Inspired Magazine

Donations of baby carriers and funds poured in.
While Cristal initially planned to mail the baby
carriers, such was the level of support that she
embarked on a trip to Greece in September last
year to distribute the baby carriers to refugees
arriving by the hundreds aboard ferries in Kos.
She travelled to the tiny isle to hand out the
first of the 500 donated carriers. “By then my
campaign had gone viral – I had raised $7000
overnight and thousands of people were sending
me their baby carriers,” she says. “Everything was
riding on my idea that these refugees would want
my baby carriers.”
Wearing a baby carrier with a doll inside to
model how it worked, Cristal approached the first
family – would they like a baby carrier? No, came
the confused reply. Worried, Cristal approached
another family – a man who spoke excellent
English, who was travelling with several women
and children – and offered him the free carrier. “I’ll
never forget his face,” she says. “He just said ‘really
it’s for us, why?’ I said ‘it’s from America, a mother
donated it to you so your wife and your child can
be comfortable’ and his face kind of froze with
this look of gratitude that you just can’t explain,
mixed with grief – that’s when I knew I was onto
something.” She went on to distribute all 500 of
the baby carriers.
In Cristal’s words ...
Who inspires me
[The drowned three-year-old] Alan Kurdi. To me he wasn’t just a Syrian
refugee; he could have very well been my own son.
Best advice
Solidarity work is only tough at first. Once you get to work your mind
settles whatever disputes it may initially have on the issues of morality,
pros and cons, good and evil and the merits of what you are doing. And
when the mental dust settles, your reward is the tremendous and unique
satisfaction that can only be obtained by helping a fellow human being.
PEOPLE BEHIND THE HEADLINES
In the meantime, donations of baby carriers and
funds continued to flood in at home in America.
It became obvious Cristal would need to form a
public charity – and Carry the Future was born.
With the carriers and money came pleas from
other mothers desperate to help. Cristal gathered a
team of 10 volunteers and they returned to Greece
several months later with 2500 baby carriers to
distribute.
On this trip Cristal met one family with two mums
– an older woman with three teenage daughters
and a younger mother with a baby son and two
young girls. Cristal saw the young mother as she
entered the heaving Athens port and watched
panic cloud her eyes. The woman met Cristal’s
gaze and, in limited English, she pleaded for help.
“Something snapped inside me and I just said ‘yes
let’s do this,” Cristal says. “I stuck the family in two
taxies, took them to my hotel and paid five nights’
accommodation with money someone donated to
help refugees.”
While Cristal had met hundreds of refugee
families by now, she’d never spent time with any of
them. These women were her first real experience
in getting to know the people behind the headlines.
While their own houses had not been bombed,
their kids hadn’t gone to school for months, their
friends had been kidnapped, their country was in
chaos, and their husbands had fled ahead of them
to set up new lives for their families in Germany.
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CRISTAL LOGOTHETIS