A group of 12 will return to Haiti this week taking much needed items purchased by the generous holiday response from our friends like you. We will be taking 3 treadle sewing machines, sewing supplies, shoes, hats, music stands and music and most importantly, boxes of medicine – including the medicine needed to expand our Medika Mamba program for malnourished children to new communities- and much needed medicine for the goat project.  The end of 2011 brought an outpouring of generosity from our friends and family. This week the people of La Gonave will receive some of those gifts.

And, for 2012, we have already received two new gifts that have humbled us as well. In January we had two friends of the Partnership go onto the website and set up a monthly “giving stream.”  Oh yeah, that thing. We knew we had that capacity when we set up the website last year, but nobody had ever done it and we had been so busy doing what we do that none of us had  thought about it.

The first one came in as a gift of $25 a month. Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge gift in the scheme of things, but I began to ponder what we could do with $25 a month.  Well, here is just the beginning of what it would do:

Treat one child with severe malnutrition for a month

De-worm 50 children to help prevent malnutrition for 6 months

Provide half a month’s salary for a Community Health Worker

Provide goat medicine for the goats in one village for 3 months

Provide an Adult Literacy educator for one village for 1 month

About the time we began to get our mind around what a huge gift this really was we got another one. This time for $50 a month, giving us three times the ability to provide the list above.

The fact is that $25 a month ends up being $300 at the end of the year. For an organization that prides itself in having no over-head costs that is an enormous gift.  So, at the close of this post, I intend to go online and begin my own giving stream gift. With a monthly gift of what many spend weekly stopping for coffee on the way to work I can make a real difference in the lives of the people on La Gonave.  That is a simple, generous gift. It makes me wish I had back all the monthly payments I have made for gym memberships that I never used.

Enough said.

https://secure.piryx.com/donate/gkMizOx2/LaGonave-Haiti-Partnership/

Deb Griffin

For the Partnership