'll travel back to Haiti, where he operates a couple of orphanages, the most recent of which administers to children with HIV, or invest further in the rehab center he started last month for street kids in Ecuador who are addicted to sniffing glue.

"In Ecuador, everyone only wants to take in little, little kids," Jackson says as he picks at a pasta salad at the Coral Rose Café on Young Circle on a rainy weekday afternoon, his big, blue eyes betraying an intensity that runs counter to his laid-back demeanor. "And they're running into the problem, 'Well, where do the teenagers go?' When I went down there, my focus was to try to feed the kids who were actually sniffing the glue."

Jackson became aware of the problem while shooting footage for a documentary on street kids that he's been working on for the past few years. The kids use the glue to curb the constant hunger that gnaws at their innards and to help them sleep in often-harsh conditions.

But, as was the case in Haiti, Jackson couldn't simply hand out a few sandwiches and feel as if he had accomplished anything. Instead, he opened a seven-bedroom facility, complete with two greenhouses, in the city of Cuenca to take in and treat the glue-addicted kids. He says he was able to do so for less than $2,000 with the help of Father Sanchez, a Catholic priest he calls "the Martin Luther King of Ecuador."

"You can't just go to a country and open an orphanage," Jackson explains, "so I had to work under [Sanchez's] licensing. When I went down there, I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going. I was relying on the energy of the world to bring it together like it did."

Jackson says he's not a religious person, though he refers to the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and seems to believe in some kind of guiding force that places him where he needs to be. For example, he talks about his 2003 introduction to John Dieubon, a native Haitian with whom he opened his first orphanage, in almost mystical terms. Dieubon had been serving as a translator for a friend of Jackson's. Dieubon and Jackson began talking about ways to help homeless children, but Dieubon excused himself because he had an appointment -- which turned out to be at the hotel where Jackson was staying.

"I was sitting [in the hotel], and there he is, by the grace of … whatever," Jackson recalls, searching for the right words. "We were put together for a reason, and that's for sure. He could be Jesus, truthfully. It's a possibility."

Jackson inspires a similar reverence in Sean Cononie, who operates the Homeless Voice newspaper and the COSAC shelter where he and Jackson share quarters. "If I had to pick a hero for the type of work I do, it'd be Aaron," Cononie says, taking a brief respite after a long night dealing with a resident's nearly fatal overdose. "He could be getting high every night, going to nightclubs and doing what young kids his age do. I'm not saying he sits in the closet all day and reads books -- he does go out -- but most people would be driving a newer car, having nicer clothes and not living the life of poverty."

From golf courses …

The swanky environs of Destin are far-removed from the Hollywood homeless shelter, and farther still from the slums of Cuenca, or Cité Soleil, Haiti, or even the upper-middle-class Haitian neighborhood where Jackson resides when he's on the island and where electricity is something of an iffy proposition. A child of privilege, he grew up on a golf resort developed by his grandfather; his dad served as the director of golf.

"I played golf every day of my life growing up," he says. "Thirty-two holes a day." He even went to Valencia Community College to study professional golf management, though he says he stayed only long enough to earn one credit.

After his abbreviated college career, Jackson took a trip to Costa Rica; the poverty he encountered there shocked him, standing in stark contrast to the $2 million and $3 million homes among which he grew up. Upon returning home, Jackson contacted Michael Stoops, executive director for the National Coalition of the Homeless in Washington, D.C., who found Jackson a job with Cononie in South Florida. Although he was hired to help with fundraising, it soon became apparent that Jackson, as Cononie puts it, "had a heart for helping people." Before long, he was running the newly formed international division of Cononie's organization and branching out with his own Planting Peace charity.

Jackson made his first trip to Haiti with Cononie and a doctor friend from Pensacola, smuggling in medical supplies such as antibiotics and AIDS medication. Cononie describes such missions as something akin to a James Bond movie -- sitting in the back of a tap-tap loaded down with supplies, sneaking in and out of the slums and heading back to the hotel before anyone was aware of what he and his accomplices were up to. It's not just the physical danger from thugs that necessitates such stealth but the constant graft from officials and customs agents. "You bring in 10 bottles of Tylenol," Cononie says, "they want two."

Of course, there is a very real threat of violence, and the U.S. State Department even informed the high-profile Cononie that if he were kidnapped, he'd be on his own. Jackson says he's not overly concerned with the prospect of getting snatched, but he did have one particularly harrowing experience. While shooting footage for his street-kids documentary, he stumbled upon a group of angry students protesting American occupation and venting their frustrations around a Coca-Cola truck. Suddenly, he says, the attention shifted toward the white guy with the camera and four students came his way, one brandishing a baseball bat.

"I clicked the camera off and said, 'No problem here.' And I start walking off, and they all start following me," he remembers. "It was maybe 50 to 100 people chasing me down the street."

Fortunately, Jackson had made some friends through his work in the area -- the street kids. They saved his hide by confronting the uniformed schoolkids and taking him to safety. "All the street kids were willing to fight," he explains, "and [the students] don't want to mess with the street kids, because those are the rugged kids you don't mess with."

… To a homeless shelter

When he first came to South Florida in 2003, Jackson shared an apartment in Aventura with his girlfriend at the time and a former college roommate. However, the romantic relationship fell apart, and Jackson found accommodations a block or so from the shelter. He earned extra money working part-time as a caddy at Aventura's Presidential Country Club but was spending most of it on his orphanages.

"He ran into some funding problems," Cononie says. "And I kind of said to him, 'Aaron, if you want to work on your charity full-time, and since you're really living in poverty anyway because you're giving all your money to Haiti, why don't you come move in the shelter and live in the office with us, and we'll go ahead and pick up whatever money you're putting into the orphanages? This way, you can expand your agency and help more people.' "

For about two years, Jackson slept on the floor of the shelter, though he now has a futon in a 400-square-foot room he shares with Cononie and volunteer director Lois Cross. It's equipped with a TV and a telephone, and Jackson has access to a computer; an office is being constructed in which Jackson will have a desk, as well.

"There are very few homeless advocates who live in shelters by choice," Laura Hansen, CEO of the Coalition To End Homelessness, relates by e-mail from her Fort Lauderdale office, mentioning National Coalition for the Homeless' Stoops as a notable exception. Although she hasn't met Jackson, Hansen comes up with what seems to be a fairly accurate assessment.

"In my limited experience," she continues, "this is usually the result of profound spiritual enlightenment/commitment. Although it is not necessarily religious in nature, it is based on a fairly advanced consciousness that, to some degree, comprehends the fact that we are all in this together."

Life in the shelter isn't so bad, Jackson says, and he's not in any particular hurry to leave. "I'm actually happy there," he avers, even while admitting that it's not the healthiest environment. "You have to be careful. I've caught two bacterial infections there that were very, very serious."

A scar runs across Jackson's cheek, another across his abdomen, visible reminders of staph infections that resisted antibiotics and required surgery. Of course, traveling to Third World countries poses its own health risks; as Cononie says, go to Haiti with a sore, and it's likely you'll return with an infection. Both Cononie and Jackson took ill while abroad, the former with meningitis, the latter with malaria.

The risk of becoming ill and the ever-present cigarette smoke are the two major reservations Jackson has about life in the shelter. But he says he has 180 reasons to stay -- namely, the residents, with whom he has grown so close.

"They're all just people who can't function in this society, for whatever reason," Jackson says. "One hundred percent of them suffer from mental problems, but they're really good people at heart. If you just sit down and listen to their situations, it's incredible."

Equally incredible is the fact Jackson relates next: He gets a large percentage of his funding from the homeless themselves. "Seventy to 80 percent of them will hand me money out of their pay," he says of the Homeless Voice vendors, whose money he verifies every day. "They'll all donate, like, 'Here's $2 for Haiti' or 'Here's $1,' and you multiply that against the 60 people who went out, and that's how I get most of my funding."

A good portion of that funding also comes from Cononie's charities, which guarantee Jackson's monthly budget of about $3,500 for the orphanages. While Jackson no longer officially works for Cononie, he does help out with some administrative tasks at the shelter, which doubles as the Homeless Voice headquarters.

Over the four years he has been going to Haiti, Jackson admits, he has had to school himself on everything from cutting through red tape to buying food and medication at reduced rates to educating the Haitian populace on the dangerous parasites that swell the empty bellies of their children yet can effectively be eliminated with a relatively inexpensive deworming medication. He's also working on his Creole, though he says he can generally make himself understood.

"The kids are always making fun of me when I say something wrong," he relates. "Like, I used to say, 'Bonjour, petits Bouddhas,' which means 'Good morning, little Buddhas.' " It was a reference to the children's distended bellies, he explains, but also a word that sounds just like the Creole word for "butt." "So every time I'd call them that," he explains, "they were laughing and laughing, and I couldn't figure it out."

While his immediate aims are clear to him -- to continue feeding and treating impoverished and homeless children -- Jackson doesn't claim to know what the future will hold. Will he continue to live in the shelter, to sacrifice his life's savings so that others may live?

"The way I work, I feel more led into what I'm doing," he says, trying to picture his situation 10 years down the road. "But I'm obviously going to still be in Haiti. You know, this is my life's work, so in 10 years, I'm going to be doing the exact same thing, just probably on a larger scale."