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December 02, 2006

The Most Important Christmas Present Ever

May I direct your attention to the column on your right? You should notice a new item there. One with a thermometer. That badge links straight to a donation page at the Heifer International website. The amount on the thermometer is the amount I have pledged to raise this holiday season via this here blog. Every time someone donates money via my donation page, it registers here.

This, you see, is what I want for Christmas. $1000 in donations to Heifer International. More than that, if we can manage it. I'd like to blow the top off that thermometer and turn this entire page Heifer Donation Red.

I don't remember the how long ago it was that I first heard about Heifer. Long enough ago that my parents were still living in Salem, because they were introduced to Heifer via their church, John Knox Presbyterian. Mom told me about Heifer International and showed me a video. It was the first of many times that Heifer made me cry.

Let me explain. I do indeed cry at sad things, horrible stories, the discussion of other people's pain. I also, however, have a particulary tearful reaction to hope and compassion and courage. Someone commits an act that fills another with hope? That sets me off like Old Faithful. I weep and weep and weep. Seriously. Tears are dripping on the cat right now as I type this, with the thought of the amazing things Heifer has done over the years.

I still cry, every year when I get their holiday gift catalogue, "The Most Important Gift Cataogue in the World," because of the stories of hope and joy and healing. And every year, Dave and I make a decent-sized donation to Heifer in the names of all our families and friends and then I make simple gifts so that everybody has something to open as well, but the big present, every year, is the donation to Heifer.

This is how they work. Heifer goes into needy communities around the world, working with local individuals and organizations, and provides families with animals. In order to receive their animal(s), the families must undergo training on care and feeding so the animals will remain healthy. These animals, however, are not a gift. They are a loan. The loan is repaid by providing another family with the first female offspring of that animal. It's called "Passing on the Gift," and the people who are helped in this way do just that. They are not only the recipients of something that can change their lives, but they are allowed to exercise their own generosity, which is, I think one of the things that makes us fully human.

One of the great things about this organization is that they pay attention to the needs of the people they help. They select animals for that community based on the lifestyle, environment and social situation. So, for instance they give healthy llamas to families in the Andes, and teach them about healthy breeding practices because the llama herds were getting so inbred that the llamas were getting smaller and weaker with each new generation. Now, the families know what causes those problems and can work to prevent them. Or in parts of Southeast Asia, where they give farmers water buffalo and teach them how to use the manure to run biofuel stoves as well as to fertilize the fields. Or in parts of the southeastern United States, where poverty stricken families get sheep or cattle or chickens and learn about stustainable farming so they can keep the land healthy and their animals healthy.

And back to the whole generosity thing. The people who get these animals are poor. Poor. Poorer than most of us who have access to computers and the internet can even imagine. Poorer than we can comprehend. So poor their children can't go to school. So poor that one parent has to leave home to find work someplace else while the other scrambles to feed everybody. So poor that they have to walk miles, daily, for water.

Poor.

And yet, these people don't just pay off their debt to Heifer by passing on one animal. They continue to give. When I was at the Heifer Ranch in Arkansas in March of 2002 for the Women's Lambing Project, one of the other women there told a story about a trip to a community in Nepal. The women in this community had received rabbits. Good for food, good for fur, good for fertilizing the small fields. They had also started a women's group there. (Women's empowerment is also one of Heifer International's goals. I told you, I believe strongly in everything they do.) This group decided that they had been so helped by the generosity of Heifer and their program that they needed to do their part. So each woman saved a handful of rice a week from her family's food--which was a goodly amount for people who had next to nothing--and when this particular group from Heifer came to visit the community, the women's group presented them with a big pile of rice to be sold. The money from the sale, they explained, was to go to start a Heifer Project in another community. They had barely more than nothing themselves, these women, but they wanted to celebrate the hope they had been given by providing it to someone they'd never met who also needed help.

See why I cry?

But don't just take my word for it. Go to the Heifer International website and check out what they do.Then come back here and click on the badge on my page to donate, so that we can make that thermometer bulb rise. For those of you in the US, it's a 501(c)(3) organization, so anything you donate is tax deductible.

The original gift of Christmas was hope. Help me to celebrate the season in the spirit it began. By providing hope to someone else, and by extension, all the rest of us who live here too.

Posted by sally at December 2, 2006 11:35 AM

©2006 - All content copyright Sally Eames-Harlan unless otherwise noted