Dear Friend,
Mother. It’s such a powerful word, a powerful image, a powerful reality.
As Christians, we know that there is no one or no one thing above the Lord, our God. But we also have special veneration for Mary, the Blessed Mother, because we know that, as the Mother of God, she had such an exceptional role in his life, as she does in all of our lives.
At this time of year, we all think of our own mothers, and grandmothers, and great-grandmothers and all the wonderful women who came before us, who nurtured the generations, who made us quite literally what we are today.
My family originated in China. My grandmother had her feet bound, that cruel practice—now long discontinued—of using tight bandages to restrict growth, because small feet were thought to be attractive. It is unclear where that aesthetic judgment originated, but one of the reasons is certainly that such feet were not that useful. Bound feet meant you were wealthy enough not to have to work in the fields or paddies. That made you a good catch. Eventually, some daughters in poor families had their feet bound in the hope they might attract a rich husband.
My own mother did not have her feet bound. Although she had lost a great deal of wealth when she fled China for Hong Kong, she did still live in a world of servants and household help. That was quite different than what my children experienced with a mother who went off to work every morning and often returned late at night.
At Catholic Relief Services, we know so well that there are many different styles of mothering—we see them in the nearly 100 countries around the world where we work. But we also see something that is so clear and evident: that all mothers want the same things for their children.
We want them to be healthy. We want them to be safe. We want them to be educated. We want them to have the freedom and ability to live full and meaningful lives. That’s what my grandmother wanted for my mother, what my mother wanted for me and what I have always wanted for my children.
Because of your generosity, CRS is able to help mothers realize their dreams in many ways. Working through local partners, often through the local Church, you bring health services to remote villages and poor urban neighborhoods. You bring women prenatal care and better childbirth facilities. You help emphasize nutrition in the critical first 2 years of life. You pay school fees. You allow women to pool their resources in savings communities that they then use to start businesses so they can support their families. You bring clean, fresh water, saving mothers from backbreaking labor and their children from dread intestinal diseases. The list goes on.
There’s something else you realize when you do this kind of work: It does take a village to raise a child. Think of all the women who were important in your life. I had a wonderful aunt, a caregiver who helped my mom and those wonderful Maryknoll Sisters who showed so much courage because they were led by love.
It takes the community to support a school, to follow up on the work of health clinics, to spread the word about proper nutrition. And sometimes a village must band together to look after orphans and other vulnerable children. Many of the programs you support help these kids, whose live have been disrupted by disease and death. You help give them a future, give them hope, give them what their mothers wanted for them.
We do this work for one simple reason: a variation on the Golden Rule. All of these mothers want for their children what we all want for ours. We do it in the name of the Blessed Mother and her son, because it is from them we learned true compassion. We learned that we all make up the village that helps to raise the world’s children.
May blessings overflow,
Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo
President & CEO
Posted April 25th, 2012 in by: John Lindner | 1 Comment »
Dear friend,
The beginning of spring is always such a special time for those of us in the Church, a time when the earth is reborn, when green leaves and buds appear, when the crocuses and daffodils find their way out of the ground and dazzle us with their colors. All of this is brought forth by the warmth of the sun fulfilling the promise it made when it began to lengthen our days following the winter solstice.
For us, this is a time of Easter, Christianity’s most important holiday. We celebrate a literal rebirth, the resurrection of Jesus Christ—a fulfillment of the promise he made as the Messiah. In the span of a few days, Jesus’ followers, the apostles, his family and the Blessed Mother went into the darkest of winters as they saw their savior crucified, forsaken on the cross, only then to emerge into the most brilliant of springs as the stone was rolled away from the tomb.
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Posted March 23rd, 2012 in by: John Lindner | 1 Comment »
Dear Friend,
Getting water is so simple for us: We turn on the faucet, and there it is. When that doesn’t happen—maybe a water pipe breaks or maintenance shuts off the supply—we consider it a huge hardship.
I experienced that once as a young girl in Hong Kong, then a tiny British colony on the edge of China. The Cold War was raging and tensions were always high. Despite that, in a long-standing arrangement, Hong Kong bought most of its water from China. At one point, some dispute flared. China decided to teach us a lesson and cut off our water supply. Hong Kong got water only once every 4 days, and then for only 4 hours.
My family would turn on the taps during those hours, save that water and parcel it out carefully. I remember taking showers from buckets. And certainly I remember the relief we felt when the restrictions were lifted after a few weeks and, once again, water flowed from the taps at any time of the day or night.
Thoughts of that came to mind a few years ago when I traveled as a Catholic Relief Services board member to Ethiopia. Cardinal (then Archbishop) Timothy Dolan of New York was on that trip, as was my son Justin Bartkus, among others. I saw many villages where it would have been considered a luxury to have 4 hours of water coming from a tap every 4 days.
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Posted February 24th, 2012 in by: John Lindner | 6 Comments »
When I first heard about Operation Rice Bowl at my church in America, I thought they were talking about something I knew so well from Chinese culture. I don’t have to tell you that the Chinese people eat a lot of rice—you have been to enough Chinese restaurants and seen enough Chinese landscapes with rice paddies to know that. But rice bowl was a term I heard all the time, and not just at mealtimes.
Growing up in Hong Kong, rice bowl indicated our overall well-being. If you say you have “a new rice bowl,” you have found a new job or started a new business. An “iron rice bowl” means your future prosperity is assured. A “solid rice bowl” is a good indication that you have a sure way to make a living. If you say, “My rice bowl is broken,” well, maybe you have fallen on hard times. And so on.
When you use rice bowl this way in Chinese culture, you are really talking about your livelihood. I have found no real equivalent in American English. It is some combination of steady paycheck and nest egg.
So, when I first heard about Operation Rice Bowl, that’s what came to mind. And, really, I was not far off.
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Posted January 26th, 2012 in by: John Lindner | 1 Comment »
Dear Friends,
I am so grateful and humbled to be able to greet you for the first time as president of Catholic Relief Services. Your wonderful solidarity with our poor brothers and sisters around the world inspires me as this new year and this new phase of my life begins.
When Ken Hackett first knocked on my door 8 years ago and asked me to consider becoming one of the first lay members of the CRS board of directors, I admit I was not that familiar with this great organization. Certainly, I knew of CRS from Operation Rice Bowl and other collections at church, but not much more. It was after I joined the board that I realized I was like the character in that John Denver song who was “coming home to a place he’d never been before.”
CRS completes a circle that began for me decades ago in Hong Kong. Then a British colony, Hong Kong was home to many people like my parents, refugees who fled China, first from the Japanese and then the Communist regime. Although I did not know it at the time, CRS was working in Hong Kong then, helping refugee families less fortunate than mine.
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Posted December 27th, 2011 in by: John Lindner | 6 Comments »
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