Kids Around the World

May 3, 2012

tags: charitable cause, charity, donate, faith, Family, giving, kids, money, tithe, tithing, travel

Kids Around the World is one of my favorite charity organizations. This is what they do:

“Kids Around the World, Inc. (KIDS) is a faith-based 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization dedicated to helping children and families who have been affected by war, poverty, illness, and natural disasters. Our home office is in Rockford, Illinois and our goal is to reach children around the world with the message of God’s love for them. We accomplish this by:

Building playgrounds where children can enjoy being a kid. Research has also shown that playground activities are essential for children’s proper physical, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive development.

Teaching Christian education workers how to develop better Bible lessons. We use storyboards we have created as a visual aid in the lesson development and instruct the teachers on ways to involve the children in the lesson activities.

Provide nutritious meals for children. We package food casseroles which are a rice and soy mix fortified with 21 vitamins and minerals, 6 dehydrated vegetables, and chicken flavoring. The ingredients are recognized and accepted world wide and preparation only involves cooking with boiling water.”

Mr. Bigtime and I have gone on 2 different trips with them, one to Louisiana and one to Guatemala. We feel like every time we go on a trip with KATW, it does so much for our soul. It gives us a better appreciation of the live God has given us every time.

Giving is just as important as spending and saving. When you give money or time away to something when you don’t expect anything in return it changes your heart. It allows you to be apart of something greater than yourself and make a difference in someone’s life.

What is so great about KATW is that they are family-oriented. They encourage children to come on the trips so they can see that they have an abundance of “things” at home when others don’t even have food to eat. The most touching story I heard was while we were in Guatemala. In Guatemala we worked very closely with an organization called Potter’s House. Potter’s House works closely with the children of Guatemala City that reside close to the dump and are children of “scavengers” or people who attain their livelihood from scavenging anything they can out of the dump. I have never seen poverty like that. The story was about a woman who was saying how it was a “good” day when she could scavenge fruit or vegetables for her children to eat. I lost it. I can’t believe that was the woman’s reality. The scavengers have it down to a science, they even know when all the fast food restaurants send over their trash. A lot of injuries occur in the dump due to the mass amount of people that scavenge, people get debilitating injuries that sometimes leave them forced to send their eldest children out to the dump or with an injury that they can’t ever afford to fix.

What’s great about KATW is that it gives the local children hope and a place to play. When we were in Louisiana and Guatemala the kids were SO incredibly excited to try out the new playground that was made. Here are some pictures from Guatemala: