"You cannot save them all" Update 7/29/26
- p9foundation
- 22 minutes ago
- 3 min read
"You cannot save them all"
"You cannot save them all." This is what people tell us when we have reached the limit of our funds and yet another person comes to us asking for help. "You cannot save them all." As if we can just look a mother with a sick child in the eye and turn them away. Or a young man whose body is covered with sores or a pregnant woman about to give birth homeless on the street or an old man with no roof over his head when the rainy season is pounding down storms. We are a small operation and we are very limited in what we can do. And because we try to be there for others in emergencies of course every day we are going to have people come to us who are in drastic, terrible need. But just because there are so many in need does not mean that their need is not real. "Be not weary in well-doing" is perhaps the saddest and most profound verse in the Bible, because it is almost impossible to do one's best to help others again and again and again and not become weary. The people who come to us are not characters in a book. They cannot be easily described in a few sentencs of put into neat categories. They are living people, struggling year after year in lives of extreme poverty and hardship. They sometimesdo stupid things. They sometimes behave in erratic ways, as real people tend to do. They make mistakes. And when they come asking for help they cannot wait. The pregnant woman or the bleeding child cannot simply sit and wait for days or weeks until we have the funds to help them. If we have to turn them away they will do whatever they can to survive. They take their children to the villages of their roots, even if that means they will not receive the help they need there. They sometimes abandon them. Desperate people do desperate things and they do not always behave rationally. If we judge people for the actions they take when they are almost out of their minds with fear and worry and despair then perhaps we should only help saints and angels. Because real people have flaws. They make mistakes. And, frankly, we do not always know all of the details of what they are going through. But we can see the wounds and the illness. We certainly know when a woman is heavy with child and about to give birth with no place to go.
John in Ghana is one of the most caring people we have ever met. When people come to him he will do everything he can to help. He has given his own survival money. He has taken them into his home. He always advocates just as strongly as he can that we help them. He doesn't always understand that we have used up our funds for the month. Sometimes he goes beyond his own strength. His health is not good. He has literally collapsed on the street when helping others and we have only known days later when he regains consciousness in the hospital where friends have taken him. Right now John is under great strain. We have gone to the very limits of our funding this month and the need has not been met. John has even given his food money and may have to sell his phone once again to get through the rest of the month. We are all stressed and strained and struggling not to let anyone down. Right now "You cannot save them all" is the only message we can tell them, but it is no comfort to the people who come to us in need. And it is no comfort to us. But this is where a hard month has left us.
