Blood:Water Mission Forty Days Challenge

I'm sorry for not writing anything in this blog in awhile - finding a job will do that for ya.

Even though I believe God has given me a passion for ending trafficking and slavery, there are a lot of great missions organizations that are doing great things, and I thought I would highlight a challenge by one here.

Blood:Water Mission is challenging people starting March 1st (that would be tomorrow) to give up drinking everything but water for 40 days. Then at the end of the 40 days, take the money that you saved drinking only water and give it to Blood:Water Mission for water projects that they are doing around the world.

I'm thinking of doing it - I really only drink coffee and water anyway. I'm not sure about the coffee thing though, I am hopefully starting a new job which means I have to actually wake up in the morning and be alert during the day. Hmmm, I think I need to go pray about it!

Born Into Brothels

I love the library. Especially at this juncture of my life, with not having a job and no money coming in.

The library that my family and I frequent is the Washington Centerville Library, and it has a pretty large collection of movies and my kind of books. We've been going about every week or so, and I've found some great books to read and movies to watch.

Last week, I borrowed Born Into Brothels - I had heard that this was a good documentary, but never really thought about picking it up until I went to the documentary movie section of the library and saw this on the shelf.

Wow.

It's the story of a group of children in the Calcutta red light district of India. The co-writer of the documentary is a lady by the name of Zana who is a photographer. She started coming to this part of Calcutta to take photographs; however, the more time she spent with the kids who were born here and who live here with their prostitute moms and families, the more she fell in love with them. She decides to teach them photography and her dream for them is to go to boarding school where they can get an education and hopefully be able to leave the horrifying world of prostitution.

The movie shows different snapshots that were taken by the kids, and tells each child's story. My favorite picture is below - it's of one of the girls' friends and I just love the vibrancy of colors as well as the expression on the girl's face.


I recommend this movie to anyone who wants to know more about what it's like to live that kind of life and to see the world of prostitution through the eyes of a child. It's a story that will keep you in its grip - as Zana tries to get some of these kids into school and as she tries to encourage one of the boys to live out his dream of being a photographer, you will be heartbroken as well as encouraged.

A Search Engine That Gives Back.

Sometimes we look at the issues we care about, and if they are huge issues that are hard to get our heads around, we can get frustrated and feel like there is no way we can make a difference, that we can even make a small dent in the problem.

Well, we are wrong.

There are many different "small" things that we can do each day to help people. A few months ago, on my other blog, I mentioned a website called Freerice.com, where you can simply answer some word definition questions (multiple choice to make it even easier) and donate grains of rice to the World Food Bank.

I found another interesting website today.

It's called Goodsearch.com, and it's simply a search engine (powered by Yahoo!) that will donate money to your favorite charity or school simply by using the Goodsearch search engine instead of Google or Yahoo or other search engines. I put in Love146 as my search engine and then spent about thirty minutes today searching for things I already needed to search for anyway.

Who knows, perhaps even something as simple as searching for things on the internet could change the world.