It appears that at least sixty people have now viewed yesterday’s post. If each of us started giving just $10 per month (I realize I may sound like an infomercial, but just deal with it), within one year we will have raised close to ten times the average annual salary of one-third of the world’s population. In the third world, this amount could put 400–600 children through school. It could bring a total of thirty to fifty computers to ten or more schools that currently don’t have any computers. It could provide 500–1,000 children with shirts and sneakers (FN1 According to one report, there are at least 300 million shoeless children world-wide. To put this in perspective, the United States’ population is about 310 million. According to another report, your average American owns eleven pairs of shoes, with men owning an average of five and women owning an average of, gulp, seventeen. Ha ha. I’m somewhat embarrassed, especially as a man, to admit that I own ten pairs I think). Or this amount could do a number of other things. Think about the joy these kids would receive from owning their very first pair of kicks or being able to use computers for the first time in their lives. Seriously – let us stop and dwell on it for, say, just twenty or thirty seconds. I’m going to do it, too… Their joy would be infinitely greater than the joy we experience from buying our 40th t-shirt or 10th pair of jeans, or being 20 rows closer at the next sporting event (not to suggest that we necessarily shouldn’t have and be thankful for these things).

Anyhow, like I promised in yesterday’s post, listed below are a few charities I recommend and their outreaches.

Amazima Ministries International: Founded in 2008 by then 19-year old Katie Davis, Amazima feeds, educates, and encourages orphaned and vulnerable children and the poor in the African country of Uganda. Katie’s story is very interesting to me, and so I’ll share some of it. Katie, who was raised in a Catholic family no different than many of ours, first visited Uganda as a high school senior in 2006, and was very moved by her experience. Despite being the senior class president and homecoming queen of her high school, and having scholarship offers to top universities, she opted to move to Uganda for what she thought would be a gap-year following high school. To make a long story short, she is now the single adoptive mother of 13 girls and plans to remain in Uganda indefinitely I believe. You can learn more about Katie and Amazima, and donate to the ministry, here: http://www.amazima.org.http://www.amazima.org.

Orphans Overseas: Partnering with the Salvation Army and Intel, Orphans Overseas operates a preschool and orphanage out of Kenya and also provides tech education in Vietnam. I’ve visited the orphanage and was very impressed (photos can be found on my Facebook page). OO also plans to bring 2,500 Intel-supported classmate PCs to schools in the greater-Nairobi area of Kenya and, in addition, it supports various other orphan care initiatives, including early childhood development, rescue care for abandoned infants, support programs for single mothers, family reunification support, domestic & intercountry adoption, and orphanage education projects. Learn more about or donate to Orphans Overseas here: http://www.orphansoverseas.org/.

International Justice Mission: For those of my friends who are attorneys or justice-minded, IJM is a human rights agency that rescues victims of slavery, sexual exploitation, and other forms of violent oppression. It was founded by former U.S. Department of Justice attorney Gary Haugen in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and it now has a total of 16 field offices and 500+ lawyers on four different continents, including one here in Nairobi, Kenya, where it specializes in helping victims of child sexual offenses, police abuse, and illegal detention. Learn more about or donate to it here: http://www.ijm.org/.

For those who are reluctant to donate to a charity they know relatively little about, another option would be to send donations directly to me, which I would use to send shirts, sneakers, sports equipment, and/or other things to the South Hoor people with whom I spent the last week (to learn more about them, see my recently posted Facebook photo album titled, “South Hoor, Rift Valley”). In fact, if you wanted your money to be used for something specific (e.g., basketball sneakers), I would do my best to accommodate you. While I can’t guarantee I’d use the funds as effectively as the charities listed above, I can assure you that 100% of them will be used for the people.

This will conclude my second post. Again, feel free to ask any questions or make any comments.