What do you want for Christmas? The item at the top of my list costs $16,000. And I really want it.
Allow me to explain:
In many parts of Africa, clean water lies hundreds of feet below layers of hard rock. Children have no choice but to drink disease-infested water from surface lakes and ponds. When our drilling teams strike water, entire villages erupt in celebration because a clean water source cuts a community’s child mortality rate in half.
$16K can dig and install a hand pump on a well that can supply 300 people with life-sustaining clean water. It’s just one of many things you can “order” from the WorldVision Christmas Catalog.
It’s disgusting how far our money goes in other countries that need it more than we do. A one-ounce bottle Chanel No. 5 costs $275. Imagine other ways that money could be spent:
Dairy Cow - $545
Send a child to school for one year - $75
Brood of chickens for fresh eggs - $125
They have hundreds of items that you can buy in honor of someone else, and you get a card to give to that person, explaining how the money that otherwise would have been spent on them was used to help those in need. Here’s the catalog.
For more information on the clean water crisis in Africa, please visit Blood:Water Mission.
You bring up some very good points, however until the terrorists who plague this country have been defeated, who rob and steal from these people and force them into slavery, and until good jobs are there for the populace that will not be overrun by dictators and the terrorists, you are pouring money down the drain. These people have little future unless they leave their own country. Take New Orleans for example. Without jobs there is no economy and where there is no economy, a people cannot flourish or even exist. But, as I mentioned before, you bring up very good points.
David-
These people have lived there for thousands of years. Population shifts and other factors may have made it more difficult to find clean water, but digging wells and buying cows has very little to do with the government…and that’s kind of the point. If people can take care of themselves, through sustainable agriculture and microbusiness, they won’t be at the mercy of despotic governments.
I’m not sure what terrorism has to do with it.
We’ve toyed with the idea the last couple of years of asking family to refrain from buying gifts for us. We even toyed with trying to get everyone to pitch in an “buying” a cow through heifer.org. Unfortunately, noone really “got it” when we brought it up.
It looks like this year my wife and I will be using our Xmas budget to “buy” gifts for everyone from heifer.org. There needs to be some sort of shift in our prosperous culture where we recognze that the blessings we enjoy from the hand of God are not only for our enjoyment but for the blessing of the Nations.
Crap!
$275 for an ounce of Chanel No. 5?!
That could buy like a years worth of Plush Bus Crane Game stuffed animal attempts at the local grocery!
Hi Justin…I like WV also. Our school , Aletheia, raised enough consciousness and thus money (not spent on teacher gifts , not needed nic nacs…kids for kids) to get $650.00 last year and it certainly wasn’t insignificant that we were able to finance 10 children’s tuitions to school for a year. This year my parents are donating a few dollars each , for “my” gift, and we are sending two children to school in a third world country through WV. We are having parents send in one classroom supply each for the class to “open” for their classroom party time. The second graders are thrilled with what we are doing and were last year too. We are also doing ANGEL TREE for prision fellowship… I suggest the naysayers check out the World VIsion projects. World Vision, and other church mission efforts are often the only direct way some of the people in the “third world” receive anything , from shoes to a uniform and supplies that are necessary for them to be allowed to attend school in non-welfare system worlds.