Thinking about Christmas

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Thinking about Christmas, I know Thanksgiving isn’t here and typically I don’t jump holidays however I can’t help getting ahead of myself because of what I learned while sipping coffee one morning last week on the veranda at New Life Children’s Home speaking with the Director.

I inquired about Christmas and what they were intending to do for the children this Christmas and I learned that the hope was to provide the traditional gift of a new set of clothes or a school uniform. Apparently it is within their custom to give clothing each Christmas and seeing that New Life and their sister home in Chintalapudi is solely funded through the One Life Child Sponsorship program for the basics such as food, shelter and education it then becomes necessary to find outside funding for any “extras” such as another set of clothes. I was under the impression as a sponsor of 4 kids that my dollars took care of all these things but then I read the fine print and heard first hand that what is received doesn’t cover this “extra”.
I thought to myself when did clothes become extra especially when considering all you have is 2 or maybe 3 outfits total in the whole wide world to your name?

I further thought about the passage of scripture where Jesus spoke of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and caring for the orphan and the widow and asked myself was there any part of this passage that I didn’t understand?
That is when I began to consider my closet and that of my children. I have been in the place where the kids at New Life sleep and no part of it is really a typical room nor do they have a closet for that matter. What they have if they are lucky is a small box or a chest for which all their belonging belong and in no way does it compare with what we have. Think here of a play chest filled with play clothes or doll clothes that is the picture of what a 7 or 12 year old boy/girl has at New Life.

Small pickings for sure.

It doesn’t take long for me to go down this road of what I should do. So down I went and here I am asking you for help.

What does it cost to clothe a boy/girl at New Life? Not much, $15 gets them a new outfit. What would be better still would be for you to give $30 and that way we can get them a uniform for school and a set of casual clothes like a t-shirt and pants for boys or a Punjabi for girls.

Hopefully now you are realizing clothing a child is an important thing to do and is really easy to do.

So how then do you join me in this?

Just click PayPal Donate button below and use your Credit Card to help me meet the need.

If you don’t know how much to give consider this: $15 buys 1 set of clothes for 1 child and there are 190 kids at New Life and another 50 at Chintalapudi so you do the math; we need a lot of money!

Thanks for your help and one last thing, there is a deadline. All funds need to be collected and sent to India by December 10.

As always everything you give is tax deductible and no part is held back for administrative fees, so give with that confidence that your gift will be clothing!

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