Love

Love is defined in a dictionary as “a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person”

The King James Bible defines it as “Greater love hath no man than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends”

Throughout our lives, if we are fortunate, we will know many kinds of love; the love of a parent, the love of our friends, teenage love, the all-consuming love when you meet the person who you want to share the rest of your life with, the love you feel for your child and the love that child gives back to you……….there are so many different kinds of love.

Not everyone is as fortunate as you and I, but last week I was shown just what it is like to “Love your brother”.  Whilst visiting a Children in Distress community project in Curtea d’Arges, Romania, we gave biscuits to the children as a treat.  These children were from the surrounding villages, very poor communities; one boy had a pair of shoes on that were 3-4 sizes too big (probably shared by the family). Another boy on receiving his biscuit, carefully ate half of it and then asked if he could take the other half home for his brother.  That really shook me!  I have eight grandchildren who all have biscuits “on tap” and I’m sure would not have been restrained enough to leave half of a much coveted biscuit for their brother back home.  How lucky that little boy at home was, to have a brother who loved him so much.  Needless to say, he was told to finish the biscuit himself and was given some to take home for his family.

Throughout my visit I saw love freely given to all of our children by their carers. You might argue that they are paid to love the children and I would say straight back to you……….”No, they are paid to look after our children”; the love they give the children is of their own free will and it is obvious to everyone that they DO love the children in their care and the children know it too.  To see their happy little faces despite their many disabilities is a sight to behold.

Here is one of our supporters, Glynis, enjoying a cuddle with one of our new little boys, Marian – as you can clearly see, both are enjoying the experience!

 

It is a humbling experience to visit our many projects in Romania; why don’t you join us on one of our supporters’ trips? I promise you that you will never forget the experience and you will certainly feel the love that is given and received by all.

Jane x

Hope Help & Hospice Care

I find that the season of Spring fills me with hope, don’t you?  After the dreary months of Winter, the snowdrops start the season off by appearing in our gardens, pristine white and crisp against everything else which is still quite dull after Winter, followed by shoots appearing all over the garden; daffodils, grape hyacinths, bluebells, crocuses, tulips, the beautiful Lenten rose.  Soon everything is bursting; the birds into song, blossom on the trees, the daffodils finally bloom and it fills my heart with hope. 

We each have different hopes for the year ahead and all kinds of hopes and dreams flit through my mind.

John Addison (1672-1719) once said “Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for”.  Well I’ve found something to do in that I work for Children in Distress; something to love (in my case it is someone - actually lots of little ‘someones’! - the children we care for) and something to hope for – a better life for the children we care for.  Hope, Help & Hospice Care is what we give to our children in Romania.  

 

Would you like something to do? Contact Children in Distress; we always need people like you to help fundraise so that we can continue the invaluable care of our children.  If you’d rather not fundraise you can do it indirectly by donating goods that we can sell to raise funds or knit, sew, crochet blankets, items of clothing and toys for our children (we send shipments of such items to Romania every 10-12 weeks or so, dependent on how many goods we have to send and available funds to pay for the shipment), if you are good at woodwork, you could make toys; we have one lovely male supporter who makes wooden trains for the children (which they love!) – there are endless ways in which we can find you something to do!  In return, we can give you something to love because I guarantee that once you take the step to do something for our children you will love them just as we do and following on from that, you will have something to hope for; a better life for them.

This week I am taking a party of supporters out to Romania to show them the work we do and to meet some of the children we care for. It is a small party of supporters; seven, but out of those seven people are five who have never been to Romania before and have never met our children and staff before.  Those five people have already found something to do in that they have been supporting Children in Distress and now it is our turn to give them something to love and when they return from Romania next weekend they will also have something to hope for.

“At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division” - Jesse Jackson

 

Your Legacy

What do you think I mean by “Your Legacy”?  Am I after your money (I am after all, a fundraiser!)? Or do I mean your legacy to mankind?  Perhaps, on this occasion, a little of both of these things.

My legacy to mankind is my three children, two sons and a daughter; all of whom my husband and I are extremely proud (yes I do know that pride is a sin, but on this occasion I’m allowing myself that sin!); they have all done well in their chosen professions, they have not caused us a lot of trouble (only an occasional little blip or two over the years but nothing serious J).  We brought them up to be tolerant of all people, no matter what religion, race or beliefs their friends had, to be kind to everyone they met and, quite simply, to care about their fellow men.  In return, their legacy to us is eight beautiful children; two of whom are of Jamaican descent, two of Nigerian descent, one of Ghanaian descent and three of “pure” British descent (I hope that doesn’t offend anyone, especially my family but I didn’t know how else to phrase it!!).  I watch these eight children playing with each other at family occasions, totally oblivious that any are “different” from their cousins and oh, how I wish all the people in the world could get along with each other like these children do.

My work with Children in Distress involves visiting Romania, usually at least once each year and I see a legacy of another kind; Ceaucescu’s legacy.  Without exception, where there is trouble in any country in the world, it is always the children who suffer the most.  Ceaucescu’s legacy was having imported contaminated blood, he left thousands of children (and adults) with HIV and AIDS.  Unable to afford medication for their children, parents abandoned them, often to the perils of terrible institutions where they were bound inside filthy cots, left unattended for hours at a time, kept short of food and most of all, deprived of love.  This is where Children in Distress stepped in to cure, sometimes; to help, often; to comfort, always.  This is their legacy.

 

Your legacy could be, simply, to leave a bequest in your Will to Children in Distress to help them continue this valuable work.  The month of May is ‘Make a Will’ month, so why not make yours and leave a legacy to Children in Distress?  No matter how large or small your legacy is, it would make a difference to the children in our care.  Children are our future; we must always care for them.

About Time!

I thought it was about time that I found the time to write again. TIME; a commodity which we all seem so short of these days, don't you agree?  My Dad used to say that we all find time to do the things we want to do and you know, he was right!

In my busy life of working, looking after grandchildren, elderly Mum, housework (now there's something to waste time on.................who cares if there is a little dust around??!!), I can still find the time to work on my love of crafts.  After all, that great man, Martin Luther King Jr did say that "We must use time creatively!" Perhaps he didn't exactly mean that I must use my time knitting, crocheting etc but I do strive to use my time creatively in one way or another.

I spend time thinking up creative ways of raising money to look after our children in Romania; at present my creative juices are flowing by producing things to sell at our "Coffee, Cakes & Crafts" morning to be held on Saturday 12 April.  In a previous post I told you all about the chickens I and my friends are producing for sale - at this present time we have produced 150 and demand would appear to be great this year so we are still using up every spare minute knitting more; here are a few of them (I promised you a picture of them!): 

Today I met up with two supporters, Ann & Elsie from Consett, Co Durham who filled my van with lovingly knitted items for the children in Romania; a great deal of time had been spent on the blankets, jumpers, cardigans, hats, toys etc by a number of ladies who had lovingly given up their time to help clothe needy children in another country.  Nelson Mandela said "We must use time wisely  and forever realise that the time is always ripe to do right" - I reckon that the ladies of Consett had used their time wisely and found the time ripe to do right.  Thank you ladies!

Incidentally, whilst my husband Pete drove the van today I used the time travelling to knit six flower brooches and three chickens; all for sale on 12 April!

Time is precious, don't waste it!

Jane x

Friendship

A few nights ago, a friend who I hadn't seen for almost three years (we had kept in touch via email mainly during this time) phoned me to ask if I would be in the next day as she would like to call and see me.  I was and she did and we had a great time catching up on our respective news.

This set me thinking about friendships in general.  What makes a good friendship?  There are different kinds of friendship; the friends you don't actually see very often but when you do see them it is just like you saw them the day before (like my recent visitor), there are childhood friends who you met perhaps at primary school / secondary school / college and have remained friends throughout all the different changes to your lives since then, there are new friends who you may have met through your work / church / at the pub / evening class or some such environment, there are friends who will stick by you through the good times and the bad,  then of course there are  the "fair weather" friends who are there for you when everything is going swimmingly but are nowhere to be seen in times of difficulty.

I think our friends are made up of a mixture of all of these different kinds of friends.  I know that I have friends from all of these quarters.

It is much the same with our charity; we have supporters (friends) who have been with us from the start and have stuck by us, supporting us through thick and thin, we have made new friends as the charity has grown who we have met whilst giving talks at different organisations, friends who have joined us when donating a shoebox to our 'Love in a Box' appeal or friends who have heard about our work and befriended us.  Sadly, we also have some "fair weather friends" too!

The children in our care need lots of friends, friends who will take the time to send them a card just to say hello or a card on their birthdays and at Christmas, friends who will help to raise the funds to look after them  They have, in their short lives, already met up with too many "fair weather friends" - they need the kind that will stick with them through thick and thin.  Why not introduce your friends to our children so that they can make new friends?

Gratitude

This morning I opened my emails to find an email from Andy White http://www.58twelve.com/ and felt compelled to share what he said with you.   We all, no matter how well off, financially or emotionally, have a tendency to moan about what we don't have instead of being grateful for what we do have.  Andy's words have a great relevance to my work with Children in Distress and to your support of CID.  Here is what he wrote:-

Do you own a car? Only 8% of the world do, so that means 92% don't. And that means that whatever type of car you have, if you have one, you are privileged.  Do you enjoy clean, disease-free, running water from your kitchen tap? More than one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water, never mind a kitchen tap. That figure includes an estimated 400 million children - more than the entire population of the USA.  And, because unclean water is full of nasty stuff, it causes illness resulting in somewhere around 443 million school days being missed every year.

If you're like me, you don't like feeling hungry. But you probably don't have to put up with that feeling for longer than it takes you to find a snack, right? But around 800 million people won't eat anything at all today. Nothing at all. And about 300 million of those people will be children.  So is it any wonder that, every couple of seconds, someone dies from hunger?

Do you complain when the power gets cut or the internet goes down? I know I do.

But I have no right to complain. Approximately 1.6 billion people - that's about a quarter of the world's population - live without any electricity at all. Can you imagine life without electricity? I can't.

 

When you get passed over for a raise, or miss out on that bonus, it sucks. But what sucks more is that nearly half the world's population — that's more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. That's 3 billion people living on less than you and I may spend on a coffee.  And what about the 1.3 billion people who live in extreme poverty - less than $1.25 a day?

The contrasts between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' are stark.

Here's an example of that contrast: Americans spend $20 billion per year on ice-cream - yes, ice-cream - while around 800 million people worldwide don't have anything to eat at all, never mind a desert.  And I'm not beating on Americans - I am quite sure other countries could provide equally horrifying statistics - I just don't have them to hand.  And that $20 billion spent on ice-cream would go half way to raising the approximately $40 billion it would take to offer basic education, clean water and sanitation, reproductive health for women, and basic health and nutrition to every person in every developing country.

Look, I didn't mean to wreck your Sunday morning, but these things are worth thinking about.

And I've been thinking about them a lot recently. Not specifically the situations I just shared with you, but the way I view my own life in a world where, as I type these words, someone is starving to death, or drinking water that will kill them.  You see, we gauge our lives based on what we see around us - among our peer groups and in our neighbourhoods. And, we get sucked into an 'I need more than I have to be OK' mind-set.

But the problem with that mindset is that you lose sight of just how 'rich' you are.

You see, when you focus on what you don't have, you cast aside the blessing you already hold in your hand. And without an attitude of gratitude, you will never enjoy all that life wants to give you.  If your starting point is not gratitude, you will always be discontent. You will always be looking for more, striving, reaching, wanting.  I know how this works. Over the years, I have missed the fullness of so many blessings because I never paused to hold the gift that had been placed in my hand so that I could celebrate and enjoy it.

I still fall into that trap, but I'm working on cultivating an attitude of gratitude. And all those stark statistics I gave you remind me just how lucky I am to have what I do have, and how ungrateful I am to lament what I do not.

So what do you think about gratitude? Does it come easily to you or, like me, do you need to work on it? What do you do to make sure it's a part of your make up?

Powerful words huh?  They certainly set me thinking! I know that many of you are grateful for what you have; otherwise you wouldn't be helping CID to look after the children we care for and for that support I, and my colleagues both here in the UK and Romania are extremely GRATEFUL.  Please encourage more of your family and friends to be grateful for what they have and to show that gratitude by supporting those who are not so well off.  Thank you :)

Jane x

 

The hardest job I ever had...............................

My Mum (now age 95!) was chatting to her friend and I overheard her say “The hardest job I ever had was teaching our Jane to cast on”. Of course she was referring to teaching me to knit. She quickly followed this statement with a little bit of a boast; “Before you knew where she was, she was casting on for the whole class!” Phew, it must have clicked with me eventually!!

Now, anybody who knows me, knows that I just love knitting and any other kind of crafts I can get my hands on! But……………..I can still remember being age 5 in Miss Palmer’s reception class knitting dishcloths and proudly holding up my very first finished one, only to realise with dismay that it had a huge hole in the middle where I had dropped lots of stitches! Perhaps at that point I COULD cast on but hadn’t quite learnt that if I dropped a stitch I was required to pick it up again! I’m delighted to say that I have improved since then J

I bring my love of crafts into my work for CID by leading the Handcrafters’ Guild; we have over 140 members who knit, crochet, sew, make greetings cards and other items to send to Romania to help clothe the children we care for and also to sell some to raise funds for the charity. I also try to encourage other friends of the charity to make blankets, clothes and toys for the children. One of the girls (Ionela) at St Laurence’s, Cernavoda now makes herself some money embroidering exquisite table mats and runners and selling them; a craft she learnt from me during my visits to St Laurence’s.
My latest foray into the world of crafts is to set up the Children in Distress Yarn Shop http://childrenindistress.yarnshopping.com/ to not only bring our Guild members and other supporters some very affordable yarns but also to (hopefully) raise some much needed funds for the charity.

Ever since learning that ‘pride comes before a fall’ (the dishcloth episode!) I have tried to do my best at whatever I was doing at that precise moment. A J Leon, who I had the privilege of meeting some years back, says in his blog ‘The Pursuit of Everything’ - Produce your best work every single time. Or produce nothing. Anything in the middle is a waste of your time and our attention. Well, when I was 5 years old, there was nothing in the middle of my dishcloth and it WAS a waste of my time! However at that time I was producing the best work I could.

What was the hardest job you ever had?
Jane x

PS If you'd like to join our Handcrafters' Guild, drop me a line at janerussell@childrenindistress.org.uk