PROVO — From his second-story office near a Provo business park, David Gardner has a good view of the golf course.
The links are hardly distracting, though. Gardner, at least in his mind, isn't here. He's in Africa, Mexico and the Philippines.
Gardner's life is centered on helping the poor. As director of Nourish the Children Foundation, Gardner, who introduces himself as the man who isn't the embattled Utah County commissioner, finds ways to feed the starving across the world.
Currently, Gardner's 4-month-old group is working on projects that would send thousands of pounds of food to impoverished areas in Africa, Mexico and the Philippines.
"Every 3.6 seconds a child dies of starvation. If you calculate that out, it's 1,000 every hour, 24,000 every day on this planet," Gardner says, pausing. "And we waste so much food."
Most Americans choose to ignore such facts — but not Gardner, who is often asked if he is the two-term GOP commissioner who has been arrested twice in the past two years for driving under the influence of alcohol.
This Gardner is driven by the memory of needy, starving children.
On one trip to Africa he met a young girl with a cleft palate who had been waiting two years in a hospital for an operation. Her father was dead, and during her stay in the hospital her mother died of AIDS complications.
Gardner picked the child up and gave her a Mickey Mouse toy he had gotten from a McDonald's fast-food restaurant.
"You'd have thought I gave her a gold brick," he said.
Gardner spent his remaining days in Kenya trying to expedite the girl's operation.
"I need to tell you I didn't get it fully satisfied before I left," he says. "I still have pictures of her, though."
He flips through his pictures of Africa and counts down the days until he will go again.
Right now, Gardner is working on a project to send thousands of meals to refugees in Mexico who were displaced by a volcano last month.
In the next few weeks $60,000 worth of food will go to Latvia.
Rather than sending goods in heavy cans and packages, Gardner's group sends dehydrated food packaged in mylar bags, which have a shelf life of 3 to 5 years and resist moisture and rodents.
Care packages from the foundation also include small solar-powered stoves.
Because the packages are light, Gardner's group can send a higher volume. Shipping isn't as expensive.
The food is prepared and packaged at four different locations in Utah. The Humanitarian Resource Center of North America delivers the food and other donated products.
Funding for Gardner's foundation comes from private donations. Gardner says of every $100 donated, $97 goes to helping the poor.
That means Gardner and his secretary are paid from 3 percent of all donations that are received.
Since October, Gardner has been paid once.
"Do you know what pro bono is?" Gardner asks, smiling. "That's what I am."
Gardner makes do for his own needs with money from his retirement fund and the sale of his former grocery business. But it is Gardner's personality and demeanor that make him a great fit for the organization, says David Callaway, executive vice president of First Harvest International.
First Harvest donated office space to Gardner and is one of the four Utah companies that packages food for Nourish the Children.
Callaway recalls a recent trip to Africa where Gardner entered the bus for the airport barefoot. He had given his shoes to a cab driver.
"That tells you the kind of man we have running this organization," Callaway said.
E-MAIL: jhyde@desnews.com