Sometimes, when in the middle of the scariest personal battles, it pays to pay out to someone whose circumstances are even darker. Sometimes, reaching out when we feel like we can’t even hang on – is how we find the strength inside ourselves to do just that…
When I’m working through Depression or dealing with unsettling Home Life experiences, I find that doing small positive things on a daily basis takes me out of my own self-absorption and helps me channel my energies into positive action for myself… simply put, help others – help yourself.
When I browsed the KIVA website looking for a loan that made sense to fund, I found Esther, a Kenyan woman whose life felt similar – she’s a single mother, one child. She is independent, owning a home for her family. She believes in the power of education, and she is entrepreneurial…
Image from KIVA.org copyright 2011
I knew immediately my little $25 loan was going to a person who would throw her back AND soul into her Life. She would turn that $25USD into something powerful – and if I never saw “my” money again, I was happy. The Universe gives back to those who give back, and I’ve never believed anything I “owned” was really mine in the first place.
Thank you, Esther. I hope the day is soon here when I can loan $250… or $2500… and not just $25!
As soon as the Paypal transaction was cleared and I felt like a genuine, bonified giver, I was seized with curiosity not just about Esther and her life, but about her country, Kenya.
As a child, I loved to watch any foreign language films, National Geographic documentaries, and especially anything that had to do with Africa. If we played RISK as a family, I always had to “own” Africa. The irony of that – a freedom-loving child of hippies being content playing a militaristic board game with world domination as the goal? How American.
But even more than the documentaries, I loved the people and animals of Africa. From the blue-eyed South Africans to the raven-skinned Nigerian goddesses and the purple-eyed nomads… from the stinging sands of the Sahara to the murky Nile… the jungles where I could very nearly believe Tarzan of the Apes truly did roam to the green cities built atop tumbling shorelines, my childhood fantasies of Africa ran wild with vivid imagery.
The older I got, the less they were fantasies and the more my mind was filled with contemporary nightmares. Rampant disease obliterating a generation of forward thinkers, the stamp of genocide on every screen and in every face, the political forces whose intensity and violence terrified me, the dichotomy of the struggling people and the squashing powerlords.
Africa was like Mexico, but less familiar, less graspable. I spent years of my childhood inundated by Mexico’s stark contrasts… but Africa was still far away, never touched or seen.
It remains so today.
Funding Esther’s loan has opened a little window in a world strikingly different from my own – and yet, in light of my own current situation and creation – strikingly similar.
Another worldwide bond we single mothers share: breastfeeding.