Heading into the holiday season (tomorrow being
Thanksgiving) I have decided that I can do more to help others; we can all do
more. As we gear up for Black Friday and start thinking about our
Christmas/Hanukah wish lists, why not think about someone else, or how our
gifts can help someone. Isn’t that the idea of the holidays; aren’t they
supposed to be about GIVING?
This year give thanks for being as lucky as we all are to
have grown up in beautiful homes with beautiful families around us, supporting
our every move. Then think before you buy and figure out how you can give a
gift that helps that child that wasn’t as lucky or blessed as we all got to be.
For a couple of days know I have known that I was going to
write this blog, but just this morning I learned about a new organization doing
what I attempt to do with my small following, but on a much larger scale. www.dtj.com or Discover the Journey attempts to
educate people about real issues, real problems, and real situations that exist
around the world; problems that need real solutions. I came across an
initiative they are running called “i am child” (shared it on my new twitter
account and on my facebook page), which lists 7 categories of children in the
world and the situations that are their lives. It discusses the displaced
children, the enslaved children, the orphaned children, the child soldiers, the
girl children in the developing world, the street children, and the
impoverished children.
See the video here. http://vimeo.com/7226498
There are so many great causes out there and sometimes when
I am preoccupying myself with one (fistulas) I can forget about many more (I am
only human). We need to forget the outta sight, outta mind idea and bring this
to the forefront of our consciousness.
Yesterday I was teaching a class on entrepreneurship at a
local middle school and we were working on an activity where the students were
given a situation and they had try to come up with a “big idea” to deal with
that issue, ranging from homelessness to the lack of access to food and resources.
One of the girls, in all innocence and complete lack of knowledge, said to me,
“well isn’t it their own fault for being too far away from cities and the
resources they need?” To which I replied, “No, some people are simply born into
a world that looks much different from the one we live in. Most of the time
these people cannot fathom what a city looks like, what having water coming
through a tap in their house would be like.”
Just because someone is born in Haiti, or Cambodia, or
Senegal does not make him or her any less human; it does not make them any less
a person than someone born into privilege in a developed country. I am not
better than them because I was born into a comfortable house and family that
was able to send me to good school and provide me with water, food, and
clothing. These people are not uneducated because they choose to be, they never
had access to school and books or were forbidden to learn, they are not living
in squalor because they enjoy that type of lifestyle; they have no other
choice. We need to remember this idea, each and everyday. What have I done that
I get to deserve to live in comfortable house that I don’t even have to pay
rent for because my mom is just that amazing. Nothing, I was born this way and
it is my mission to help those that were not as lucky as I was.
As we move into the holiday season, keep that in mind. You
can donate in someone’s name as a gift (Grassroot Soccer), you can purchase a gift that gives
again (like TOMS, and FEED), you can help out a charity by buying a t-shirt or
jewelry from them (i.e. Falling Whistles and charity:water), or you can
volunteer your time at the homeless shelter, with Habitat for Humanity, or a
food kitchen. Think outside the box this holiday season, literally, and give…
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