Looking back?

Hindsight can be quite comforting!
Been feeling a bit down in the dumps recently. Cash hasn't been flowing in and requests for help are increasing. Saying 'no' is horribly hard to do and at times I must admit I've been thinking that perhaps the best thing to do is to close the charity down. Goodbye to GOES? Then I think back to when we started work in The Gambia. One of the first things we did was to provide a boy, a young student, with a bicycle so he could travel more easily to college. His journey prior to this had been long and difficult. The bike in question was not some hi-tech creation, in fact it reminded me of the bike I had fifty years before and on which I rode to school. So, the boy got his bike. He worked hard at school and progressed well. So well that he was accepted by a university in Euirope; the bike was passed onto another student. I'll bet that bike is still, to this day, in good hands and providing much needed transport to some deserving person. Thanks to GOES all sorts of good things are happening. We work in very small ways - we are, after all, a micro-charity! We know the people we help (and those same people help us, with a meal, a glass of Atayah, a bed for the night). A child has school fees paid. Years later that same child proudly shows us their college diploma. We help a youngster who needs medical attention - and the next time we visit that village the same youngster runs up to greet us with a smile. We pass on a pair of reading glasses, and later the recipient is noticed with her head down in a book, absorbed in the world of words. Tiny occurancies, small parts of the tapestry of life, but so important to those individuals. Your good deeds roll on, just like the bicycle we started off this post with. How can we not go on with GOES, at least for a little while longer?
Thanks to all our helpers, past, present - and future.