Humility

I'm very thankful that a couple groups have thought this endeavour to be of enough value to contribute to it. My airfare and room and board in Venezuela have been taken care of by contributions by the members of Cherokee United Methodist Church, its missions committee, and by the UMW group at Fairview UMC.

I had hoped to avoid asking for help, and am not entirely comfortable accepting it. I was wondering what to do if I collected more than the sum of airfare, room and board, and asked Rev. Woody at Cherokee. His answer has give me a lot to think about, and I'll try to explain why.

He said simply that if it was given in the spirit of helping me get to Venezuela (and back of course), then I should use it as such, for extra living expenses or whatever. I think it's good advice and something the American Red Cross learned the hard way after 9/11. The idea this led to for me is that turning down a gift freely given is in some way an act of arrogance -- I'm second guessing the giver's intentions and demeaning their act of generosity. I'm also running away from the responsibility of being a good steward of their money.

So, I'm going to take it and not say anything (excluding, of course, this entry). In fact, I don't budget for anything but the bare minimum, and I trust to austerity and sheer stubbornness to stick to it. For example, the little bit extra will allow me to eat more than granola bars during the 14 hours of total lay-over I have on the way down.

In that spirit I, vegetarian of 7 or so years, ate a ham sandwich someone gave me yesterday. I anticipated that not eating meat would be a problem as it's very likely that I'll be offered meals (likely including meat) by numerous people while I'm there. To turn it down is to choose my own somewhat arbitrary value over their generosity, and, as implied above, it's a statement I want to avoid.