Religious motivation in Africa's largest slum

A while back I was wading through the mud of Africa’s largest slum. Over a million people are trying to survive in Nairobi’s “Kibera”—a word that means “jungle.” I was there working with “Church World Service,” the international relief agency of the “National Council of Churches.” CWS is the largest of the Christian groups attempting to support people all over the world who feel hopelessly trapped. We are not in Kibera and elsewhere to evangelize, plant churches or make converts, but to do what we can to relieve suffering.

This Christian agency has the lowest overhead of any of the traditional relief bodies, including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army or US AID. We basically provide micro-grants for those ready to help themselves. In Kibera, among other things, we fund a young man who gets up at 3 am to take his handcart miles away to buy charcoal, which he then sells by the coffee can. Women sew uniforms for school children. Others take care of orphans. A man trains a handful of apprentices to repair vehicles. No western “missionaries” are employed. We only hire and train Kenyans.

While in Kenya I also contacted communities across the Rift Valley where CWS provides funds for sand dams and wells in communities without water, helps women organize to fight female genital mutilation and organizes “under the trees” literacy classes. There are others offering similar humanitarian efforts who do so for a variety of reasons. But those of us who work with and support CWS do so because that is what our faith demands. Take religious motivation away and you will have successfully made life even more tragic for millions of the world’s suffering people

of your hearts? That you would be selfish and evil otherwise? I don't buy it.

ON EDIT: Even worse is the implication that every volunteer in your organization HAS to be a Christian, talk about exclusionary!

In this case what Christian faith deepens and excites is the goodness of the human heart. Why the iffy question?
We don't even ask the Kenyans we employ anything about their religion. My guess is that many of them are either irreligious of are of some African tradition. Most of us who financially support and volunteer for CWS work do so out of our Christian faith, but there is no litmus test. We would welcome your contribution.

to co-opt a natural human impulse(in this case empathy) and using it to advance your own religion on this board. This is arrogant, exclusionary, and wrong. Even claiming that your faith "deepens and excites" that goodness is troubling to say the least. Its this, more than anything else, that makes me think faith is a dangerous thing. At best, I would say that religious faith has a neutral affect on our ethics and morality, yet you can't even admit that much, instead you co-opt those same impulses and have to actually rationalize it with your faith. My question is why bother doing that?

for what you do, atheist to christian.

and these are the types of people I lend money to through http://www.kiva.org/

I do it both because I can and because I know what poverty feels like, although I've never been as poor in absolute terms as the people I lend to.

My faith is nonexistent so I'm compelled by my desire to lift us all up from the bottom up. It's the only way it will ever work.