Since 2013, we’ve been quietly shaving a sliver off the top of our sales and sending it halfway round the world, via KIVA, into the hands of strangers we’ll never meet.
And before you shuffle uncomfortably and suspect that this is a hat being passed round the room, it isn’t. You don’t need to open your wallet, maybe just your heart and your eyes for a few paragraphs.
The people we donate to possess the kind of grit that gets in your teeth. Taxi drivers in El Salvador with engines held together by hope and string. Shopkeepers in Burkina Faso who balance books on instinct rather than accounting software. A herb distiller in Lebanon with hands perfumed by the day’s labour. Cow and sheep herders in Azerbaijan, ever on the alert for predators. And the water in Cambodia, turning from something you wouldn’t wash your shoes in, to something you’d give your child to drink.
Some stories end in the quiet thud of disappointment. A default. A shutter pulled down for the last time. And that hurts. Not the loss of the money, but the sense that you were a small wind in their sail, and still, they couldn’t make the shore.
But more often, something catches. A taxi gets fixed, a business grows, children go to school. And our little purchases, the ones made without even thinking, become the invisible hand steadying someone else’s ladder.
We wouldn’t like to be in their shoes, so we’ll do what we can to help.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
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