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Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,
GREAT LENT: The Thirty-Second Day
"Bread for myself is a material question; bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question."
- Nicholas Berdyaev
Those of us who are not poor or who do not interact with poor people with any kind of daily regularity, most likely fail to understand the generational "net of poverty" that is do difficult to extricate oneself from.
I raise the issue this morning, because we received the latest issue of the St. Nicholas Uganda Children's Fund Newsletter. Our parish has been supporting this excellent ministry for some years now; a ministry organized and administered by Peter and Sharon Georges. I know that some of you are also individual supporters of this Uganda ministry.
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| Peter and Sharon with a group of Ugandan students |
I would like to share a simple paragraph from this latest newsletter that captures the plight of the poor and the barriers that poverty makes so hard to overcome. The paragraph has the situation in Uganda primarily in mind, but this is clearly a universal problem that is just as real in America:
The cycle of poverty, or poverty's trap, is a spiraling mechanism that is so binding in itself that it doesn't allow poor people to escape it. It is not merely the absence of economic means. It is created due to a variety of factors, including lack of quality education, insufficient healthcare, and poor infrastructure.
Impoverished individuals and families do not have access to the economic, educational, and social resources that would enable them to get out of poverty. The result is that the poor remain poor throughout their lives. In Uganda, where no schooling is free, parents are unable to provide what their children need to succeed academically - tuition, books, school uniforms, shoes - nor can they afford adequate healthcare.
The poverty trap leads to generational poverty.
We have an entire page dedicated to the St. Nicolas Children's Fund on our parish website:
https://www.christthesavioroca.org/stnicholasugandachildrensfund
As a footnote to add from the newsletter: In a country of 47,000,000 the current number of infected people stands at 175. Rather remarkable!
