Posts Tagged ‘Christian’

For most of my life I was sick of poverty. Not that I cared about it, I didn’t really care to be honest. I saw all the cliched images from the third world depicting all too familiar scenes of children drinking contaminated water and desperate hands competing for morsels of packaged aid. So many images over so many years has a real desensitization effect on me which compounded my apathy.  And besides, those were issues and ideas which were “out there”; very large socio-political issues to be handled by governments and high officials, not a common, ordinary person like me. It’s not that I even wanted to donate to aid organizations, as I’d heard that most of your time any hard earned cash donations mostly became wound up in unwieldy administration costs and more often than not very little got to the suffering person. But as I said, I didn’t really care to be honest.

I grew up in a upper middle class home, went to a private school, was generally cocooned in life, so poverty was something that really didn’t concern me, after I shouldn’t I really put all my attention to my career, my life, my education, my friends and family.

This is a story of how that perception slowly changed. For the better.

In 2003 I visited Tanzania, at the time I was visiting an girlfriend (now ex) who had volunteered for a student aid organization. My visit was at the conclusion of her formal placement at a remote village, the central project was the establishment of HIV screening centres. I’ll never forget that trip, I always recall reading the READ MORE