A Message of Hope

When I think about the trip I just took to Cambodia, I remember a bottle full of crawling, stinging red ants. The skinny little girl who held it up so that I could get a closer look said something in a language I don’t speak.

‘This is her dinner,’ said the translator matter-of-factly.

Every time I visit Cambodia I see two things. I see families who have been working hard to pull themselves out of poverty and succeeding at it. They have clean water wells, thriving gardens, small businesses, health care, and a bubbling sense of excitement about life. Then I see families who literally cannot spare the energy to think about anything other than finding something – anything – with enough calories to keep themselves alive.

Every single time I have this experience, I am overwhelmed with a desire to stop seeing the families with children who scavenge for bugs to eat. I simply do not want to see this anymore. It kills me.

But I know that the only way I can stop seeing this is by fighting to help these families become the kind who live and thrive. There is no way that my conscience would allow me to believe that they stop existing when I stop seeing them. Especially when I know full well that there is hope for them, that there is a proven strategy for easing and even eliminating the worst of their pain.

I’m really proud to be sending this letter with our latest annual report. It is absolutely full of success stories. When I look it over, I know that what you have given is not in vain. I know that poor communities across the world have been able to accomplish unbelievable things with our comparatively modest investment into their lives.

I know that in Cambodia, for example, it costs a meager $600 to help a family to go from being scavengers to success stories. That’s honestly the average cost of providing the resources (things like clean water wells, low-interest business loans, and gardening tools) and the training (teaching sanitation practices, business skills) that work together to transform a family’s quality of life for good. I realize that $600 is not a pittance and that most families in North America could do a lot with that much money. I just know how much more a family in Cambodia would benefit from that same sum of money – I know that they would be released to live as happy and healthy human beings for the first time in their lives. And that makes $600 seem like a very reasonable sum of money to me.

So I carry this burning sense of hope, justice, and possibility with me as I enter a new phase of my life. In the future, I will be speaking to every person that I can about the plight of girls like the one I met in Cambodia. As long as I have breath, I will be working with people who want to assist families living in poverty.

But I will not be addressing you, my friends, in these monthly letters. Instead, Aklilu Mulat, the Executive Director of HOPE International Development Agency, will be letting you know where our greatest needs are from month to month. He is an extremely fine person and a friend of the poor and I know you will appreciate what he has to say.

I write this final letter to you wanting to say very much the same things I have been saying year after year. I want to say that the job of eliminating poverty seems too large, but it is not. I want to say that there is so much that you can do for people who are ready to work hard and succeed.

More than anything, I just want to ask you to help. This is my last chance to make a direct appeal to so many of my friends at once. Let’s keep changing lives in Cambodia and around the world. Let’s remember that little girl on the other side of the planet and not let her go hungry even one more day.

Please give.

With respect and gratitude,

David S. McKenzie