|
JB Innovation wants to encourage the giving of Alternative Gifts. Please e-mail us (below) with your idea of how to create an epidemic in alternative gift giving. Then try our puzzle which will show how thinking differently can lead to innovative solutions in the real world. Please read about three Alternative Gift options below. We hope that the practice of giving Alternative Gifts will grow in epidemic proportions. A. Animal banks yield a higher standard of living and food security for Laotian families.
Since the end
of the war in 1973, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC),
a Quaker international peace and development agency, has stood beside
Laotian villagers helping them to produce enough food and to improve
their standard of living. AFSC has provided technical assistance
for schools, irrigation, food production, drinking water and sanitation
projects. Some villagers choose to raise pigs. Starting with a loaner pair from the bank they can breed piglets to supplement their family diet and/or sell the surplus for cash to buy crucial staple goods or purchase health care. The AFSC also provides training in the care of the animals on loan. Since women are the primary caretakers, this training improves their sense of well-being, their participation in village life, their economic status and the health of their families. B. Help provide health care, education and love for children in 17 orphanages in China.
Since 1989 China Connection, a U.S. nonprofit agency, has partnered with China's Amity Foundation to provide care for many orphans in state orphanages. Their supplemental orphan program aims at keeping institutionalized children alive in spirit as well as in body. This program is now active in seventeen orphanages in Jiangsu, Anhui, and Xinjiang provinces. Orphans receive extra food and blankets, vitamins and play equipment. For children who can benefit corrective surgery is provided. Caring Christian women, many retired doctors and medical workers, volunteer their time six days a week to serve as “Grannies” to hug and hold the infants, as well as mentor the untrained staff of the orphanage. For older children educational scholarships are provided. One child, Zhao Bi, raised in an orphanage since infancy wrote to Amity, "I have graduated from elementary school and am going to be a high school student. Now I feel like a free and happy little bird, flying to the high sky for brightness, faith and golden future. Happiness is from you, uncles and aunts in the orphanage and countless kind people in society." C. Rescue a child from tedious labor in India and send him or her to school.
The International
Justice Mission, a Christian agency established in 1994 and run
by legal advocates, seeks to stamp out this injustice against children.
Working through it's India Justice Center, IJM documents illegal
practices and intervenes to rescue scores of children. They cooperate
with law enforcement officials to enforce the law against the moneylenders
and bring them before the judicial system. Ghetto sweatshops are
raided and children released. Upon their rescue, children receive
effective after-care that includes vocational education under the
care of missionary professionals. A slave child is released to freedom
and a new life. Be sure to e-mail us with your idea Thanks! (To learn more about giving alternative gifts on the web, see altgifts.org) Now test your thinking with our puzzle (Clues and answers are included): |
A
small, land-locked Southeast Asian country of five million people,
Laos consistently ranks as one of the least developed nations in
the world where the average family income is less than $350 a year.
Laos was devastated during the U.S. war in Indochina. 
China must feed 22% of the world's population on
only 7% of the world's arable land. To stave off mass hunger, China
has developed severe population controls urging its people to have
“One Child” families. Parents want one perfect child,
preferably a boy. If their child is born handicapped or is a girl,
they may be abandoned and sent to government orphanages. Some orphanages
remain poorly staffed and underfunded and yet thousands of abandoned
children crowd these cold, grim institutions today trying to survive.
In
Madras and throughout cities and villages in India at least ten
million children are held in bonded servitude, working to pay off
small loans (ranging from $15 to $100) incurred by their parents.
This practice is illegal but the law against this crime is rarely
enforced. Moneylenders exploit poor families in times of crisis,
offering loans with exorbitant interest rates, up to 100%. The children
of the poor are pledged to pay off this “rip-off” by working
12 hour days, six days a week on tasks such as rolling cigarettes,
breaking rocks, making fireworks or weaving rugs. Since a child
earns as little as 15 cents a week and because interest accrues
every day, children often spend years of labor in a dark ghetto
room before the loan can be paid off in one lump sum. In the meantime,
childhood years are lost and the slave child often loses his/her
health and a chance to go to school. Too late, parents learn that
they have essentially sold their child into abject slavery.