Hi, it’s Melody Curtiss, Executive Director, Helping Children Worldwide.
Two years ago, I took this job, wondering how I would convince people that the poverty in rural Africa is as compelling as the poverty in rural America, and that education and healthcare for the youth of Bo is as important as education and healthcare for the youth of Washington, DC, Houston, TX, Kansas City, KS, or Charleston, S.C.
In America, we have our impoverished, our homeless, our sick and troubled. But there is a stark contrast between impoverishment in our land of plenty and the vulnerable children and families in Sierra Leone. We go hungry. They starve. We struggle to keep our kids in school. They have no school. I get sick on Sunday. I take medicine and am back at work on Monday. In the villages of Sierra Leone, they have no medicine, and if there were medicine, they couldn’t buy it on $1.20 a day.
I never want Sister Augusta at Mercy Hospital to again ask me if she should buy infant formula to feed babies who are starving, because their mother died and they are living off water. I don’t want her to take money that isn’t in her budget from another over-stretched budget item. I want her to have the formula on the shelf. I don’t want to hear that a baby is orphaned because her mother died giving birth in a village seven miles from a trained medical professional. I don’t want to discover a child has typhoid because his family washes their clothes and drinks from the same river their village uses as a toilet, or that five and seven year old students are dropping out of school to toil alongside their parents in the field.
As we celebrate the Christmas season, I invite you to make a generous gift to Helping Children Worldwide so that we may continue to shine the light of God’s love into the lives of the children of Sierra Leone.
Thank you for your love and support,
Melody Curtiss