With Great Sadness, Affection, and Respect: Vincent Danhier (1962 - 2022)

 

 

 

This is not the announcement that I had hoped to make this month.  This was supposed to be the time where I announced to a community of kind and generous people that their donations, big and small, had accomplished what we'd hoped they would, and that the work on the sixteen bed shelter had been completed.  And, in fact, the final touches are being made and the hope is to have these beds occupied by needy homeless girls within the next few weeks.

However, I have received word that my friend and a source of great inspiration (and the founder of Educacion y Futuro), Vincente Danhier, died on the 28th of January.  He had been hospitalized on a few occasions with acute pancreatitis, and it was clear that his condition was becoming more serious. In my last exchange with Vincente--about a week before his death--he wrote of making it back to his native Belgium in order to access more advanced medical care.  While hospitalized, he also contracted the Covid-19 virus, and some combination of the two conditions brought his body to the breaking point.

This is a tragedy on so many levels. From a strictly personal perspective, he was a friend and someone whom I admired greatly. Admittedly, we only met a year ago during a chance visit to a condor refuge that he had opened outside of Tarija, Bolivia.  (It was on this trip that he told me of his primary work as the  founder of Educacion y Futuro and we  hatched the plan to renovate a decrepit building that could house over a dozen abandoned girls.)  We saw him again in October, and he and I were in constant contact over the past year.  In total, I only spent five days of my life in his company, but the impact he made was profound and lasting.  I don't normally ask friends to contribute $15,000 to a cause headed by someone I have only just met. Vincente's pervading aura of integrity, competence, and compassion led me to take this step without a hint of hesitation.

Elbowing my personal affection for Vincente for place in the sadness line is that he leaves behind his devoted partner Varinia and their son Ignacio, who was born in November.  I don't know what else to say about this.

And, of course, there is the sustainability of his life's work with EDYFU to consider.  He and I had a brief conversation about how he might plan for his organization to continue come the day of his inevitable departure. But, of course, we didn't expect that day to come just three months down the road. My initial fears--that perhaps EDYFU was Vincente and some people he paid--are thankfully not being met.  I've communicated with a few people on the ground, and it appears that he left an infrastructure.  A board has been meeting and is about to appoint a new director, and there are some hopeful plans to not only maintain what Vincente created, but also to expand it (maybe even with the construction of a Vincente Danhier Memorial Playground and Park for the kids).  Still, it will be a struggle; of that, I am sure.

I'm grateful to have had the chance to meet Vincente in what proved to be the final year of his impactful life.  I'm doubly grateful to have had the chance to organize something that will provide support and comfort for a bunch of children who deserve far more than life has delivered to date. And I am grateful for you, my friends--close and distance, recent and time-honored--who stepped up to make something good happen.

Vincente lived a full life and gave more than he took.  As a kind old woman repeatedly says in Alan Paton's Cry, Beloved Country--"Why else were we born?"