Charity Begins At Home

Most of the news that you see and hear about Zimbabwe is negative and a lot of it focuses on the millions of people who are in desperate need of help and you can’t help but sympathise with them. I feel compelled to help in some way but being in the Diaspora and so far away from home I don’t even know where to start, what kind of assistance to give and how to give it. When I think about helping out what I picture is a select group of people getting their hands on whatever I send and using it for their own purposes with it never getting to who it was intended for. That, whether it is a real scenario or not discourages me from trying to do anything to help.

My faith and belief in being able to help was recently restored by my wife who after going through the clothes our daughter has out grown decided on sending to Zimbabwe. Instead of giving the clothes away to a charity here or throwing them into one of those ‘clothing bins’ she thought of relatives back home who have babies that would need clothing. All of these clothes have been put into a box and will be on their way to Zimbabwe very soon. After sorting through all the baby clothing we took a look in our wardrobes which are full of clothing, some which has has not been worn in years and some of which has not been worn at all. We are going to sort through this clothing and send if off to Zimbabwe as well where it will hopefully be distributed to people who will need, use and appreciate.

What we are sending home obviously won’t help thousands of people but it will at least benefit a few people. For example, when winter comes around again next year someone will be able to keep themselves a little warmer and a little more comfortable. Knowing that we will be able to do that for someone will bring more joy to our blessed lives. Something else that has also come about is that some of my work colleagues brought in boxes of clothing when they found out about it. This will mean an added cost for shipping but I will use the money generated by this blog to help pay for it. I don’t want this to be a one-off thing and hopefully we will have the opportunity to help more and more people in different ways in the near future.

We do know of some people who volunteer for charitable organisations to whom we will send some of the clothing to distribute appropriately. I don’t know how big philanthropy is with Zimbabweans but if it something that is not big it is something that should be embraced by many. No matter how big or small, everyone should try to do something to help those less fortunate than they are.