Empowering the Poor For Life

Some thoughts and reflections on our work with ProLife and Gawad Kalinga, Helping the poor. These words were inspired when I was talking a FTW in the Philippines about GK and finding a secular understranding of this spiritual connection: I'm sure there is more to be added, but for me this has been quite a revelation in better understanding our work as Catholics. Please pass on to those that may be looking for a foundation of the work we do for the poor and for Life. God Bless

We must empower the poor to choose, to hope and plan for their future and to make the responsible choices for their lives and their children's lives, in turn this will provide a foundation for the culture of life, and creates a more aware and more accountable population that can plan accordingly to their needs within control, recognizing that the control is in the values, and not the governance..

If we can't change their viewpoint, then we have issues that won't go away, and the cure for this is not by limiting the population thru governance or human intervention, but through holding their hand, giving them hope and rebuilding their lives
"We don't need to limit their amount of kids, we need carefully discern the number of children God wants them to have"

When you talk with the impoverished women as to why do they get pregnant?

And they have answers like...

We weren't really thinking, we just needed temporary release that time and now I’m pregnant

OR My husband was drunk and I couldn't stop him

OR It's okay, the more kids we have the better chances that one of them will make it and get us out of poverty

Middle class families carefully plan out their familiesand there is some proof that it's among the poor that population can grow...so we must look to the poor. By creating the homes and relationships in GK, we are really creating with the values the foundation of the culture of life. Which in turn is raising a new generation of people that will be grounded in the values that God has shown us...So we restore the dignity of both the body and soul..

We also protect life through the opportunity of nurturing the poor, so countless of lives are not just saved, but also have seen witness of Christian work and can pass these values onto further generations.

More info on Gawad Kalinga can be found at http://www.gawadkalinga.org

or http://www.ancopusa.org (ANswer the Cry Of the Poor is the US advocacy arm of GK)

The Pro-Life in Humanitarian.

When the world was created, it was created with one thing in mind. To hold, grow and develop life.

In our world of millions of people, we seem to forget easily the poorest of the poor. But worse off than that is we forget to remember that they are people like us. We start to develop new plans, new governance and new economics for them, but are missing the integral aspect of their development: nourishment.

Models exist today that baffle the mainstream critics and scientists. They look at these basic groups and don’t understand why they can build thousands upon thousands of homes and educate hundreds of thousands more but not worry so much about following the guidelines that our brightest minds came up with. The basis of Gawad Kalinga and so many other nation building movements is to give care from the start to the end for all peoples involved. There is not a time in point where care will not be given. From the details of the plans, the supplies, education, health, productivity to the broadness of scope of building thousands of homes within a short time span, these movements represent something that we, in the first world countries should be aware of.

They represent a type of change that no matter how magnified under the microscope, no matter how picked apart they will get, the basis of our human integrity is to help others.
Why then if this is the basis for us, we seem to have failed over all these years. Two percent of the world holds the world’s riches? Is this the work of the devil, is this the work of the conquest and colonization state of minds that founded our own first world paradise?

I think the issue really is that we have blinded ourselves from the work we are doing. We have found places that are comfortable to us and that allow us to retreat into our little hole. Yet all the meanwhile, we can give countless dollars to some organization and be happy that we don’t have to step into the mud pile with them in order to calm our conscious.

This also seems to be the reason why we find a lot more donors than we do volunteers. This reoccurrence of people deciding to give their riches but not their time seems to be a norm. In all reality, the riches are needed, but have we not thought that these represent the same worldly distractions that got us to where we are today.

Which leads to the next topic: Today, we find ourselves in a world that seems to everyone else, more or less ideal. I choose not to use the word perfect, because that should be reserved for non worldly ideals. But when we dig deep, we seem to find ourselves in quite a comfort zone. We find that we have history of problems and currently have other risks and disasters out there, but our ability to pay any attention to the negative things is quite limited. A programming of sorts that allows us to continue on feeling good about ourselves once we empty the change in our pocket to the less fortunate. But how are we really helping them out? Are we not motivated most of the time due to a pressure, a feeling that in order to do something right, I should give just a little of my myself. We give end of the year donations not because it is Christmas, but because there are tax breaks. We support current storm victims, but months later choose to find more selfish reasons to spend our cash. Now go to the shelters where we find the poorest of the poor, and we find all sorts of volunteers, go there again next year, and it’s the same people. Look around the city at all the volunteer opportunities and it pretty much is the same people.

Now lets broaden our scope. Lets look at the less fortunate in the third world countries. They seem to find themselves way out of their comfort zone, yet we can snap lots of photos of them smiling. And how do we decide to help them? We send them money and supplies. But lately, we have been sending them supplies that we thought were good for them, after all, it’s said these people are sub-par to our living standards. “They need us” we say. In fact, we need them, this is our opportunity to heal ourselves, and make right in the world what we ignore. It’s more than just showing up there as well, it is all about listening to their needs. They love life as much as we do, yet we try to say their poverty problem is due to population and so we should fix that. They life as much as we do, yet we say the problem is their government, cause its not like ours, so we should fix that. We want to westernize the world in order to feel good about ourselves. Instead let us embrace this diversity.

The really interesting part of this of course is that there are individuals and organizations that realize we have no clue on or care much about what happens after our taxes and checks are passed on to the volunteer groups, There are groups out there that are still trying to change the world to one standard. Who are they to claim they are right? Well, no one has chosen to fight them for it. It is a sad world when there are people trying to pass on the idea that overpopulation leads to poverty, it’s a sad world when women are given a “Free” medical checkup and instead are illegally and unknowingly implanted with IUDs, it is a sad world when the only organizations willing to fund are the ones with agendas. Since when were condoms and birth control part of the bartering chips for funding? Since when did we pay off other countries politicians to pass laws that are anti-culture and anti-life in nature? Unfortunately, this has been going on for years, while we stayed in our comfort zone.