KymPossible's Mission Journal

When is the last time you helped a stranger?

If you don't remember, it has been too long.  

I often find that it is the people who have the least who tend to give the most.  And I don't mean they are giving hundreds of dollars - they may give $5 when they only make $10 or $13 an hour to start with. What I mean by "give the most" is that they give the most often.  Whether it is helping the person at the check out line who is putting back something because they are short on money, or donating time/money to an animal rescue, they give freely not because they have an excess of resources but because they know what it is like to need.

I grew up poor.  But my mom and I once drove home from a fast food restaurant at 10pm to get  blankets for the couple that were living in their car in winter.  We didn't have much, but we sure had more than that couple had.   I'm not telling you this to show off my generousity or imply I'm special or deserve admiration.  I'm telling you this because I want to inspire you to find ways that you can make a difference for people.  Did the used spare blanket that was probably 5 years old mean as much to us as it did to that couple?  Not a chance, it meant FAR FAR more to them.  This is a phenomenon I call "The Exchange Rate of Kindness".  I can give something trivial to me, and have it mean significantly more to someone in need.  So while I don't attend church or believe in God, I tithe.  I give directly to people in need.  Sometimes they are charities.  Usually they are individuals, like the guy at the gas station who humbly asked if I could help him out with a gallon of gas in his container, his car ran out about a block away.  I filled his 2.5 gallon can, because I could.  The $10 meant very little to me, compared to what it meant to him.  

You don't have to hang out at the gas station waiting for someone to walk up with a red gas can.  If you don't know where to start, here are a few people who could use a hand.

• Trenton Crowl - A woman I went to high school with and haven't seen since 1990, she knows Trenton's family.  In August 2012 on the day before Trenton turned 1, his mother's boyfriend suffocated him to get him to take a nap.  The resulting brain damage has changed Trenton's life forever.  Tonight he is back in the hospital having life threatening seizures.  Whatever the outcome, his father and stepmother who now have full custody of Trenton could use your help. 

 

• Aidan Love - My best friend know's Aidan's family, they all take karate classes at the same dojo.  In January 2014 Aidan was sick again, and his mom, a single parent on active duty with the Air Force took him to the doctor.  His regular doctor who had been seeing him for the last three weeks was unavailable; the doctor he ended up seeing thought the prior diagnosis wasn't quite right and did more investigation... and discovered a massive lymphoma cancer throughout his chest and abdominal organs.  Aidan is doing well with chemo and other cancer treatments, but is still a very sick little boy whose family is in upheaval focusing on his recovery. 

 

• Michael Morones has been in the news more than the other two children, he was an 11 year old so bullied at his school for being a brony that he attempted suicide.  The brony community has raised $72k for his family and there is a big Broadway fundraiser hosted by Sir Ian McKellan coming up on April 14 2014, so while I financially support all three of these boys and their families and would encourage you to do the same, if you have limited resources it may be reasonable to help Trenton and/or Aidan's families first as they don't have the same level of community-driven financial support coming in.

 

If none of these causes is moving you to donate $5 or $25 or $100, find your own cause that you are passionate about.  There are plenty of ways you can make the world a better place for your fellow man.  I can recommend shelters for juvenile victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence shelters, homeless services such as soup kitchens and transitional housing, support centers for child victims of sexual abuse, international aid organizations to provide clean water or vaccines to villages... 

You know how you feel when you get to the drive through window at Starbucks and the person ahead of you has "paid it forward"?  You can do that pretty much anywhere - just do something nice for a stranger, with no expectation of direct repayment but the belief that the recipient will in turn do something good for someone else at some point.  The more often you help strangers, the easier and more reflexive it gets.   And you can involve your family, it is a great learning experience!  My kids help choose what we donate to each month, and often they want to donate some of their own money as well.  

Need more inspiration?  Check out the One Spark Foundation.  They have lots of easy and low cost ideas on how to make other people's day a little brighter.  

Child abuse at Uintah Elementary School

And the kids were abused by the school officials themselves!

You might say I am being sensationalist or overdramatic, but I assure you that I am not.  

If I were to serve my children a meal and then suddenly take the plate away and throw the food in the garbage, giving them only milk and a piece of fruit and telling them "daddy didn't pay the child support this month, you don't get dinner" I would be abusing my children emotionally, and probably physically by intentionally not feeding them a proper meal.

That is exactly what the Salt Lake City school district did at Uintah Elementary School.  On Monday they tried to notify parents that had a balance due in their children's lunch accounts.  Then on Tuesday, after children had been handed lunches, someone came and took the food away from the kids and threw it in the garbage because their parents hadn't deposited money into their lunch account yet.  Maybe payday isn't until Friday.  Maybe mom forgot.  Who knows the reason, it is still totally unacceptable to take food away from a human being and throw it out.

Salt Lake City school district has just punished and humiliated children for an issue that was entirely out of their control and should have been handled directly with the parents. They just sent these children the message that "we would rather take food away from you and throw it in the garbage than let you eat it, that's how little you matter". No normal human being with a heart would have taken food away from children because of their parent's debt. The person who made this decision and every person responsible for carrying it out should be fired and not allowed to work with children ever again. They humiliated and emotionally scarred children, and for what? They didn't recover the money their parents owed, they didn't recover the money for the lunches they threw in the garbage, they simply wasted food and traumatized children. And while they may think they only hurt 40 kids (only! One would have been too many!) the reality is that every kid who saw this happen now has reason to fear their school lunch being taken away and thrown out too. 

Seriously. People need to be at minimum fired for this.

source: www.nokidhungry.org

 

Statistical obfuscation, the American Winter, and universal hope

If you have, make, or want money, and have an opinion on taxes, welfare, the socioeconomic class divide, Occupy Wall Street, "the 1%", or poverty, this is a good article to read: NYT: The Undeserving Rich

The first reason I like this article is because it points out how data is used to mislead people.  As someone with training in statistics, data analysis and program evaluation, this pains me.  I once had a Director at a Large Software Company I worked at ask me to analyze some data and write a report to support his program/hypothesis.  I told him I could analyze the data, but that it may not say what he wanted it to.  That is what data analysts are supposed to do.  Not massage data into an elaborate edge case that says what you want it to.  Data analysts are supposed to be mathematicians and scientists.  We are supposed to objectively analyze data and identify significant correlations, trends, perhaps even causalities.  We have to observe the results and intelligently communicate them - but we are not supposed to manipulate the results to say what we want them to, or to hide the truth of an issue!

The second reason I like this article is the second section (it really could be two separate articles) about the Myth of the Deserving Rich.  

The story goes like this: America’s affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.

What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities?

It is easy to tell ourselves that the poor are in that situation because they didn't work hard enough or made questionable life choices.  In essence, they deserve to be poor.  But the truth is that our country has an ever growing population of hard working people living in poverty.  If they hit a streak of bad luck - get sick, have a car break down so they can't get to work, get laid off, etc, they may be homeless before they know it.  Many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck not because they are shiftless slackers who don't want to work hard - they are living paycheck to paycheck because their job (or in some cases jobs) don't pay a living wage.  

According to US Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida, 50 million Americans (including 13 million children) are living in poverty, and there is only 1 job opening for every 3 applicants.  A web search tells me that unemployment is at 7.3%, and the US population is 313.9 million, so I'll be the first to admit that I can't get this math to make sense to me yet.  Neither do the assertions of the producers of American Winter, that 46% of America is living in or near poverty (what is the definition of "near poverty"?)  I am still digging through data to find the truth.  But watching American Winter, you cannot deny the brutal reality that working families face every day in America (don't try watching it without a box of kleenex handy).  Quoting my friend Lizzie who is actively involved in helping homeless people in her community:

Absolutely anyone can end up homeless. It's easier (and more comfortable) to think its " those people". Distance keeps the very real and scary threat of poverty away. 
There are people who are mentally ill and drug addicted on the street, but in some cases they simply began without resources or proper family. The depression, PTSD, and addiction are aquired after a financial ruin. Hope is lost. Sleeping in a wash is a bit of a trick...a little medicine helps you sleep thru the night, a little more takes your mind off how utterly screwed you are. And then...addiction.

Many many Americans are 60 days away from catastrophe. There are former millionaires that are now homeless, people who got too old to work, abuse victims, products of the foster care system, veterans, isolated people, alone people, people who hit a rough patch and had no one to ask for help. 

People. All kinds of people, anyone. You. Me. All of us. Not "those people" All people.

 

OK so maybe the Congresswoman's statistics are inflated and it isn't 50 million people living in poverty but only 25 million.  Or maybe the American Winter filmmakers are right and it is closer to 150 million in or near poverty.  Either way, it still doesn't mean those people deserve to be there with little hope of improving their situation.  We don't have to give handouts, but for $DEITY sake we need to offer people a hand up and a way to get out of poverty.  Opportunity and hope should be available to everyone in America, even the poor.

New in my reading queue: Bread For The World.  I don't have the same faith they do, but I am interested in their goal to end hunger.  It isn't job training or advocating for a living wage, but kids can't study when they are hungry (and that means their future potential is limited) and their parents can't do their best when they are stressed about how they will feed their kids.  

I can't fix everything, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't at least try to make one thing better.

The 100 Thing Challenge, plus a few other things

There has been a strange confluence of events leading to this blogpost.  Today my friend Emerson posted an excellent NYT opinion piece about how the addiction to money (and subsequently power) are just as addictive as heroin and cocaine and arguably far more corrupting.  Those who are addicted may have obscene amounts of money, yet they avoid sharing their largess outside of a chosen few friends and family (versus donating back to the community) and defend its not only continued but ever increasing stream into their bank accounts with a zeal that borders on paranoia.  They rationalize their behavior like a junkie.  And the article is written by a man who lived the life, with multi-million dollar bonuses on top of his multi-million dollar salary, and eventually walked away from it.  He didn't like who he had become.

I don't think you have to be one of the super wealthy multi-millionaires to struggle with this addiction though.  Just two days earlier I was talking with my friend Johnny about his life in Uganda, and the fact that it seems that for a great many people in America (and likely other first world countries as well) it doesn't matter how much wealth they have acquired, it simply isn't good enough and they still want more.  As I recently blogged, there are people happier with less than you have, and by chasing things you don't have you taint the things you do have with a subtle sense of dissatisfaction (and in some cases not so subtle).  I'm not suggesting everyone should live an ascetic life, it is natural to want to fill your Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with a nice home instead of just a lean-to shelter - but no amount of money or objects can fill your heart and soul with peace and happiness.  There comes a point of diminishing returns, where the home you once wanted so badly is now not opulent enough - that is the danger I strive to avoid in my life.  Attitude of gratitude and all that.  

So while I have only spoken to a couple of my closest friends about the actual details of my Life2014 plan at this point, I discussed with Johnny my high level themes for this year.  The first of my three themes is Simplify.  By reducing clutter and getting rid of things we don't regularly use, I believe we can lower the stress in our lives and be happier and less distracted.  What is more, as the kids and I clear things out of the house we are looking for ways to give them to those who have less.  The kitchen purge is benefitting the Genesis Project, a local organization working to rescue and rehabilitate victims of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking in the Seattle/Tacoma region - they are teaching the girls in Genesis House how to cook.  And we have a bunch of bottles of partially used shampoo or body wash that we bought over the last few years but ended up not liking and the bottles are just sitting unused...  So we bought little travel toiletry bottles at the dollar store and are filling them with soap and shampoo for the homeless living in Tent City.  We could just throw the partially used products out and be done with it in a matter of minutes, but this is so much more rewarding for our souls.

And it seems I'm not the only one with the crazy idea that getting rid of stuff will make us happier. Johnny told me about the 100 Thing Challenge, where a guy decided to get down to owning just 100 Things.  I went off to the internet to read more about this movement, and so far tend to think that like my recent blogpost on Kelly McGonigal's The Science of Willpower, people are getting too rapidly wound up in the implementation and goal of getting to the 100 mark than the overarching premise of simplifying their lives.  The idea to get down to owning 100 things is attractive but 100 seems rather arbitrary and unlikely to be the right target for everyone; the dichotomy of a catchy call to action with murky practicality is likely to result in people feeling like they've failed to achieve the target goal, when the target goal may be wrong.  It is also leading to some people waffling on the 100 number or the definition of A Thing.  Some practicitioners are counting their entire music collection as one thing, not each incividual CD.  Does each plate count as a thing or do you count by each set of dishes?  Each individual sock, each pair of socks, or is a dozen socks grouped as A Thing?  Does each person in the house get to have 100 Things?  Why 100?  Wouldn't a reduce-by-x-percentage goal be a more scalable model?

I'm not trying to ridicule the concept of the 100 Thing Challenge, I admire the intent.  I am merely acknowledging that it is imperfect, without rejecting the idea completely.  Frankly I have no idea how many Things I already own, so the idea of only having 100 is rather hard to conceptualize.  It would be interesting to try and write a prioritized list of the top 100 things I would choose to keep, but perhaps more interesting would be to catalog the top 100 Things I would choose to eliminate (and then do so).  Perhaps that is the more successful approach to take, not to clear cut your life but to practice more strategic and selective cutblocks.  

Just more food for thought.

and...

A little bit more about my friend Johnny.

Johnny, his wife, and kids decided to move from their home in the USA to Uganda in 2009 to try and make the world a better place.  It hasn't been an easy journey, but they are absolutely accomplishing what they went there to do.  For example, his organization Hackers For Charity (which has many volunteers, it isn't JUST him) needed to raise $1000 to rebuild a village that had been destroyed by fire and left dozens of families homeless.  Thanks to the donations of everyday people like you and me, they raised $3000 overnight, enough money to rebuild 26 homes.  And then HFC created crafting jobs to help lower unemployment in the village.  They were already providing computer training, as someone with computer skills can earn enough in Uganda to support multiple families.  Bottom line, Johnny and his family are making a difference.  Not everyone can move to Uganda and do what Johnny and his family are doing.  But anyone can contribute to help their mission.  Seriously, HFC is doing good work, please consider making a donation if you can, even $5 makes a difference.