By Colleen Spencer
St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Charlotte
My Lenten Studies experience at St. Martin¿s was very enlightening. Week after week, meeting on Sunday nights in the Parish Hall with Debra Smithdeal, we read about Africa's crushing health problems. Not just HIV/AIDS, but malnutrition, malaria, tainted water, infant mortality, and on and on.
Statistics on women who die in childbirth and babies who don't survive to their first birthday haunted me particularly. Mothers whose children are dying; children whose mothers are dying...
While working through the study material, with its dismal news from around the globe, our St. Martin's group talked among ourselves about how powerless we felt, how overwhelming the problems, and how little we could do. We learned about a worldwide effort under way to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015, the Millennium Development Goals. We were asked to pray, spread the word and give money. But how much good would our minor donations do in the face of such massive need?
Then Ty Smithdeal said something that turned my thinking around: Absurdly small amounts of money can have huge impact in Africa.
One thing I could do, I thought, was to make an appeal at the Women's Retreat at Valle Crucis, more to raise awareness than money. We were meeting with the women of St. Alban's in Davidson, 35 of us in all. Perhaps together we could reach out to some African women not so different from ourselves.
I set a basket on the table and challenged each woman to donate a token dollar for each time she personally had survived childbirth. I wanted us to identify with women mired in extreme poverty, to think about the contrast between our worlds, our experience. In some areas of Africa, I told them, a woman has a one in 16 chance of dying in childbirth; in North America, it's one in 3,500.
I wanted us all thinking about what it was like for us to be pregnant, with ultrasounds and blood tests and emergency C-sections in state-of-the-art hospitals. Vitamins, Pampers, Gerbers. And to think about having none of that, not even enough to eat to produce adequate breast milk, not even clean drinking water.
I struggled to explain how my thinking had changed: I couldn't save them all, but what I could give might save one woman's life by training a midwife or providing basic prenatal care through a mobile health clinic. It might save one woman's children through postnatal care or childhood immunizations. Not much in the whole scheme of things maybe, but huge, miraculous, for one family.
Then Linda Smith bailed me out by offering the starfish story: two boys walking on a beach littered with beached starfish as far as the eye can see. One boy picks up a starfish and flings it back out to sea. The other boy asks why he bothered; saving one hardly makes a difference. "Right," said the first boy. "But I'll bet it made a big difference to that starfish."
The women at the retreat got it, pitching dollar bills into the basket in gratitude for their own luck in surviving to raise their children. Some also gave for others in their families: sisters, daughters, mothers. By day's end we had $93. Somebody topped it up to an even $100. By next morning, another dollar had appeared.
In mid-March, we sent a St. Martin's check for $101 to Episcopal Relief and Development in New York, asking that it be applied to projects that provide prenatal and postnatal care in areas of extreme poverty in Africa.
And I believe those women whose token dollars went into that basket went home ready to learn, pray and think about how they can make a difference to perhaps just one African woman and her family.
