Page 8 - Phonebox Magazine July 2011

Charity cannot be confined
WE ArE All told, and rightly, that Charity begins at home. Just watch the face of a small child eagerly sharing a bag of sweets; the child’s joy comes from the sharing. Soon enough he will share his pleasure with neighbouring kids, then school friends and forward to the crowd around at the sports club. The circle of giving is ever growing wider. College years carry us through to some chosen career with an attendant income and the chance to help people we probably never meet.
Someone in the office or the works comes forward with a collection can for a local orphanage or homeless shelter, for people similar to us but sadly less fortunate. Helping out with a few bob is obviously a good idea and please God the can is soon filled. Such is splendidly common here in England as we share among our own people.
Now comes the disaster appeal together with a lot of publicity and we enjoy reading of some splendid sum raised in fairly quick time; that is good but we spoil it when we boast of our generosity. The career meanwhile comes along with income tax and adult life draws us to wonder where the money goes.
Some of that money goes to overseas aid which appears a good idea only to be sadly wrecked when we read of the corrupt governments we are helping. Therein lies the rub; governments only help governments, dignitaries abroad grow rich – very rich – on the proceeds of (mostly) Western aid but the people we aim to help receive nothing but further suppression. The recipients are seldom people, they are only politicians playing games of quid pro quo. We hear pious words about good governance but those are mere weasel words and crocodile tears which aim to keep the tax payer quiet. An unhappy instinct grows among us which leans against sending money abroad. I am pained when I hear good hearted friends and neighbours speak of these things and missing the point, the feeling is akin to watching a favoured horse baulking at the one final fence.
We live in a world of rather more than six billion people, a world operated by a few thousand statesmen
and their henchmen. In excess of three fourths of all those people live in poverty and deprivation such as
is simply unseen in our tiny island. But there are many worthy organisations which reach abroad to
individual people in villages, mission schools, hospitals and such-like. The real charities carefully by-pass
all government. We all need that the world’s poor shall come to live as we do, we need to leave them no cause to look on us with envy. They are presently envy while we are greed. True charity aims to remove those two evils and in so doing to put an end to the tensions which divide the nations.
Charity begins at home but as we grow up let us see that home is just one small planet. GB
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