Bono’s NAACP Speech

Bono’s NAACP* Speech

I saw this video on facebook the other day and I can’t get it out of my mind. I tried to comment on my friends page when I first saw it and typed about 17 responses but I’m always worried about coming across too strong, especially when it comes to things I’m passionate about.

It’s no secret here on my blog that I’m passionate about poverty and us in the west opening our eyes to how the rest of the world lives. I don’t think the comment space was big enough for my response to this video, and so I am going to go on about it here. Aren’t you lucky?

Also, I’m rather tired of not speaking my mind fully and here is a good place to practice. You see at least here this is my blog and I can say what I like!

Here are some of my initial unfiltered responses to this video:

1. I love this man!

2. Oh my gosh, he has a handle on our Christian faith better than most of the church.

3. Oh God help us! Change our hearts.

4. Aren’t you glad the religious church never got hold of this man?

5. This is a prophetic voice to our generation and so central to the Kingdom of  God and we really better not miss it! I get so frustrated with the church’s lack of concern for the poor.

6. I WANNA GO!

7. Let’s not just watch and applaud Bono’s inspirational, emotional, and crowd pleasing speech. I find it hard to understand that a person can be moved with compassion about a person’s suffering but then move on having done nothing about it.  Let’s stop and think (and/or pray) for a few minutes and then DO something about it. Even if it’s a small thing. It’s better than nothing. I wonder how many of those people who gave a standing ovation acutally went off and DID something about extreme poverty, the AIDS crisis in Africa, or helped save a child from dying of malaria? Hopefully many of them.

8. I absolutely love to see people who are themselves and doing what they are created to do.

9. Western Christianity has become far too theoretical and cerebral and far too little practical is done. Where are those who rage against injustice?

10. So what are we gonna DO about it?

*National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

Meme (what does that mean anyway?)

Saw this meme over at Sharon’s blog today and thought I’d join in. I’m so tired lately that it’s been hard to write but this is an easy way to get something down.

What is your current obsession?

Raising funds to ship 473 boxes of donated medical supplies out of my garage and to the Howard Hospital in Zimbabwe.  Also poverty in general and raising people’s awareness of it.

What is your weirdest obsession?

I have no idea. If you think I have a weird obsession be sure to let me know. Thanks.

What are you wearing today?

Jeans, t-shirt, cardi.

What’s for dinner?

D made fried rice. Yum

What’s the last thing you bought?

A pair of knitting needles and a ball of wool because my 4 year old son wants me to make him a scarf to wear in the snow on Saturday. We are going on a (long) day trip to Mt Ruapehu.

What are you listening to right now?

Rain on the roof, crackling fireplace. Hum of computer.

If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?

To visit family in Australia

Which language do you want to learn?

Hindi

What do you love most about where you currently live?

We are safe and warm and we get to eat every single day.

What is your favourite colour?

Pink or green

What is your favourite piece of clothing in your own wardrobe?

A white cotton peasant blousey thingy.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Backpacking around India with my buddy Ali.

Describe your personal style?

Um…..style? Casual. Comfortable. Practical.

If you had £100 now, what would you spend it on?

Well, that’s about NZ$259 which would cover the shipping of about 16 of the 473 boxes mentioned above.

What are you going to do after this?

Sleep

What are your favourite films?

I always find it hard to answer this question because I forget movies. (Never forget a good book though!) Also I don’t tend to watch the same movie over and over so none become a firm favourite. But let’s try……I enjoyed Australia, and did enjoy Slumdog Millionaire,

What inspires you?

When people discover and make time to pursue their dreams or the thing they are best at. I really believe that every single person has a unique and valuable contribution to make to the world…a destiny or purpose if you like and there is nothing more wonderful and inspiring to me that seeing them doing it with all their heart.

Your favourite books?

How long have we got? Ha ha there are many. I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaleed Hossieni and loved it. Also loved Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Oh and The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, and The Hiding Place by Corrie TenBoom.  I love learning about how other people live and books that inspire me to action about things that are unjust in the world – like poverty and war and political regimes.

But I also love the classics, like Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Jane Austens works. I also like classic childrens literature like Treasure Island – RL Stevenson and The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Do you collect anything?

Books and clutter.

What makes you follow a blog?

I like to read blogs of people I know as it’s a great way to get to know someone better. I also like to read blogs that inspire my creativity, or about ordinary people doing extraordinary things to make a difference in the world. Sometime I follow a blog out of habit because it’s been on my feed reader for such a long time and it would seem disloyal to suddenly delete it!

Name an unfulfilled dream or one thing you must do before you die?

To visit/travel in/ live in Africa. Feed a hungry child. (I mean literally….be there, not just send money)

What’s your biggest regret in life?

I don’t really have any regrets, but that’s not because I haven’t done anything stupid, but you can’t change the past so I tend not to think about them. I dunno. A minor regret prehaps …not celebrating my 30th birthday with a big fat party.

When you were a child/teenages what did you really want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a nurse and a mother. (So far so good!)

The rules:1. Respond and rework; answer the questions on your blog, replace one question that you dislike with a question of your invention, add one more question of your own.2. Tag eight other people.

I’m tagging anyone anywhere who wants to join in. Leave a comment here so I can come read yours too.

Now I Know

I stumbled across this song some months ago now and still sometimes the refrain goes through my mind…

“I know what I know and I can’t deny it…”

I’m glad I’ve woken up and starting to look around me… I’m glad I’m learning the truth even though it’s painful. My dreams terrify me but I can’t go back now. I feel ruined for the status quo. I hope I never forget the plight of the poor, the orphans, the forgotten and overlooked ones.

Just thinking

I’ve been brewing a bit of an idea around here…which has been keeping me busy, hence the long absence. I am going to be sharing it with my church people on Sunday morning…and so here it is for you too! It’s totally terrifying to have a dream and more so to share it. I feel like I’m really putting myself out there and it’s rather scary!

Around the time just prior to starting the Zimbabwe project, and over the months that have followed, I have been making myself aware of some of the issues around poverty, particularly extreme poverty in developing nations. I have let myself be shocked at the statistics. I mean really let myself think about what they mean. The numbers are so big that we struggle to comprehend the magnitude of the problem. When we read that 1.1 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty, do we really get it? ¹ Have we ever stopped to really think about that? What would you and I do if tomorrow and for the foreseeable future we had only $1 per day to pay for all our daily needs of food and drinking water, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education?

As I have read and become more aware of the great needs in the world, I have become increasingly convinced that it is everyone’s responsibility to address the problem of poverty.

In my opinion it’s far too easy for those of us who live privileged lives to be ignorant of the way hundreds of millions of people in the world are living. It far too easy for us to be so wrapped up in our day to day lives worried about our houses, and cars and shopping and jobs and children; and spending our days working hard and watching TV, trying to pay the rent or pay off the house, that we are selfishly ignorant of the fact that several million mothers in the world struggled to find food for their babies today.

As a mother I think ‘what makes me so different from those other mothers who face a daily anguish of finding food for their fretful hungry baby?‘ Broadly, the answer is simply circumstance. There is no other difference between us than the circumstances of our births.

It could have been me born in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 40% of toddlers die from Malaria, which by the way is a preventable and treatable disease. It costs between $0.50 – $5.00 NZD for life saving medication to treat Malaria.² But sadly for most of the people dying of malaria, it’s not as easy as popping down to the local doctor, or having a friend take you to hospital. Even if they do make it to a hospital often times the medication simply isn’t available.

I wonder what would happen if people in New Zealand started dying at a rate of 10000 per day³ of a preventable disease? Just wondering.

And lets not forget the orphans. The are around 40 million orphans in the world today. 15 million of these are orphaned because of HIV/AIDS and of those 11.6 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa. ⁴

See….the statistics are shocking aren’t they?

So as I have been considering all these things and letting myself be confronted with the harsh realities, I have asked myself what can be done. Whose problem is it? Governments? Politicians? United Nations? Charities? Aid Organisations?The Church? Individuals? And the answer I came up with is Yes to all of these. It’s every body’s problem. There are many causes of extreme poverty, but injustice is a major one. And so just because I believe it isn’t right, I believe it’s my problem to address it. And, as Christ followers it is our very mission to break the chains of injustice and bring good news to the poor.

So, essentially my vision or idea is to:

Firstly, and most importantly develop in myself and us a heart like God’s for the poor.

Secondly, to take action to support projects that directly benefit the poor, by setting up a separate fund to which we as a local church can give as we are moved to and collectively make a huge difference. Together we could save hundreds if not thousands of lives, and

Thirdly some time in the future, to make a way where ordinary people like us can go to the destitute places and get our hands dirty and really help in practical ways to bring an end to extreme poverty.

And now, something to think about.

“What, therefore, is our task today? Should I answer “Faith, hope and love?” That sounds beautiful. But I would say – courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature… we lack a holy rage – the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth… a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth and and the destruction of God’s people. To rage when little children must die of hunger, while the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and the madness of militaries. To rage against the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction, peace. To rage against COMPLACENCY. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the kingdom of God.”

~ Father Kaj Munk (1944)

1Extreme poverty being defined as living on less than $1 per day. Moderate poverty defined as living on $1-$2 per day. (The End of Poverty (2005) Jeffery Sachs pp20-21)

2http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/facts.htm

3(The End of Poverty (2005) Jeffery Sachs p215)

42007 Data. http://www.avert.org/subaadults.htm

More questions than answers

“It is not permissible to add to one’s possessions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.”

~ Alan Paton. (Cry, The Beloved Country. 1948)

I’ve been thinking about poverty a lot lately, and it’s becoming clearer to me that the way I live has an impact on people in a greater way that I thought before. You see…what I do doesn’t just affect my and my family, or even just my city. The way I live along with all the rest of us affects people everywhere.

I’m becoming aware of greed. You see….our culture makes us want Stuff. By that I mean all sorts of items non-essential to life. And we want more and more of this Stuff, and because we are greedy we want it cheaply. We get it cheaply on the most part, but why? When I buy my son a little pair of shoes that cost less than $10 from The Warehouse…do I really think that in that $10 price that is enough to pay retailers costs, profit for the retailer, transport costs from China, profit for the manufacturer, the cost of materials AND a decent wage for the person making them?

This has raised a lot of questions for me. I have to ask myself:

• Why are they so cheap? Is it cheap labour?
• Why is the labour cheap?
• Because in China people are willing to work for less?
• Why are they willing to work for less?
• Do they have a choice about working for less?
• Are we greedy?
• What are the people in these factories paid?
• What are their conditions like?
• If I stop buying cheap goods churned out to satisfy the west’s insatiable appetite for Stuff will it help the cause of the people who are currently making them?
• Is there that much difference between this and the boycott of sugar by the abolitionists who refused to eat sugar produced under slave conditions?
• What about Fair Trade?
• What should I do about it?

(I wrote this post months ago and just cleaning out my drafts folder. Mostly the questions remain unanswered, but I am developing an inner rage about injustice so you might just hear more about this someday soon)

Blog Action Day – World Food Crisis

Today is Blog Action Day where approximately 9000 bloggers from around the world will be writing about poverty. Hopefully our collective voice will make a difference in raising awareness and generating ideas to combat the misery of living in poverty.

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Did you know the price of rice increased three fold in the months January to March this year? That’s a lot! And for our family of 5 living in Auckland on 1 income, we have noticed the increased food prices in our weekly food shop. But we still can afford to eat a varied healthy fresh diet every single day. We also have enough money for luxuries such as ice cream and coffee. But the price increases in many poorer nations has a much more dramatic effect. A child dies of hunger every 7 seconds. So in the time it takes to read this post, several precious kids have died from lack of food.

The World Vision New Zealand has an interesting slide show displaying the typical food consumption of families around the world. It’s quite shocking to see in visual terms the difference between rich and poor. (And I consider ourselves rich on these terms) Go and have a look and see how your food consumption compares. The pages also shows the many ways World Vision is working to help relieve the food shortages. If you want to help, there’s a donate button at the bottom of the page.

You can read what others are blogging about here.

Blog Action Day – Let’s Talk About Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day where approximately 9000 bloggers from around the world will be writing about poverty. Hopefully our collective voice will make a difference in raising awareness and generating ideas to combat the misery of living in poverty. This is my contribution. Also posted at Make A Plan. Read what others are saying about it here. (Also, it’s not too late to join in if you have something to say about it too).

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I first encountered extreme poverty when I visited India in 1996. It was the first time I’d been out of Australia where I grew up and it was a massive culture shock. I had mentally acknowledged poverty, but seeing it in front of my eyes made it real to me in a way reading about it or even being told about it could never do.

I couldn’t believe people lived in such terrible conditions, day after day. I couldn’t believe there were people begging who had massive open wounds, and no one did anything about it. Or someone lying on the road in dust and dirt, and quite possibly dying and ordinary people walked straight past. I wanted to stop and do something! I wanted to get that person to a hospital and cared for.

But I walked past too. I was intimidated. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where I could take these people, didn’t speak the language, and couldn’t very well scoop them up and take them in an auto rickshaw back to the backpackers hostel! I was also just too scared. I thought I might be told I was doing something wrong or offensive in a foreign culture. In a way, I was too young. Yes I was naive and idealistic…sometimes the issues aren’t simple at all, and I didn’t give much thought about the reality of taking on a person’s care when I was just 20 years old, in India for 3 weeks on a very limited budget! I didn’t have a clue.

But in a way I never want to lose that youthful naivety, and almost reckless approach to poverty. So often we don’t do anything at all because the problem is too big, or too complicated, or not our problem. We don’t act because it’s a political issue, or it could be dangerous, or we are just one person and what difference will it really make. We are intimidated.

Earlier this year, a friend of my husband’s who lives in Taiwan and regularly emails us, sent us an email about the political situation in Zimbabwe. I’ve seen these emails before…you know what I mean. Emails about a cause. Most of the time I delete them thinking that I can’t take on the worlds problems, and often just not interested. Something about that email caught my eye though. I think because it was a story about an ordinary person just like me, a family just like mine struggling in life. I became interested enough to start searching the internet to find out more. I remember typing “What is going on in Zimbabwe?’ into google. The results were alarming for me.

I read about chronic shortages of the most basic kind, of hunger, of starvation, of illnesses. I read about hospitals unable to treat patients because of lack of basic medical goods and pharmaceuticals. I was moved to pray and continued to read about the situation (then approaching the March 29th elections)

And then a few weeks later by chance I stumbled upon an article which listed the wish list of items required by a hospital in a rural hospital north of Harare. The list had been collated by the Chief medical officer, and I was shocked to read some of those items. Things such as toothpaste and toilet paper. The most basic supplies. Also large quantities of fairly basic medical supplies like gauze and dressings.

‘Stuff it’ I said. ‘I’m going to send something’. I was sick of talking about how bad things were and doing nothing. I didn’t want to walk away again. So I emailed the doctor and indicated my intentions to send something and he gave me advice on how best to go about. My secret dream was to send a shipping container, but I mentioned this only to my husband and privately told myself to get my head out of the clouds and just take baby steps. Personally we didn’t have the money to send a container and I knew that it was more realistic to send a couple of boxes.

I started by emailing local medical supply companies and asking outright for donations. I approached over 15 companies and heard back from only one. They offered 4 pallets of perfectly usable goods.

I was so excited I could hardly think. A few weeks later this was followed up by a further large donation from the same company, and eventually a third. Now our garage is full to capacity with boxes of medical goods to be sent to Zimbabwe. It is approximately 28-30 cubic metres. ( A 20ft shipping container hold exactly 33 cubic metres.)

Our next challenge is to raise the funds to ship it there. It’s been a slow process, but I’m confident we’ll get there. I can’t wait to get it sent, and that hopefully my little crazy idea is actually going to make a difference in peoples lives.

This project has shown me that everyone has something to give no matter how insignificant you think it may be. Some people think that dealing with poverty is only about money. Yes, some people have money to give, and I think that all of us who live privileged lives in developed nations should consider giving something regularly. After all we live like kings and queens with our clean hot running showers and fresh food every day.

But it’s not just money. Some people have time on their hands. Some people can paint. Some people can give manual labour. Some people are good in business. Some people have blogs. Some people are hospitable. Some people are nurses. Some people can pray. Some people can design websites. Some people are doctors. Some people can sew. Some people can write. Some people can sell. Some people are politicians. Some people can make amazing food. Some people can sing. Some people can fundraise. Some people can spread the word. Some people can create beautiful things. Some people are lawyers. Some people are actors. Some people are activists. Some people work in medical supply companies and make compassionate decisions about what to do with surplus or written off goods.

Anyone regardless of age or background has something to give. Be creative about what you can do to help those less fortunate than yourself.

I’d love to hear your thoughts…especially if you’ve come here for Blog Action Day. Drop me a comment and let’s talk about what we can do about poverty.

To help with this project called Make A Plan please consider a donation using Paypal here, or join our Facebook group here. You can read more about the project or order items from the store here

Blog Action Day 08

I’m in. Are you in? Join me on October 15th. Let’s talk about Poverty.

more about “Blog Action Day 08“, posted with vodpod

Last post about the Baby Packs

At the risk of boring you all to tears, I know at least a couple of people out there would like to see the final collection of donations for the Baby Pack Project.

Thank you to SweetP, Penny and Audrey.

Baby Pack Project Update

A big Thank You to Penny who has donated all this beautiful stuff to the babies in South Africa…there are nappies, blankets, hats, bibs, socks, singlets, and warm hand knitted cardigans and sweaters. Thank you!

ETA: Also a big Thank you! to SweetP who has kindly donated money towards the postage! Yay….thanks so much.

I will post photos of the complete donation when it’s all ready to send.