intoxicated with charity
Sharing resources and know-how and giving support are a deep and never-ending source of happiness ingredient. This has been scientifically proven and non-scientifically but still efficiently practised over thousands of years by individuals and communities. Bill Gates has just discovered what happiness seekers have always known. The first time I heard about this kind of intoxication was in the 70s back in a village in northwest Romania. An old grade school teacher had gathered together a dozen gypsy kids in an old house. They repaired the house and the teacher collected every month the child allowance directly from the mayor’s office so the kids’ fathers couldn’t take it to the pub. They had some plum trees in the garden and they sold some of the plum directly and some of it directly in the shape of plum brandy. He had run and funded this project for about six years and none of the 60 odd kids from this project landed in jail. All of them had a vocational training and got jobs. About a dozen achieved mid-level technical school graduations and three of them even got academic degrees. Two of them became engineers and one a schoolteacher. The project was then closed down by local politicians.
In the mid-90s I was working on some refugee projects of the UNHCR and a german state agency in Hungary. My office was in a Catholic parish and I shared it with two elderly ladies: a Sacré-Coeur nun and another volunteer of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service. These two old ladies were practically intoxicated with charity. After – and sometimes instead of – their administrative tasks they kept on inventing ways and means to help the poor and the needy. The leader of the organization , a Catholic priest who was awarded the title “man of the year” by Reader’s Digest back in 1996 was also personally involved lots of different charitable actions. Father Kozma – as everybody called Monsignore Imre Kozma, protonotary apostolic – was the man who lived almost exlusively on his intoxication with charity: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Man+who+would+heal+Europe.-a030063713
I went along with him a few times to gather the rests of food in restaurants and bring them to “his” train where the homeless were allowed to sleep and were being fed by volunteers. I got infected with this form of intoxication and I started volunteering: I went with an aid convoy to flooded Ukraine and then I coordinated, led and ran aid convoys getting medicine from Budapest to Sarajevo and got involved in dozens of unspectacular activities.
Between 2000 and 2003 I contributed to the funding of a charity project ran by a Catholic nun in a Hungarian village for the integration of Gypsy kids and their parents.
Even in the months when I was myself broke I found some surplus to channel into needy gypsy and non-gypsy households.
My selfish desire is to fund and run an orphanage – maybe in poverty stricken Romania. Beyond securing the basic conditions for their eating and drinking and playing and learning I wish I could help these kids how to collaborate and how to treat each other with respect, how to manage their conflicts and how to get themselves and their social environment stress-FREE and happy.
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