I just moments ago encountered for the first time the World Vision Gift Catalog. For varying monetary amounts, donations can be given in the names of family and friends, to provide the needy of the world material goods.
$120 provides a brood of chickens for eggs
$75 provides a goat for milking
$50 sends a child to school for one year
$45 provides ten fruit trees
$25 clothes five homeless children in the U.S.
$15 provides two rabbits for breeding and selling in the marketplace
There are other more expensive items (dig a well for $12,500; buy a farmyard of animals--two cows, two sheep, two goats, two pigs, four rabbits, twenty ducks, and enough chickens to lay about two dozen eggs per day--for $2250; etc.), and one can buy shares of these more expensive gifts. But I thought about what Anna and I spend on each other for Christmas, as well as family and friends--and we're no rabid consumerist materialists, mind you--and I wanted to start crying. Seriously.
How much can be done for the poor for, relatively, so little of my money! My tears were in part a realization of the hardness of my heart, but also from a sense of relief that there is something so tangible I can actually do.
And all I've ever heard is that World Vision is a worthy outfit.
[Via, with much gratitude, Michael]
Posted by Clifton at November 18, 2004 12:08 PM | TrackBack