When my son was a baby, he refused to eat solids. He dropped a lot of weight and was classed as medically underweight. We tried all kinds of foods and still nothing! He ate his first solid food at 14 months … it was peaches. I was hugely stressed during this period, watching him get thinner and feeling so helpless. A good friend went through a similar but more serious situation when her premmie baby refused to gain weight. He ended up with a feeding tube being administered. My baby-nurse told me that “no baby has ever starved through stubbornness” and she was right….because we live in a first world country but what about other countries?
When I was 20 I visited South Africa. I’ll never forget our driver stopping for fuel and dozens of children swarming the vehicle. Their little faces pressed against the windows, tiny hands hitting the glass, begging. “Don’t give them anything. If you give to one, more will come”, our driver told us. It was so confronting because you wanted to help, even just one child. As we drove away, other children stood roadside with their big malnourished bellies. We’ve sponsored a child through World Vision ever since.
When we’ve visited Fiji, we went to a school in the Highlands. The kids were happy, gorgeous kids but barefoot with those big bellies I remembered from Africa. Ten years ago, their homes were shanties and the village had no electricity. Driving back to Nadi at night, we realised no-one had electricity, there were no street lights and only the dim glow of candles through windows.
I’ve been looking to make a difference for a while but not known how or where to start. Recently, I stumbled over Blake Mycoskie’s book about TOMS shoes called “Start Something That Matters”.
If you get a chance to read this book, do it! It made me realise that small-scale change can lead to big change in someone’s life. So, here at Melissa Purnell Accountants, we’re going to make the change we want to see in the world, and YOU get to be part of it too!
We’re trialing an association with a global “social giving intuitive” called B1G1 which is centred around a “Buy 1 Give 1” theory. When you Buy 1 from us, we’ll Give 1 to others in need.
So now you can feel even better about your decision to work with us because it’s having a direct impact on those in developing countries. The concept is that for every one of our Services you purchase, we “Give 1” directly through B1G1. In our first “Give 1”, we hoping to provide hot lunches to school children in Africa. The aim is that desperate parents continue to send their children to school to ensure they are fed, rather than send them to work for money to buy food.
Our Tax Invoices will soon be updated to have ‘Our Impact’. It will show how WE, just by doing business together, are changing the world…one child at a time.