Open Your Mind A Little (OK, A Lot)

Last year a site that I'm a member of sent out the word that a hospital group was going to be going to New Guinea to help with medical care at a specific location and would anyone be interested in donating hats for them to take along with them to give out to the people that came into the clinic. New Guinea is warm during the day but during the night hours, especially in the mountains, the temperatures can drop rapidly.

The site is Ravelry.com, it is a knitting and crochet social site that I'd been a member of for almost 3 years. Even though the medical group was being sent for both medical and missionary purposes (I don't like missionary pressure on desperate people), I decided to donate several hats to be taken along with them. I make hat and caps on a regular basis and donate them to a local hospital cancer ward irregularly (which means when I have a bag full) so I had several on hand already. I like doing charity work like this, I have a roof over my head, food on the table, I'm healthy and I'm still able to make my mortgage payments, there are lots of people in the world that can't say all those things.

So I sent the hats off and forgot about them. A few months later another announcement came up on Ravelry that the clinic had been a great success and a Big Ole Thank You to everyone that donated to the request for hats. A very nice gesture I thought. Later that same week I received a letter in the mail from the hospital that had sent the medical team to New Guinea. They thanked me for sending the hats and told me what a big success the trip had been. Hundreds of people had been seen at the clinic and all the 300 hats that they had received from all over the world had been handed out to grateful patients during their visit.

The letter shared one story of a particular patient that had come into the clinic. One of the services provided was eye exams and glasses to the patients that needed them. An elderly man came into the clinic and requested that he be given an eye exam. Speaking through an interpreter, the doctor started getting some background information from him. He was a genuine Bushman and had traveled for three days, walking at first and then hitching rides when he came to the areas where there were roads and walking again when there were no vehicles going his direction. He lived far up in the mountains as part of a remote tribe and they had never seen a doctor. But he had heard from travelers through the village that the free clinic was set up in the city and that he could get help for his eyes at the clinic. Further questioning brought up that he couldn't read, he was too old and slow to hunt with the other men and the women did the gathering and cooking for his people. Why did he need glasses? It was his job, he said, to pick the bugs out of the children's hair and now his eye sight was becoming so bad that he could no longer help his tribe/family in the job that had been assigned to him. So he had traveled for three days to see if the doctors could help him continue to do what was expected of him.

He did get his eye exam, a pair of glasses and a new hat before he left the clinic to return home. That story was shared as an example of the good that the clinic had done in New Guinea. And that's the kind of story you want to hear from a clinic going to help people that need medical help and don't have the resources that a lot of developed countries do.

As I chatted with people after I received the letter and recounted the story that had been shared I discovered some interesting things about the people that I told the story to. The main reactions were;

* Why send charity items 'over there' instead of taking care of 'your own'?

* That's great that they collected that many hats, let me know if they do it again and I'll send some.

* What a great idea as a memento of their visit.

* How many charities do you donate to?

* ~shudder~ The children have lice ? ! ? How can people live like that?

* You itemize, right? So you can put all this on your tax deductions?

There were a lot of people that thought it was a good idea and commended me on sending the donation that I did. There were also a lot of people that, really, surprised me with their reactions.

A human being is a human being whether they live in New Guinea or in the United States or, where ever you're reading this from. If I had a request to send hats for a medical mission to another country I would send them. And I would tell my crafty friends about it so they could send some also.

I also donate to charities locally, I like Project Linus and, as I said before, I make chemo caps for cancer patients, I also make prayer shawls for personal friends who are touched by cancer. That isn't really much considering what all is out there that needs to be done but some people find that astounding that I do everything that I do. I try to remember my manners and not demand 'Do you do any charity work?' because that is an individual decision and can't be forced on anyone. But you can get a pretty good idea from someone's reaction to your own charity work how much they contribute. I find a great deal of satisfaction and self esteem in the work I do, I'm sure other people would find the same if they would extend themselves.

The reaction to the bugs in the children's hair surprised me. We have outbreaks of head lice in schools and towns in the United States on a regular basis. The 'icky' factor of how these people lived really got to some people. It was as if they have it in their heads that everyone lives at the same socio-economic level that they live at and when something disagrees with that viewpoint, they can't accept it. Which may be one of the reasons why they don't think charity work is all that important. Blindness to the wide range of living conditions that human beings exist in around the world may help them sleep better at night but when the reality of it hits home, it will be more disturbing and potentially devastating because of the prejudice that they've accepted in their own mind.

Open your minds a little, OK, a lot. There's a lot of world out there that's different from your day to day and it's worth looking at and learning from and contributing to.