Comic Relief is a time where top celebrities visit war-torn or poverty stricken countries with a film crew to raise awareness for the plight of the citizens, before journeying back home to their life of privelege and luxury. However, Ed Sheeran found the latter impossible to do without helping the people he’d just met.
Ed Sheeran performs on The Today Show
Every year, a celebrity will meet and talk with vulnerable people whose futures are bleak due to hardship of their own country, and then they’ll urge viewers to phone in and donate in order to help people like them. But on Red Nose Day, Ed Sheeran couldn’t take the risk that the boys he had just bonded with might never receive the help they need, and decided to take matters into his own hands.
After meeting JD – a young boy who lost his mother and grandfather to Ebola and was abandoned by his father – the ‘Shape Of You’ singer was hearbroken to see that he was forced to live on the street, sleeping in a small boat where he was regularly at risk of violence. ‘Once we’re done here, we’re going to pack up the camera and these guys are going to be sleeping in a canoe at night with a lot of dangerous people about, wake up in the morning and try and fend for themselves’, Ed says.
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This boy desperately wanted an education, he wanted to become President so that he could build schools and feed the community. But his ambitions seemed far out of reach until Ed came along. ‘Really does not feel right leaving at all’, he told his camera crew. ‘The only thing we can do is help them which we should.’
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‘My natural instinct is to just put them in a car and just take them. Just put them somewhere in the city and put them in a hotel until we can get them sorted’, he continued. ‘Can we do that? Can I pay for them to stay in a house until we get them in a school? It doesn’t matter how much it is we’ll just get him and his five mates in a house with an older person to look after them. I don’t think we should go until that’s sorted.’
Eventually, the team did just that and got the boys to a safe place, giving them the future that they deserve.
