Kids and Goats
Last year we adopted a couple kids. My grandfather always sponsored a kid or two through Children International, and last year I got inspired to help the girls make a connection to kids somewhere else in the world. So we picked a couple girls from Ecuador - Erika and Vanessa. You can get online and choose a country, and a child, and this is who Andra and Grace picked:
Erika Vanessa
I love the program. We get letters from them regularly, and we email and write them back. Erika is the most amazing artist, and Vanessa's mother is very sweet (Vanessa is still too young to write us letters). When we first picked them, and we reviewed their family fact sheets, Andra was so concerned that she wanted to give them more money, so we added contributions for various holidays. We get notices about what they received for our donation, and we talk about them all the time, and what their lives are like.
I continue to struggle with raising kids who have any kind of social conscience and any sense of how the world lives when they are surrounded by such affluence. This is our one little attempt to work that in to our daily lives, and so far it seems to be working. We are so excited when we get letters. The girls just pooled the "Sharing jar" money, a jar they put $1 of each week's allowance into for some charitable purpose. There is an employer match (me), and I told the girls they could decide if they wanted to give the money to Erika and Vanessa, or maybe buy some creatures from Heifer International, another of our pet charities. They decided that since we already help Erika and Vanessa, that they wanted to buy a goat and some chicks for some other family.
I was very proud of their choices, and this week, my friend Amy told me she sponsored a few kids too. So here is where I am going - for $18 a month (the proverbial pennies a day), if you are looking for a little holiday happiness, you might find it in the cute duck pictures drawn by an 8 year old from Ecuador.
I know we sure did.
Erika Vanessa
I love the program. We get letters from them regularly, and we email and write them back. Erika is the most amazing artist, and Vanessa's mother is very sweet (Vanessa is still too young to write us letters). When we first picked them, and we reviewed their family fact sheets, Andra was so concerned that she wanted to give them more money, so we added contributions for various holidays. We get notices about what they received for our donation, and we talk about them all the time, and what their lives are like.
I continue to struggle with raising kids who have any kind of social conscience and any sense of how the world lives when they are surrounded by such affluence. This is our one little attempt to work that in to our daily lives, and so far it seems to be working. We are so excited when we get letters. The girls just pooled the "Sharing jar" money, a jar they put $1 of each week's allowance into for some charitable purpose. There is an employer match (me), and I told the girls they could decide if they wanted to give the money to Erika and Vanessa, or maybe buy some creatures from Heifer International, another of our pet charities. They decided that since we already help Erika and Vanessa, that they wanted to buy a goat and some chicks for some other family.
I was very proud of their choices, and this week, my friend Amy told me she sponsored a few kids too. So here is where I am going - for $18 a month (the proverbial pennies a day), if you are looking for a little holiday happiness, you might find it in the cute duck pictures drawn by an 8 year old from Ecuador.
I know we sure did.
Hey--don't know what your email is...how is Andra? Was she fine the next day? How was the wedding? Rena
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I think the bigger question is how is your kitchen?
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