Morning Thought Tuesday February 10^th 2009

Good morning. In December a group of nine of us from the island were privileged to go to Romania to distribute Mustard Seed Jersey Christmas shoeboxes. I hope that some of the listeners this morning are the people who packed those shoeboxes and that you will be encouraged by what I share with you.

This morning I want to tell you about Snoopy – we do not actually know his name but he was wearing a top with the word Snoopy on it so we called him Snoopy. He is a gypsy boy aged 8 or 9 living in the village of Cefa in western Romania.

It was Martin, one of the Jersey team, who first noticed Snoopy when he visited the homework club in Cefa run by Mustard Seed. What he noticed was the neat handwriting the lad was doing, in fact he photographed it. The next time he saw Snoopy was at the Christmas shoebox distribution for the homework club.

Alex who leads the Romanian charity called us over and said there was a problem. The children attending the homework club had been told that a reward for regular attendance at the homework club would be a Christmas shoebox (children attending the Cefa school had already received a shoebox at school so this was an extra one). Alex explained that in the last week several children had suddenly begun attending the homework club what were we to do? Should we give all the children a shoebox, but wouldn't that then be unfair to the children who had attended every day all term? Or should we give just to the children who were regular attenders and nothing to the children who had only come when they knew shoeboxes were coming soon? After discussion, we decided to give shoeboxes to the regular attenders and to those who had not come much we would give a bag with a few goodies in it and we would explain to each child receiving a bag that the reason was because they had not attended enough to receive a shoebox this year. Snoopy was one of the children who received a bag rather than a box. Tough love. But necessary for him and the others to realise that rules are there to be kept.

Later that day, we distributed Christmas shoeboxes and food parcels to needy pensioners, some of the pensioners were too frail to carry their shoeboxes and food parcels back home without help. Amazingly it was Snoopy more than any other young person who was willing to help them carry their heavy food bags home. We have high hopes for Snoopy that he will work hard at his education, which can lead to the possibility of better paid employment and thus break out of the poverty cycle. I feel confident that this year ahead he will be a regular attender at homework club. I believe that boy Snoopy respected us for keeping the rules but still giving him a smaller gift to encourage him.

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