Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Two weeks and two days. That’s how little time is left in my son’s summer. Where did it go? I know, it’s a cliché, but life just goes so fast the older you get. Sometimes you just wish for a takeback.  We haven’t done a vacation because we’ve been too busy with renting our old house, unpacking the new one, selling my mother’s house, and there’ve been so many extra expenses. But we’re going to do one weekend break away, to a nearby city, to see some sights. In the meantime, we went school supply shopping yesterday and bought a few extra items for our local program to help underprivileged kids get supplies for school. I bought paper and erasers, the two ends of the spectrum. You’ve got to have paper to write on and then sometimes you need to erase what you’ve written. Ever want to do that? Erase something you’ve done or said? I have and just recently. My husband’s been out of town the last couple of weeks and one day my son was just getting on my nerves. We’ve had t...

Yesterday was Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. I wrote about him two Fridays ago when it wasn’t looking good for him healthwise. Now the reports are looking up. People around the world celebrated his birthday by giving 67 minutes of service in his name.  I prayed to be more like Nelson Mandela, braver, kinder, thinking more of others than myself, willing to make sacrifices. But this was done by a white woman in the safety of her own home. Let’s face it, I’ve never been the object of racial discrimination. Well, there was that one time. Right out of college, I decided I wanted to travel and learn about other religions and cultures. I wanted to leave America behind and see what other countries were like. Sure, I’d been to Mexico and to Canada, but never for more than a few hours or days. I decided to teach English in Japan for a year. Japan is a safe place, right? Not for me. Let’s just say it was a year to remember. I got hit by a car on my bike. My house w...

Did you know every state has at least one national park in it and that there are 401 total national parks   in America? July is National Parks and Recreation Month and is a great time to visit a park and volunteer in one.  I’ve written about volunteer vacations before and some of the best are in parks across the country. Join the American Hiking Society for a week of building and maintaining trails with five to 14 other people in exciting and diverse locations like Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. Crew requests for 2014 open this month. Sierra Club Outings does service through its group and chapters as well as through volunteer vacations. With 65 chapters and more than 400 groups nationwide each contributing to local service projects,  Group and Chapter Outings  give an incalculable number of volunteer hours to parks and public lands. Many groups and chapters devote special trips solely to service projects. Through the roughly 90 serv...

Nelson Mandela lays in a hospital bed in South Africa waiting. I wonder if it reminds him of his 27 years in prison. He may not reach his 95 th birthday, which is less than two weeks away on the 18 th of June. It’s a day set aside as a call to action for people everywhere to make the world a better place. For Mandela Day, the Nelson Mandela Foundation asks people to set aside 67 minutes for service, one minute for each year of his service to his country. Although there are organized events, one of the easiest things to do is post something on Facebook that celebrates, or brings awareness to a human rights issue for the 67 days starting with his birthday. That may sound like a lot of days to write about human rights, until you start looking for human rights issues. There’s no shortage of them. Humanrights.com, Amnesty International and other sources report that individuals are: Tortured or abused in at least 81 countries Face unfair trials in at least 54 countries...