[mobertol]

Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington

I can remember coming home with little books of pictures of children....babies, smiling girls. cheeky faced boys. We were told to sell these pictures for a penny or twopence and bring the money into school and it would go towards feeding these orphans and disadvantaged children.

Despite the fact that we were poor, we always cent some money back with the stubs of the books.
Ma used to give sixpence a week to the Catholic Church too, for their missionary work.

She used to say that although we had very little, there were lots of children who had even less.

We used to have exactly the same thing Margaret at junior school -it was called St. Joseph's penny.

These days I think that charity really is better kept close to home - where maybe you can see some of the effects in your local community and for local people. Too often all this money given for overseas and to large organisations just seems to disappear without any trace of improvement where it was meant to go.

There's often a feeling that it's just another kind of business.