President's Blog

Gift giving at Easter is tricky business. Many times those lovely little chicks and bunny rabbits that make it into Easter baskets don’t work out as intended. Living as I do, in a New York City apartment, they are out of the question for my family, my daughter’s pleadings notwithstanding. Hopefully this year I can once again get away with a basket of nice soaps and shampoos.

There is another alternative, of which I was reminded by a priest from North Carolina who sent me a copy of a letter from a young member of his parish. It reads as follows:

Dear Father Roger,

I saw a goat in the Episcopal Relief & Development book (Gifts for Life catalog). I ordered the goat for you and me. Maybe the goat will go to Haiti. The hungry people can get milk and cheese from a goat. They will be excited!!! We will call her Faith, like in Jesus.

Love,

(more…)

How should we define poverty?

My colleague, Abagail Nelson, asks this question in a reflection piece she wrote for the forthcoming book entitled, Lifting Women’s Voices. To answer it she shares this story and gets at something essential about poverty:

“For me, it happened when I was 22. I was in a small village in Ecuador doing a study on a coastal village’s economics. I asked a young woman there, about 20, a woman with three young children already. “What in this house is yours, alone?” And she said to me, “I own my spoon.” Her dress was borrowed, on loan from her sister after she splattered oil all over her own…she lived in her husband’s house, and all that was there was his… but her spoon had come with her to this house and would stay with her, should he leave. I felt a stone fall into my stomach and something deep within me went still….

This woman had a spoon to reach into a common bowl, a spoon to lift to the mouth of her little girl… She had a spoon…..and if her husband left, he could not take that spoon with him…”

How do you define poverty?

From Lifting Women’s Voices: Prayers to Change the World. (c) 2009 by Church Publishing Incorporated.

Bob Zoellick, President of the World Bank, has called for a “Vulnerability Fund” that would help poor countries weather the global down turn. According to the World Bank:

· Zoellick calls for developed countries to dedicate 0.7% of their economic stimulus packages to a “Vulnerability Fund” for developing countries

· Poor countries feel the impact of the global financial downturn but can’t afford stimulus packages developed countries are planning

· The Vulnerability Fund could help developing countries by funding investments in key areas: infrastructure, safety nets, SME financing

To read the whole story click here.

The bottom line is that not a single country has answered this call.

As with all disasters, financial or natural, those with the least suffer the most. This financial crisis is no different. The needs in the developing world are growing not shrinking, just at a time when those of us in the developed world are turning ever more inward and focusing on our own losses and needs.

God (never mind Bob Zoellick) calls us to move outside of our own loss and reach to those with even less.