Charity 2016

If your wondering where to give your hard earned dollars this year to give back to the greater good, consider this.  We're a nation of 360 million relatively rich people.  We absorb immigrants and refugees from around the world, and, for the most part, have jobs and support waiting for them so they, for the most part, can become contributing members of our society.  We have some pretty amazing infrastructure for such things compared to most countries.

In Greece and Turkey, with a total of 85 million people between them, whose economies that don't do nearly as well as we ours, are now absorbing hundreds of thousands or millions of refugees from Syria.  Their citizens are making real, palpable sacrifices to take in and process these people simply because they happen to be adjacent countries.

Now, consider the Syrians, leaving everything behind, risking life in ways dearly more extreme than what the Mexicans coming to the US and more extreme than the original colonists coming to America.  When I thought of asking my Turkish friend what he thought of the situation, I felt the connection that has been there there all along: I know that this is a devastating situation for the entire region, and aside from my taxes funding some marginal support from the US military, where can I contribute to directly help them?

IRC, the International Rescue Committee.  This organization not only resettles refugees from all parts of the world, helping them become contributing members of San Diego, and helping the students directly at Crawford, where I teach, learn English and understand America and what it means to be here, but does so all over the world.  They are on the ground in the places around the world where suffering is the greatest and doing their best to alleviate it.

Please entertain the idea of pushing some of your bounty in their direction.  People over there giving until it hurts even more than normal.

Even in you don't give personally to this particular cause, please feel free to forward this to others who may not have considered this particular organization and its mission.  They willingly occupy one of the most difficult and perilous nexuses between warring nations, sometimes hostile natives, governments, bureaucracy, and the most destitute humans.  Be part of the solution!