Charity Begins at Home

Charles Dickens wrote, in Martin Chuzzlewit, that, "Charity begins at home and justice begins next door."   As I haven't read Martin Chuzzlewit I have no idea if Dickens meant this to be a good or a bad thing.  In fact, I haven't read any Dickens since I was about 12 and can't remember much of what I read then, except that Dickens believed in Charity.  He lived in Victorian England, where the poor were literally starving and he knew that people needed help.  I did read Bleak House and remember that Mrs Jellybelly (I think that was her name) was more worried about the little black babies than she was about looking after her own children and I'm sure as 'Charity' became popular people did jump on band wagons, rather than look at what they could do in their own neighbourhood.  Many of the big Charities we still support today have their roots in Victorian England; Barnardos, Save the Children and the Children's Society.  Victorian England also started welfare reform and allowed everyone to become philanthropists  through income tax.

Some people are very much against helping others.  There is a man at the allotment who is always telling my mum about people (usually single women)  who don't work who get everything, 'paid by OUR TAXES.'  My mum tells him that she didn't mind that.  That she would much rather pay something than see unmarried women live on the streets with their children! 

There seem to be so many Charities and so many events it's often difficult to know which to support.  Our Youth Orchestra is a registered Charity because it's the only way we can keep the whole of our £1 a week per person subscription to run the orchestra and apply for grants like lottery funding to buy big items like Timpani.  Every week there is a new sponsorship form on the staff room table from someone who is walking, running, cycling or just sitting in a bath of baked beans.  There are so many awareness days that this month sees Breast Cancer Awareness jostling for attention with Blindness Awareness,  Jeans for Genes, Hospice Day, World Arthritis Day, Child Poverty Day and many more including Chocolate week and Bramley Apple Pie week.

Yesterday, I went to an event to support the Juvenille Diabetes Research Foundation.  If I'm honest I wasn't looking forward to it.  Not because I didn't want to support the charity but because I'm a grumpy old woman who doesn't really like to go out on a Saturday night, especially to somewhere where there will be lots of children that I teach.  A band called the Whoppers, who weren't bad at all played a mixture of songs, mainly from my teenage years.  They had a very strange sign, which no one I asked seemed to understand. 

It was a great evening, full of fun and it raised £600 for the Charity and the raffle was fabulous.  They had worked so hard to get loads of brilliant prizes and we  won three.  Now, normally, I would have put prizes back in after the first one, but there were easily enough prizes for everyone who was there.  

JDRF is a charity that deserves support.  It is a medical charity that is working to find a cure for type 1 Diabetes.  Type 1 diabetes is a chronic, life-threatening condition.  It is an auto-immune system condition and is not related to diet or exercise.  It develops when the body's own immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells in the pancreas.  It reduces life expectancy by about 20 years and is the leading cause of blindness and limb amputations (not caused by trauma) in working-age adults.  The risk of stroke and heart disease is five times greater with this condition and it is not something that people get better from.  Suffers would die if they didn't test regularly and inject themselves with insulin approximately 5 or 6 times a day.  This disease doesn't seem fair.  The charity are funding research into stopping or reversing the immune response that causes type 1 diabetes, triggering the body to grow new insulin producing cells, treatments and therapies to combat the complications of the disease and ways to control the condition, such as an artificial pancreas.  

The event I went to was organised by the parents of a wonderful girl that I am lucky enough to teach.  She suddenly fell ill a few years ago at Christmas time and copes brilliantly with the injections and monitoring her food intake.  Her mother and Aunt are going to run the London Marathon later in the year to raise even more funds for the charity and when they do I will add a link to their just giving page but in the meantime more information can be found about JDRF on their website www.jdrf.org.uk