Pretty cool story in the Ottawa Citizen today about Mike Fisher's summer trip to El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America where almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The trip was with World Vision, which is a "Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice". Fisher spent four days in several villages outside the country's capital, San Salvador, working with villagers and filming a commercial for the charity.

Here's part of the story, from the Citizen:

In El Salvador, Fisher spent the first working day visiting villages of squalor, seeing first hand the living conditions of the poor. The conditions of the land alone was a challenge.

"We went up in trucks into the mountains," Fisher says. "It was quite the ride even by truck, and the local people walk in. It takes four hours for this one family just to get into town."

He won't forget visiting the tiny shack of one family, no food on the premises and eight children living in the one room, about 10 feet by 10 feet.

The World Vision program is designed to help provide the basics of food and water, but also to help break the cycle of poverty by helping the poor help themselves.

On the second of his working days in El Salvador, Fisher was shown some of the success stories of the program, including a girl setting up a market outside her tiny home. She sold farm produce, including eggs from a small chicken farm World Vision had helped her set up.

"It seems to be really working," Fisher says.

Again, pretty cool thing to do, and brings to mind the work of other NHLers like Andrew Ference, Steve Montador, and Zdeno Chara, all of whom are strong supporters of the charity Right to Play.