NEW DONATIONS MADE THROUGH KIVA IN JANUARY 2022

 

MEET THE PEOPLE WHO RECEIVED KIVA DONATIONS IN JANUARY OF 2022 THIS IS THEIR STORIES

Meet James, a 40-year-old refugee living Yumbe, in the West Nile region of Uganda. He is a father to four children who all attend school. 

James is a very hardworking man who grows   sorghum, maize, rice, green vegetables, and tomatoes.  The season has been so bad that most of his crops have dried due to the drought. Besides this, he is also a fish monger. He would like to buy fishing nets. This will enable him to improve on the fish he gets, as the demand is there, then he will be able to educate his children, build a permanent house, and improve on their standard of living.

Loreta is a 38-year-old rural woman. She is married and the proud mother of three children. She and her family live on the first floor of an old building in their village. Her husband has done some repairs and has made it a more secure and safe shelter for his family. To provide for her family, Loreta and her husband do agricultural activities. They have 15 dynym of family land, in which they plant potatoes, beans and other seasonal vegetables. They also have 20 goats, from which they sell the milk.  Loreta wants to buy a cow in order to sell the dairy products and obtain one calf per year so she will have the possibility of making a better income for her family. She is asking for the second time for Kiva lenders' support. Your first loan enabled her to pay the necessary expenses for planting her lands.

Talzhibek says hello from Yintymak. She is grateful to Kiva lenders for helping her to increase her number of livestock. Now she would like to ask for another loan, which she promises to pay back in full. She is asking for a loan of 100,000 som to buy dairy cows, in order to increase the volume of milk she sells.  Talzhibek is a 54-year-old, hardworking, married woman with a grown-up son. She is a farmer and raises livestock for a living. She started the business in 1996 to increase her household income. Talzhibek wants to further develop her business and improve her quality of life.

Greetings from Sierra Leone! This is 28-year-old Taddy from Goderich branch. She is a married businesswoman with one 14-year-old child, who is currently attending school. Taddy started this business to take care of her family.  She runs a retail business selling oil, fish and palm oil to her customers around the community. She has been in this business for two years. Taddy says that she has no challenges.   Taddy says that the extra income from this loan will help to take care of her family and to increase her business.

I am a dreamer, creative by nature, and tireless entrepreneur, I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico.  I have had the opportunity to sell silver, clothing, accessories, etc. After arriving in the United States, I have been able to further develop my skills as a trader. I love working on my own. Today starting, with a lot of effort and supporting ourselves with my partner Claudia, we have been able to start our own RC Deals LLC business. Eager to get ahead being the owners of our own business. Claudia is a person with a lot of ease in sales and also with experience in them. We are both fighting for a better future and we want to help the community at the same time with better prices and good treatment.  I have always been a very productive and determined person with a great desire to get ahead and with the belief that perseverance and performance are the keys to success.

HOPE FOR ALL YARD SALES IN 2022

 

Hope For All Monthly Yard Sale

 

Join us for an indoor/outdoor event where we'll be offering our usual great variety of merchandise at low prices. We will be giving out numbered tickets as we need to limit the number of people at our Yard Sale, and we will require the wearing of face masks

 

Shop our yard sales to find great buys and unique treasures. Yard sales are held on the second Saturday of each month from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m, as well as select Thursdays from 5 to 7 p.m.  Your purchases help provide funds for HOPE for All to serve those most in need in our community with basic home necessities for daily living.  Come shop and enjoy our great bargains while making a difference !

 

Donate An Item For The Yard Sale

                 During regular business hours: Tuesday-Thursday 9:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Items We Accept:  Decorative Items /   Purses /   Hand Power tools

Jewelry / Toys /  Books / Collectibles / Seasonal Items

 

Not able to get there in that time frame ?  Bring your donation to church on Sundays. We will make certain it gets there !! 

Yard Sale Dates on Saturdays for 2022:

January 8^th  /  February 12^th /  March 12^th /  April 9^th /  May 14^th /  June 11^th /  July 9^th / 

August 13^th /  September 10^th /  October 8^th /  November 12^th /  December 10^th

 

Yard Sale Dates on Thursdays in 2022:

January 27^th /  February 24^th /  March 24^th /  April 28^th /  May 26^th /  June 23^rd /  July 28^th

August 25^th /  September 22^nd /  October 27^th

 

POST CARD WITH DATES AVAILABLE AT CHURCH ON SUNDAYS

              

REMEMBERING JIM FOREST; PEACE ACTIVIST AND PROGRESSIVE VOICE OF AUTHENTIC CHRISTIANITY

Remembering Jim Forest ; Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan and Thich Naht Hanh were Mentors and Friends

On April 5, 1977, Jim Forest received a phone call that his friend and collaborator Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, had been kidnapped by the Argentinian government. The most likely outcome was death. From his office in the Netherlands, Jim and his staff worked to free Adolfo. They nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize as a publicity stunt to embarrass the Argentinian government. Within hours, hundreds of papers picked up the story, and fourteen months later Adolfo was released. Expecting nothing more to come of this, Jim thought he had received a prank call the next summer when the Nobel committee called to inform him that Adolfo had won the prize.

Not wanting to waste this opportunity, Jim arranged for a meeting in Rome with Pope John Paul II. At this meeting, their goal was to ask the pope that Arturo Rivera Damas be appointed as the permanent successor to the recently assassinated Óscar Romero. Pope John Paul went on to grant their request.

As a child, he learned about the horrors of war when a minister at a local Methodist parish hosted two victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had come to the US for reconstructive surgery. Peering at their silk veils, Jim came to learn that hospitality to those in need, those suffering, was far more important than politics. Despite his many encounters with political events over the coming decades, he always kept in mind that it was people who ultimately mattered.

It is unsurprising then that in 1960, while serving in the Navy, Jim would find a kindred spirit in Dorothy Day. Dorothy was a Catholic convert who founded the Catholic Worker movement, a network of houses of hospitality that served the poor and promoted peace. Shortly after discovering Dorothy’s writings, Jim visited Dorothy’s community in Manhattan. 

Before long. Jim had become a Catholic himself, which complicated his military career. After his conversion, he applied for CO status. Jim was discharged as a conscientious objector and went to live at the St. Joseph Catholic Worker community in Manhattan. 

Together Dorothy and Jim published the Catholic Worker paper, protested war, and offered hospitality to all who knocked. Through Dorothy, Jim met his two other mentors, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Jim visited Merton in Kentucky, thinking of moving on from the Catholic Worker to become a monastic. Instead, Merton told him the Holy Spirit had other things in mind for him. 

By 1967 Jim had founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship with the support of Berrigan and was working at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Through his work with FOR, Jim became acquainted with Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Thầy,  Jim assisted Thầy with his most famous book: Miracle of Mindfulness, published in 1975 with an afterward from Jim. 

On September 24, 1968, Jim and thirteen others, the Milwaukee Fourteen, broke into the Brumder Buiding in Milwaukee, liberated thousands of draft cards, and set them on fire with napalm. At his trial they wished to admit as evidence a range of legal opinions against the war in Vietnam, and a number of religious texts, including the New Testament. The judge rejected this, saying that admitting the New Testament as evidence “may create substantial danger of undue prejudice” in the jury.

In 1977, he and his family settled in the Netherlands as he took over operations for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. With the war in Vietnam over, Jim began to turn his attention to ending the Cold War. In truth, Jim has never seen a conflict he did not try to peacefully end. Jim traveled to the Soviet Union to promote East-West integration. Jim saw the Russian Church as a natural partner in this work. Over the course of the ’80s, Jim made many trips to the Soviet Union, writing about the experiences of Orthodox Christians there.

That same year, Jim took a step across the Iron Curtain, and joined the Russian Orthodox Church himself. Where others saw enemies, he saw fellow humans on the journey to God. Jim would go on to write “It is not so much belief in God that matters, but love of God, and similarly love of others, including love of enemies.” 

Jim went on to run the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, and write many biographies and theological works. He passed away January 13, 2022. He was 80 years old

Below is a partial list of Books by Jim Forest.  We suggest starting with “Writing Straight With Crooked Lines” This is an autobiography that will provide insight into who Jim Forest was.

 Writing Straight with Crooked Lines                                                                                                           Eyes of Compassion; Learning from Thich Nhat Hahn                                                                               At Play in the Lions Den; Biography of Daniel Berrigan                                                                 Praying With Icons                                                                                                                                 The Root of War is Fear                                                                                                                           All is Grace; Dorothy Day Biography                                                                                               Loving Our Enemies; The Hardest Commandment                                                                             Saint Nicholas and the Nine Gold Coins

REMEMBERING TICH NHAT HAHN : INTRODUCED PRACTICE OF MINDFULLNESS TO THE WEST

 Article from America Magazine  on Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced Tick Not Hahn)  introduced the concept of Mindfulness to the West. This is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, visited the United States on a lecture tour to enlighten the American people about the war in Vietnam from the perspective of the Vietnamese. His trip included a series of meetings with politicians, thinkers and religious leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., and in May of that year, he met the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

Merton’s own interest in Thich Nhat Hanh, who died on January 21 at the age of 95, was twofold. In the early 1960s, Merton became a proponent of nonviolence in the face of the nuclear war machine that he believed could only lead to collective suicide. In that vein, he was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, which he described in 1968 as an “overwhelming atrocity.” Merton wanted to converse with Nhat Hanh to understand more thoroughly what was going on in Vietnam.

Merton also wanted to talk to Nhat Hanh about Buddhism and Buddhist monasticism. Readers of Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, know that his interest in Buddhism began while at Columbia University after reading Aldous Huxley’s book, Ends and Means, in which Huxley, drawing on Buddhist writings, wrote about humanity’s need to embrace asceticism and contemplative practice in order to transcend its basest impulses.

Merton believed that Buddhist and Christian contemplatives could learn from one another, particularly in a world seemingly bent on its own self-destruction.

 

But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that Merton began to delve more deeply into Buddhist writings and to correspond with Buddhist thinkers, like the Zen master D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966). Merton became convinced that Christian contemplative monks had much to gain from dialogue with Buddhism. Without denying or disregarding the real differences that exist between Christianity and Buddhism, Merton believed that Buddhist and Christian contemplatives could learn from one another, particularly in a world seemingly bent on its own self-destruction.

On May 28, 1966, Nhat Hanh visited Merton’s home at the Abbey of Gethsemani. According to a mutual friend, the recently deceased Jim Forest, the two conversed late into the night. They talked about monastic chant, about meditation in each other’s traditions, about monastic formation. And they talked about the Vietnam War.

A number of years later, Nhat Hanh recalled their meeting fondly: “Conversation with him was so easy,” he said. “He was open to everything…. He wanted to know more and more. He did not talk so much about himself. He was constantly asking questions. And then he would listen.” He continued: “I was impressed by his capacity for dialogue.”

Nhat Hanh was to give a talk to the monks of Gethsemani the day after his meeting with Merton, but he lost his voice. Merton stepped in and spoke to the community about their conversation together. The talk was recorded, and it is clear from the tape that Merton was impressed by the Vietnamese monk. Describing Nhat Hanh as “an extremely simple, humble person,” Merton told his brothers that Nhat Hanh was “a completely formed monk” with whom he felt in “complete contact.”

Thomas Merton: “I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans, and I do not hesitate to say it.”  Merton emphasized to the monks that the Vietnam War “has to be seen as a manifestation of a spiritual crisis,” and as such, he insisted that it is the business of monks—including contemplative monks—to be in dialogue with a brother monk from the situation even if he is from a different tradition. And Nhat Hanh was very open about what was going on in his country. “Everything is destroyed,” Merton recalled him saying when asked about the war.

 

Merton was so impressed by Nhat Hanh that one month after the visit he wrote a letter to the Nobel Prize committee urging that this “true messenger of peace and of spiritual values” be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was also shortly after their meeting that Merton published a short essay called “Nhat Hanh is My Brother” in Jubilee magazine. Here Merton expressed his love for Nhat Hanh in words that also showed how disillusioned he was with so many of his fellow Americans whose support for the Vietnam War confounded him:

“I have said Nhat Hanh is my brother, and it is true. We are both monks, and we have lived the monastic life about the same number of years. We are both poets, existentialists. I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans, and I do not hesitate to say it. It is vitally important that such bonds be admitted. They are the bonds of a new solidarity and a new brotherhood which is beginning to be evident on all the five continents and which cut across all political, religious and cultural lines.+

As fellow contemplatives in a world characterized by divisiveness, Merton and Nhat Hanh chose to see in one another that which united them, to affirm in each other that which they also saw within themselves. Both recognized that the path to peace could only be forged by the kind of dialogue that focused upon that which unites rather than divides. While Merton was no supporter of a naïve relativism or syncretism that, in his words, “accepts everything by thinking of nothing,” he nevertheless argued that that which unites us must be affirmed for the sake of peace.

This was a principle that characterized Merton’s life as well as the life of Thich Nhat Hanh. And on that one spring day in 1966, in a monastery in the middle of Kentucky, two men from different religious traditions and nationalities—one a citizen of a country being bombed and the other a citizen of a country doing the bombing—embraced each other as brothers.

KIVA Donations made in December of 2021. Their stories:

 

Elis is an artisan from Indonesia who specializes in macramé handbags and decor accents. She would like to invest in a bulk purchase of cotton thread and bamboo.  "I hope my business can grow big so that I can keep providing work for my helpers. Most of them are my neighbors, friends, and even family. Many housewives make their income by working on my macrame. Giving jobs to my neighbors is one of the reasons why I want my business to grow. "Thank you for your kind support, it means a lot for us craftsmen. During this pandemic, I hope my business can survive and grow more. May God bless all of you."

Mary Joy is a 43-year-old woman. She is married and has two children, ages nine and five. She and her family live a simple life in the town of Isulan, Sultan Kudarat. She and her husband earn a living through running a small sari-sari store business. Thus, they work hard together to send their children to school. Mary Joy is requesting a loan for water connection inside their house; a dream she was aiming for a few years ago. With the help of a loan, she could definitely make her dream come true. From this loan she will buy a pressure tank, pitcher pump, jetmatic pump, PVC pipe, check bulb and pay for labor.

 

I am an African American lesbian female with one adult child. I facilitate in local jails then upon release, connect offenders with community sponsors for second-chance/re-employment. As a single parent, I started Platform of Hope with my savings account in a storefront in Decatur, GA.  We serve clients in extended-stay environments with a mobile brigade that provides food, clothing, and essentials. Platform of Hope is determined to open a women and children's shelter to ensure safe and stable 90-day housing. POH supports homeless single parents within shelters and extended stay motels.  Funds are used for used clothing, food, medicine, moving costs and/or deposits for utilities for stable housing move, transportation via rideshare for interviews, jobs, doctor appointments, and grocery stores. POH supports weekly distribution and DELIVERY of food, medicine, and supplies/necessities to immobilized senior. POH supports released female offenders re-enter society by providing transportation for court appointments, restitution, probation fees, interviews, uniforms, doctor appointments, costs for identification (IDs, birth certificates, etc) food, used clothing, toiletries, etc..

Bathybii 55, from Kyrgyzstan lives with his wife and 3 children in the Jeti-Oguz region. The mountainous area with spacious pastures is ideal for raising livestock.  He has been farming for 19 years, breeding cows, horses and sheep. He has 1.06 hectares of land where he grows hay for livestock. Baktybek is trying hard to develop his farm. He asks for support from Kiva in the amount of 20,000 som (KGS) to increase the livestock population. The income will help improve the material well-being of his family.

Bendu is 36 years old and married with five children. All of her children are currently attending school while living at home. Bendu runs a business preparing and selling cooked food. Her love for her business continues to grow every day.  Bendu is requesting a loan with the Kiva partner BRAC Liberia to purchase more ingredients to prepare food to sell. She will use her loan to ensure she can meet customer demand .

Josephine, a 33-year-old mom of four. She resides in a remote village in Kapsabet, in the Rift valley region of Kenya, she practices mixed farming.  Because of the immense knowledge she has of farming, Josphine commands a lot of respect from other farmers in her village. Her primary sources of income have been milk and crops.  Although she has been making profits from farming, Josphine has identified a market segment for selling cereals. The only big challenge she faces is a lack of funds, so she is requesting a loan to buy different varieties of cereal like maize and beans to sell in the local market. The market for cereals is never a problem because the demand is always high, and she plans to take advantage of that.   

This lovely woman is Rysbubu. She is 66 years old and married. She has a high-school education. She has been raising crops and animals since 1981 as the primary income for her family. Thanks to Rysbubu's hard work and her husband's help with the farm, her farm currently has 2 cows and 16 sheep.  In order to further grow her farm, she is seeking assistance from Kiva totaling 30,000 som (KGS) to buy livestock feed, in order to increase her income from livestock breeding. The income from the loan will help her expand her farm by increasing her headcount of pedigree livestock.