Wednesday, March 08, 2006

This is not an impossible problem

This morning, in Bible study, we also got onto the subject of giving to others. Bud told a story about a guy who was climbing a mountain in an asian country, and he got sick and had to turn back. He was nursed back to health in this little village and noticed that the girls had no place to meet for school. So he went home and sold everything he had and lived in his car until he raised enough money to build a school for girls in that village, and now he has an organization that raises money to build more schools for girls.

Another woman told us that when her husband died, she used his life insurance money to buy a house, and with what was left over, she and her family built a school in Haiti. This was not the most extensive policy I'm sure, and she was able to buy a house for herself and build a school for kids in Haiti.

Then, I got a letter from the child I sponsor through Compassion. She wrote to thank me for the money she got for Christmas (they divide all the extra Christmas donations equally among each child, so even though I didn't make an extra donation, she got something). She was given 23,800 Ugandan Shillings, which bought her:
-1 dress for 15,000
-Sandals for 17,000
-Socks for 1,000
-Undies for 2,000
-2 kg of rice for 2,000
-1 kg sugar for 1,600
-soda for 500

I just did the currency conversion. 23,800 Ugandan Shillings is equal to $13.08. That child's whole Christmas cost $13. God, why are we not doing more? We could be making a kid's Christmas for a lousy $13. You can feed a povery-stricken person in Africa for $30 a month.

In February, I didn't make my Compassion payment on time, because I overspent and then my cell phone bill was $40 for txting Australia. For less than that, I could have bought a 20 hour international calling card, or fed another African child for a month. According to the CIA website, there are 295,734,134 people living in America. If half those people gave $30 a month to a cause that fought hunger and poverty, that would amount to 4,436,012,010 a month. I think we can spare $30. That's a cell phone bill. Or a trip to Walmart. Or a date at the movies. I think we can spare that.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home