Album 6 « Gallery 875 « #trending: Coco Rocha On Haiti | MuchMusic.com

#trending: Coco Rocha On Haiti

December 5th, 2011

Happy Monday! It’s just three weeks until Christmas and honestly, I have never felt so rushed in my entire life to get my holiday shopping done! It seems like I was just making my Hallowe’en costume a few weeks ago and now we’re already making our lists and checking it twice! Boy do things move quickly! Sometimes it’s nice to just step back from all the mayhem and have a quiet moment to re-focus.

I wonder if that’s what Coco Rocha was thinking when she took a trip to Haiti recently with her husband and BFF. (Did you catch our interview with Coco on #trending this weekend?) After hearing about the terrible earthquake and destruction in Haiti, Coco knew she couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. She’s got an amazing life in New York as a supermodel who works with major magazines and top designers and yet, a few hundred miles away, the people of Haiti were suffering. It could’ve been easy for Coco to stay in New York and just donate some money – after all, her career is super busy and she probably has a lot of day-to-day appointments and errands to focus on – but instead she chose to pack her bag and actually GO to see the people of Haiti for herself.

I met Coco backstage at Toronto Fashion Week this past fall, where she came to premiere her documentary called “Letters to Haiti.” I had interviewed her in the past at fashion shows — where she walked the runway — but this time, I was interviewing her as a filmmaker. Coco decided to film her experiences in Haiti and share some of these images with the world. Her goal, she explained, was to show there is still a lot of need in Haiti even two years after the earthquake. Money always helps and so do donations, but above all they just need our love and support. If you watched our story on Coco, you would’ve seen footage from her documentary. The kids she met didn’t have much, but they were super happy to receive letters people wrote to them. Some of the kids immediately wanted to write back. Coco mentioned how surprised she was by their reaction; even in the midst of terrible suffering, they were able to find joy in the smallest of things. It’s a lesson, she says, we all need to learn.

I spent the weekend running around the mall scrambling to find gifts for my friends and then I went furniture shopping, hoping to find the perfect accessories for my apartment. But then I watched Coco Rocha on #trending and I realized all the stress I had about shopping for stuff was not important at all. In the grand scheme of things, whether or not my mom gets the coffee maker she wanted won’t matter. But whether I spend time with her, will. In the same way, Coco will continue to model and do photo-shoots and all that other stuff, but she knows it’s just a job. After going to Haiti and meeting the orphans there, she’s realized – and we’ve all realized – that there are more important things to be focusing on.

Thanks for tuning in! Talk to you soon!