Glen Dhu Responds to the Challenge

Dec 3, 2011 at 8:44 PM by Garry Howe

A Community of Kindness
Glen Dhu Responds to the Challenge


Why should we be spending money to fight poverty in other parts of the world, while there are families living in desperate situations right here in our own country? Shouldn’t we be making an effort to meet their needs first?

How can we possibly ignore the dire situation in places like Somalia, where the famine in that region is killing thousands of children every day? They need our help desperately.

These are good questions to ask because they make us think more clearly about how we can best serve the needs in the world. The answer, of course, is that we cannot ignore anyone in need. Included in the greatest commandment is “…to love our neighbour as ourselves.” The more important question to ask therefore is, “who is our neighbour?”

I believe most people would agree that the term ‘neighbour’ is not limited by distance. It is the person next door, the person down the street, the person in the next community, and the person across the world. The term “Global Village” has become more and more popular recently. We can no longer separate neighbours by distance or borders. We need to reach out to all!

This was the theme of the Glen Dhu World Vision Club as they completed their “Bags of Hope” project this past week on November 29th. We felt it was important to recognize and try to help people who live very far away, as well as children in our local community. This was done using a rather unique style, and one which differed in an important way from the strategy we had employed in past years.

In previous “Bags of Hope” campaigns we asked students and their families living in the school community to donate small, inexpensive items such as mini-chocolate bars, candy, small toys, school supplies, etc., and to put them inside ziplock bags before sending them to school. The bags were then sold for a dollar each and the money was given to World Vision to help fight world hunger.

This year we put an added challenge out to the community……Instead of each student just buying bags for him/herself, we asked that for every bag they bought, one would also be donated to a needy child in our local community through the Salvation Army. This would require two things: (1) there would need to be many more bags donated by the students/families in the community since half the bags would be given away, and (2) it would require the students to pay twice as much for the bags, while giving half of their bags they bought to other needy children.

The big question…how would the Glen Dhu community respond?

Well, it didn’t take long to find out……In the past we have had 600 to 800 bags come in from families…..great! This year we received over 2,500 bags….…incredible! This was absolutely amazing, but not totally unusual for this school community as they often will respond to a challenge in a huge way.

Now, the next question was how many of these bags could we sell? Again, in previous years we would sell approximately 600 to 700 bags. But would the students/families be willing to buy bags for both themselves, as well as other needy kids? Keep in mind that these families are actually buying the items twice; once to donate the items and a second time to buy them back.

Once again the Glen Dhu students demonstrated incredible generosity by buying over 1,400 bags, raising over $1400 to help feed hungry children in the famine-ravaged Horn of Africa region. In addition, we were able to give away over 1,200 gift bags to needy children this Christmas by way of the Salvation Army. This project served to exemplify just how kind and compassionate this school community is.

Beyond these numbers, which add up to a great display of generosity, there were countless stories of kindness and compassion along the way which fuelled this emotion-packed couple of weeks. Here are a few.

• During my promotion of the event to each of the classrooms there were several students that asked if they could give both bags away, rather than keep any for themselves.

• We had over 50 students who did exactly that…many gave 6 to 8 bags away!! (quite a few of them were intermediate students…often a tough audience to crack!).

• We had many students who simply made donations of money.

• There were several students who were deeply saddened when they heard details about hungry children in Somalia.

• It was incredible to watch the smiles from so many of the young children when we told them that their money was going to help fill the tummies of hungry children in Africa, and that the bag they donated to the Salvation Army(which each of them got to see) would put a huge smile on a needy child in our community at Christmas time.

This was about so much more, however, than simply raising a dollar amount. The children in our community and their families were able to help out those less fortunate, both near and far. They became much more aware of the needs locally, as well as around the world. Most importantly, this community decided not just to care, but to act on their compassion. As a result, some very hungry children in this world will get fed, and many kids close by will have their Christmas made just a little bit brighter.

As for the children from Glen Dhu…well there is no greater gift you can receive than the joy experienced from giving to someone else. Any doubts about that…just ask any student from our school.

Garry Howe

This post was edited on: 2011-12-03 at 09:08 PM by: garryhowe