'Helping hand' should reach out
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Each time President Thomas S. Monson watches the news or picks up a newspaper and learns of terrible human suffering as a result of tornadoes, floods, fires, drought, hurricanes, earthquakes or conflicts of war, he asks a moving question: "Do we have a responsibility to do something about such suffering?"
The answer, he says, is always the same: "Yes! We are our brother's keeper."
Helping those in need is a Church principle that goes back to the earliest days of the Restoration. A formal Church welfare program started in the wake of the Great Depression. After World War II, the Church sent food to Europe to assist the Saints and others in war-devastated countries.
But the Church's efforts accelerated a quarter of a century ago when members united to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
President Monson sat down with the Church News this January — 25 years to the month after some 4 million Latter-day Saints participated in a special fast Jan. 27, 1985.
Since then, the Church has donated 1.1 billion dollars in humanitarian relief in 167 countries.
That relief has equated to 61,308 tons of food, 12,829 tons of medical supplies and 84,681 tons of clothing, according to Church welfare services.
Recalling major world disasters and Church initiatives — including the tsunami in Southeast Asia, flooding in the Philippines, measles and polio vaccination efforts, and clean water projects — President Monson said the Church takes most seriously the admonition from the Lord to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the sick (see Matthew 25).
That effort to reach out has never been limited to one region, race or religion, he added.
"I think we should not put an artificial border around need," he said. "The Lord didn't and we shouldn't."
He said the desire to help those who are suffering is an innate characteristic in most Latter-day Saints. "We don't like to see other people suffer while we have much," President Monson said. "I think that is particularly true with regard to children. Show me a man who doesn't tear up when he sees children who are in need. I don't think you will find a real man who doesn't feel that way."
'An effect on me'
For President Monson, the desire to reach out to the less fortunate started at his childhood home with a courageous mother and a fence picket she wouldn't let him repaint.
"We lived a block from the railroad tracks," he recalled. "When the trains would go by the pictures on the wall would move."
During the 1930s, in the height of the Great Depression, hobos would ride the rails and look around the Monsons' west Salt Lake City neighborhood for food.
"I often wondered why Mother had me not paint one of the pickets in the fence. I learned later that word got around: 'You will get fed at the house that has a fence picket with a mark on it.'"
President Monson's mother invited each of those transient men into her home, had them wash up, fed them and sent them on their way with more food for later. Before they left, however, they had to endure her lecture.
"She would find out where they were from. 'Have you written your mother?' she would ask. 'Does she know where you are? She is probably very concerned. Why don't you write her a letter?'"
President Monson saw the men wash and dry with the same towel the family used. They ate the same food, at the same table, on the same plates as the rest of the family.
"That had an effect on me," he said.
'A helping hand'
President Monson said the problem with giving humanitarian aid worldwide can be summarized in a simple quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her book Gift from the Sea: "My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds."
President Monson said if a person looks at all the major needs for humanitarian aid, it is easy to become discouraged because of an inability to help everyone.
"The Church is a worldwide Church. We are just as interested in a starving child in Africa as we are a well-fed child in Los Angeles. We have to rally our resources and analyze where we can be of help."
One way the Church helps as many people as it can is by collaborating with other humanitarian organizations and agencies, including the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and Islamic Relief Worldwide.
In 1988, for example, the Church teamed with Rotary International to eliminate polio. "As a young man in high school I witnessed firsthand the start of the polio epidemic in Salt Lake City," President Monson recalled. "Every day it seemed that someone at school came down with polio."
The Church purchased sufficient polio serum to immunize hundreds of thousands of children against polio and donated refrigerators to keep vaccines viable until they were administered. Today 210 countries in the world are polio free. "One never goes wrong by helping a child," President Monson said.
Since the day when his classmates suffered from polio, communication has made the world smaller, continued President Monson. Members in Salt Lake City learned of disasters in far away places — where there were large populations but small Church membership — almost immediately. Some of the problems were bigger than any one nation.
"We got out of our own wards, and out of our own stakes and out of our own country and realized that there was suffering. These are God's children and they need to be helped."
President Monson said once you start to help those who are suffering, there is no way to stop. "You find the need of the world is far greater than you ever imagined. One disaster strikes and almost before you can complete that work, another disaster strikes.
The Church won't walk away from suffering, he added. "Starvation is starvation. Human beings dying are human beings dying. … I have seen enough to convince me where there is want and where there is suffering I would like to be there to lend a helping hand."
'Standing together'
Even though he is well aware of them, President Monson doesn't talk about the Church's worldwide humanitarian efforts in terms of percentages or statistics. He talks about them in terms of people — the Ethiopian child saved from starvation by Church-produced Atmit; the man living in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain who needed a pair of shoes (President Monson gave the man his shoes and wore his house slippers home); the baby in the Philippines who is healthy because his mother learned about hygiene.
"Every president of this Church whom I have known has been four square in favor of helping those in need and without defining whether they are white or black or brown, or whether they are in the Orient or black Africa.
"Those who have much should be more generous in helping those who have none," President Monson said.
There will always be more work to do, he concluded. But, we can "replace the weakness of one standing alone with many standing together."
