If you don't get to work from home, you may not have had the chance to watch an Oprah show. I do, and it airs on Irish TV3 at 1.40pm weekdays, and I take my lunch break at 1.30 so that I can watch it. The show varies massively in content but it is always entertaining, inspiring, enlightening or gut-wrenching (and often a combination of these adjectives apply).
I consider Oprah to be a mentor (she inspires me to live my best life), and at Christmas I treated myself to her 50th anniversary CD box set. Last night I watched the 'Christmas Kindness' show, which I think is about two years old. It was about a trip to South Africa where Oprah, her friends and her staff gave thousands of children gifts of clothes, runners (jogging shoes?) and toys that meant as much to each of those children as winning the lotto might to one of us. It was very moving and I cried tears of joy for those kids.
But then they went on to visit some orphanages and, to put it mildly, I sobbed my heart out! The AIDS epidemic in Africa is leaving millions of children as orphans every year, with little or no hope of an education that would pave the way out of extreme poverty. In fact, many of them are also carrying the virus, and it continues to spread like wildfire there is little in the way of education or preventative policies due to the great shame attached to the disease. You know, I wasn't ignorant of this fact at all, but seeing how Oprah and her team tackled the issue really got under my skin, and I wasn't able to sideline it off my radar.
The message of that show was unequivocal: this is one of the major crises of humanity of our time, and it is beholden on each of us who, by accident of birth, leads a privileged life to do whatever we can to help make life easier for those children and offer them some hope for the future. Oprah offers the average Joe Soap a way to do that easily - by donating to her Angel Network which is building schools for children in South Africa, and providing materials, uniforms, books and teacher salaries to ensure some of those children at least have a chance at a brighter future. AND, because Oprah personally finances the administration of the Angel Network, every penny donated goes directly to the cause. (This same network is building homes to rehouse victims of Hurricane Katrina)
I just made a donation. It's not very much in the grand scheme of things, but it's what I can do today. And I plan to donate whatever I can on the day every time an Oprah show causes me to cry - be they tears of joy or sorrow.
Want to do the same? Or learn more about the Angel Network and their work in South Africa? The link is here.
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