Oh, my goodness, there sure are a lot of us common folks who are thinking about the same things these days! This fall, I will have been writing and posting a blog every Tuesday morning for the past ten years. The only week I missed was when our Upper Bear Creek, here in Evergreen, Colorado, flooded and we were forced to evacuate our home for the week in 2013.
Out of those 500-some weekly pieces, however, we have never had such a rush of warm and thought-provoking responses as we had this past week regarding Compassion or Control. I told Anna Marie that we had more responses than I thought we had readers.
Apparently, the subject of Compassion or Control is an issue that is very near and dear to all of us, and we are not backing away from the opportunity to look at it squarely and do some examination and re-evaluation. There seems to be wide agreement with the view Albert Schweitzer penned during his lifetime: “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” But, how, exactly, does a thing like that work out in our world village of infested motives?
There were some strong feelings expressed that Compassion should not be a type of “free pass” for folks who set into motion bad consequences resulting from their own greedy motives and intentional choices. That would be kin to knowingly rewarding bad behavior – and the result of that would probably be more bad behavior.
A perfectly fair question dealt with how I have personally handled the issue of compassion and dependency in my relationship to our philanthropic work with Project C.U.R.E. Over the past thirty-three years, Project C.U.R.E. has become the largest handler of donated medical supplies and pieces of medical equipment in the world – shipping into 138 different countries. Believe me, we live in the real world of compassion and dependency. From the beginning, we knew we were walking on a bed of hot coals.
Allow me here to share our conclusions by quoting Dr. Douglas Jackson, our Project C.U.R.E. President and CEO, from his recent 2019 Annual Report:
For over two decades, I have crisscrossed the globe conducting on-site Needs Assessment studies in international hospitals and clinics. That Needs Assessment process sets Project C.U.R.E. apart. We are committed to visiting every potential partner’s site before we deliver medical supplies and equipment. We ask hours of questions, tour each room in the facility and photo-document the current conditions that the doctors and nurses face in their work to heal the sick and save the lives. It is an expensive process, not only in terms of travel costs, but also in the wear-and-tear on our bodies and the time invested in learning what we need to know to do our best work.
Somewhere I adopted a commitment that I share during ever Needs Assessment with the medical professionals toward the end of our time together. “Our goal,” I say, “is to have you tell us ‘Thank you, we don’t need you anymore.” This is true. We are not in existence to create a dependence on Project C.U.R.E.’s work. Project C.U.R.E. is here to deliver the tools to enable the doctors and nurses to provide healthcare for their communities, So, it’s important to share early our vision for what we believe ultimate success should look like . We want you to be successfully independent . . .”
We have about 20,000 volunteers in our six major warehouse operations around the United States (or at least that’s how many we had before the Coronavirus saga). Our volunteers love their work collecting, warehousing, and distributing all the multi-millions of dollars of medical goods. A while back, I had one volunteer share with me about the “good workout for his heart that he gets at Project C.U.R.E.: “All you have to do to get a good workout for your heart, is to get busy trying to lift some needy person up to a higher level of health, dignity, and self-worth.”
I like that!