How can we help?

I want to help people in need.

But I feel as if I can’t do anything. I am unemployed, I have no useful connections to anyone powerful.

I have not a lot of money.

I want to bring lasting change by helping someone in a way that helps them to help themselves, instead of just handing out food.

So I try to save money to give a goat or clean water to someone in a non-western country at Christmas. Through a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

But I would like very much to be able to help people every day.

And I would prefer to help people in my own country, because it is not really the responsibility of an unemployed person in a far away country to help someone thousands of miles away in a large country which has wealthy leaders who should be helping their own citizens. That was a long sentence, sorry.

I want to know that someone out there is helped by me, and I don’t need them to know it was me. I don’t even need to know it so that I can feel that I am a good person. I need it because it is natural for humans to want to improve the circumstances of others, or their environment.

Knowing that I am helping the situation of someone else means that I am a responsible, adult citizen who is adding in a small way to the improvement of my country. Even if it is only one other life. I think that helps us to feel connected. That is also important.

If you immediately thought ‘Hah, people are naturally selfish.’ Yes, we are. But we are equally driven by the need to improve our environment. I think that humans are creatures of many facets and aspects. We aren’t all good or all bad. The problem lies with the system we live in, whether it rewards selfishness or not.

And many individualist societal systems these days reward selfish behaviour. Benevolent behaviour is not only not rewarded, but leaves us with a deficit. You have to give something away of you want to give, or share. So in plus and minus terms, you are in the minuses, you lose something. We are encouraged to gain as much as we can, to be in the pluses. However there is a problem with this type of system; it encourages inequity and inequality.

It may not be illegal to follow certain rules in this system, but it would no doubt be considered unethical sometimes. However, as I said, this individualist system only looks at pluses and minuses for you, the consumer.

I hope we can change it, just a little bit at a time.

In the meantime, I will look around and see if I can find a way to help my country. I am sure that if I look hard enough, I will find a way. I admit I have been complacent and lazy. And fearful. I don’t want to be in the minuses. It doesn’t take much to end up homeless.

But I am going to try anyway, and lean on certain people who are my relatives, and hope that they will take care of me if things go bad.

And trust to God of course. I know that He is with me regardless of how I am living, which is comforting. It doesn’t fix my problems, but it gives me strength to deal with them.