Actually I made two of them!

My New Years resolutions included trying harder to help the less fortunate people on this planet of ours. No matter how much I complain about the bothersome little things life throws at me from time to time, I realize that I am about a jillion times better off than 95% of the human race. I have a roof over my head, running water, good health… we take these things for granted here, but other people aren’t so lucky. So I resolved to help in small ways, because I don’t have the resources to help out in big ways.

I found this website, http://www.kiva.org/, where you can loan small amounts of money to people in third world countries who need help with their small businesses (anything from raising goats to selling fruit at a market, whatever it may be). It’s a loan, you’re not giving the money away — they pay you back. You can loan as little as $25, which is about what the average American spends at Starbucks in a week but is a giant sum of money for someone in, say, Malawi. So I loaned some money to Saletagaloa Salelologa Centre (large photo), a group of farming women in Samoa, and to Tumainis Garicheni Group (small photo), a collective of clothes selling women in Tanzania.

I’m anxious to see how the money works out for them! Once they pay me back I’ll go ahead and re-loan it to some other people who need it.

I highly recommend this. If you are having a bad day, helping someone in need is the best way to feel much better about yourself, and any positive impact you can have on the world, no matter how small, is a wonderful thing.

My other New Years resolutions I’m still working on! Cheers everyone!

Tamera