Using Charity to Help The Third World (Worship You as a God)

November 01, 2010

I am a giver by nature. Deeply rooted in my blood is the philanthropic need to ease the suffering of others, to strip away the tattered robes of misery and lick the wounds of the browbeaten, figuratively. "Gross" you will think, and I don't blame you because your heart is not as big as mine. You have never seen the desperate eyes of a starving Romanian mother or the blue lips of a sweater-less and shivering Albanian child, as I have, in a catalog.

The poor thing.

Last year at this time, I received an issue of "Heifer International" in the mail and flipped through it, curious how race and culture could outweigh obesity on the scales of attractiveness but the catalog was something else entirely. The Heifer International Project, I gleaned, allows affluent people like me to gift livestock to impoverished families around the world. I jumped at the opportunity to help the less fortunate in a unique way, knowing full well the satisfaction it would afford me during Christmas party small talk. The following are the letters of praise and gratitude sent to me by my family of choice in Zambia. I offer them as encouragement for anyone who is thinking of giving to a good cause this holiday season and also to silence all the Doubting Thomii out there who insist that throwing money at a problem never solves anything; you were wrong, perhaps now you can wash down your words with the milk from one of my sponsored family's many cows.