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A letter from Susan
Dear Family and Friends
It's barely fall and I have already received oodles of Christmas catalogues in the mail. Being a 10-year-old girl at heart, I love leafing through the catalogues, exclaiming over the latest dolls, canopy beds, bicycles and arts-and-crafts kits. Maybe this is because these are really big items, ones that require lots of packaging and tape, oddly-shaped gifts that hold the promise of mystery within their confines. Adult presents are an awful lot smaller, usually more expensive, and often pitched under the guise of "stocking stuffers." Stocking stuffers! In my childhood home, stocking stuffers were apples and oranges borrowed from the kitchen. We would dump out the stockings and my mother would holler, "Give me that fruit. I only put it in there to make it look like you got something." Sometimes my mother would put in gum or cough drops. To this day, my sister swears that she once received an opened package of Chiclets.
But, I am not writing to regale you, like Charles Dickens, with stories of my Christmas Past. This is my annual appeal for the Navajo Child Drive's Christmas campaign. As you know, providing Christmas holiday cheer for the poorest of our Navajo families has been the main purpose of the organization since its start fifteen years ago. We aim to give a food basket to each family, and some simple gifts for the children.
The typical food basket consists of a variety of canned vegetables, ham, beans, coffee, flour and other staples. Each family receives one new fleece blanket and the whole business is delivered in a new plastic laundry basket.
We choose simple gifts for our preschool and school-aged children. I am partial to activities that have a learning component, such as books (high interest, lower reading levels), arts-and-crafts, board games. Hygiene products, underwear, socks, coats, hats and gloves are always needed. We are happy to recycle gently used items. I am proud to report that "dumping" has never occurred with any of you on my sponsor list, but I was on hand (and deeply ashamed) when Kathy Arviso opened a donation box at our office in Crownpoint and found a bunch of worn-out old bras and dirty hairbrushes. I will never forget Kathy holding up one of the brushes and saying, "I guess whoever sent this figured we're just a bunch of wild Indians." Sharing ought not require the recipient to surrender her pride.
I hope to get some new insights into the problems faced by the Navajo people during these critical financial times. None of the families identified for the Child Drive have anything to fall back on during hard times: no IRA, no "emergency" cash or credit cards, no trust or college funds, nothing to sell. Getting a second or third job is not an option: the lack of industry and the vast distances from homes to towns makes any job almost unattainable. You may recall how stunned I was when I first moved to Crownpoint and discovered that the closest bank was 25 miles down the road in Thoreau. That bank closed about a year later and the next closest banks, about equidistant from Crownpoint, are 60 miles away in Grants and Gallup. Ditto for the nearest public libraries. That's 120 miles roundtrip.......watch John Ford's 1939 classic, Stagecoach, to sample a good flavor of the distances involved!
Right now, many of us are preoccupied with the growing financial crisis and our own obligations of all sorts. Please make a little room in your hearts and minds for the Navajo Child Drive. The need is so great it challenges description. And, as Kathy Spitz recently wrote, our efforts "are never enough." There will always be another family in dire circumstances, another mother without diapers or formula, another frail grandma, another child without a winter coat. But when we show Love to our brothers and sisters, we show God's essence, one at a time.
Keshmish Baa'hozho
Merry Christmas! A little early, but Christmas is a season of the heart.
God opens doors.
Love, Susan S.
For Jesus is our hope. Through his merciful heart, as through an open gate, we pass through to heaven. (St. Faustina)
Read more from Susan on the Navajo Child Drive's weblog
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Kathy Spitz
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