Everyone knows a dollar doesn’t go far in today’s world, but that
didn’t stop Pastor Diane McGehee, who spent the last month limiting her
daily food budget to just that amount in support of 1000 Filipino Points
of Light, a fundraiser for McGehee’s non-profit group, Together in
Hope. McGehee co-founded Together in Hope with her husband in 2007
following a trip to Rwanda and Uganda where the poverty and devastation
from the recent civil war left McGehee with strong impressions and
overwhelming questions.“My husband and I, we have been very blessed, but
we realized even if we gave everything we have, it wouldn’t make a
dent.” From this realization, Together in Hope was born. According to
McGehee, Together in Hope is about participating in “a conversation with
the community”, letting them identify not only their needs, but their
solutions.“We wait to be invited,” McGehee says “We don’t go in and try
to fix people. They don’t need to be fixed. We want to find out how to
empower the resources that you have.”
The
organization focuses on developing programs specific to the needs of
individual communities. These include Jessica’s Table, a nutritional
program in Malis, three preschools and two sewing centers in Rizal and
Bicol in the Philippines, a community center in El Salvador and a youth
center for at-risk children in Ethiopia. McGehee calls the construction
of the sewing center a “typical model.” Rather than build the center
themselves, Hope brought only a single engineer and contractor from the
outside, using the fruits of their fundraising to train and hire local
labor. We don’t want to do for people what they can do for themselves,”
McGehee explains. “That takes away their dignity. We want to help them
do for themselves what they didn’t have the opportunity to do...so that
they can determine their own future.”
Dignity
and self-empowerment are critical issues to McGehee, who was exposed
early to the realities of inequality and the underprivileged. “My father
was a pastor in Georgia during the Civil Rights movement, “she relates.
“He marched on Selma. We had a cross burned on our lawn one time... it
really served to form my fundamental understanding of faith and
justice.” Following in her father’s footsteps, McGehee enrolled in
Princeton’s School of Divinity, leaving one year short of graduation to
pursue a different career path with the same goal. “At that time, there
weren’t many programs at Princeton Seminary,” says McGehee of her desire
to find an active outlet for her ideals. On the advice of mentors at
Princeton, McGehee applied to Harvard where she earned her law degree.
As a lawyer, McGehee says, “I was able to pursue faith and justice in a
practical way.” She credits her move to Houston in the early 90’s to the
city’s “extremely progressive legal market,” which allowed the then
single-mother to support herself while raising her four boys. These
days, while McGehee is still a licensed attorney, she has since returned
to a role in the ministry. In addition to working as Hope’s executive
director, McGehee served as pastor of Bellaire’s United Methodist until
recently accepting a position as the church’s Director of Missions for
the Houston area. The 1000 Filipino Points of Light campaign is her
latest project, with a goal of raising $50,000.00 by the end of
September. According to McGehee, that amount will fund Hope’s
educational, nutritional, and job training programs in the Philippines
for an entire year. “Half the world’s population lives on less than a
dollar a day,” McGehee points out. As for her attempt to relate to that
experience, living on a dollar a day with a diet primarily made up of
rice and beans, McGehee says “This was a chance to enter that space.”
Although, she is quick to add, “I knew I could quit at any time. I knew I
had a choice. I can’t ever fully enter that space of knowing what it is
to be hungry.” Still, McGehee says, it allowed her to raise the
question of what it would be like. “I have a new appreciation of what it
must mean to eat out of a garbage can,” she says, recalling one day
last month as she watched a diner throw half a meal into the trash can.
“I thought, I could have eaten that. At one time that would have been
repulsive to me. But if that’s repulsive for us, why do we think it is
acceptable for someone else?”
One
of the hardest aspects of her dollar days, she says, was not having
enough calories to function well when both body and brain were lacking
the necessary fuel. “It was mentally exhausting,” she says. “In order
make the money go, you go for what fills you up, what will give you the
most calories. Very often, that is not what is nutritious. My body
craved nutrients.”She describes the day she spent 69 cents of her daily
quota on a banana as an “extravagance,” going on to describe how crucial
proper nutrition is to brain development in children. “You know the
expression, teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for life...” McGehee says. “I
believe in that, for the most part. But while people are learning to
fish, they still have to eat. And they have to have access to the pond.
That is a lot of what Together in Hope is about, helping provide access
to the pond.” McGehee describes her dollar -a- day experiment as “a
faith journey, “her personal means of deepening her understanding and
fueling her desire to fight for justice. But if McGehee’s efforts do
spread awareness and encourage empowerment in others, traveling from
deep inside a heart and all the way to the Philippines, then perhaps a
dollar a day can go pretty far after all. bDonations for 1000 Filipino
Points of Light can be made online at www.razoo.com/story/Filipino-
Points-Of-Light-Campaign or by mail to: Together in Hope, 1250
Wood Branch Park Drive, Suite 625, Houston, TX 77079 (Memo line: “1000
Points Campaign”).
