ELIC teachers have been met with astounding generosity from host countries all over Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. These teachers work to reciprocate in all kinds of ways as they explore how to contribute to their communities. Amy, who taught in China with her husband and growing family for three and a half years, shared three strategies they used to shape their lives around bold generosity and the meaningful stories that came as a result.
Set a Percentage Aside
Designating a set portion of income for charitable giving is a common practice for many in the West. Creativity is often key to translating this tradition into overseas life. For Amy’s family, it took some time to discover the best ways to use these gifts. In the end, they not only helped others, but their family was blessed with a beautiful community as well!
When we first moved to China, we would go to the bank and take out our pay, and it would all be in pink hundreds. To us, this felt like monopoly money. With housing covered and my husband and I both working for the university (and especially before we had kids), that was a fair amount of money.
In the States, we’d made a habit of donating 10% of our income. But in China, we didn’t have anything comparable to where we would have given in the States, so we decided to figure out how to put it to use ourselves. We started looking for opportunities. But sometimes, simply giving money away is not the most helpful way to steward it, especially if you don’t have a local organization with the expertise to know where donations should go. So instead, we found other ways to support people in our own community who had need.
When we lived in Inner Mongolia, we used some of those funds to invite a local woman to come and speak Chinese with our son. I loved to watch them. She loved babies, and she would just be his Chinese Auntie and play with him and speak Chinese, and he loved her! That was a fun way to invest in the community and our family all at once.
Become an Employer
In many parts of the world, hiring people to help with routine household tasks is a common way to invest in the local economy. When Amy’s family was deciding whether hiring someone in China was the right move, she got some advice from another friend living abroad.
Americans like to be hyper-independent. We don’t like to pay other people for services. But a friend of mine told me, “When you make a good living but don’t hire anyone to do your cleaning or your cooking or your yardwork, you are taking money right out of their economy rather than helping it grow. It is a gift to find someone good at what they do and pay them well to do it.”
So then we looked for people to employ, thinking, "Who can we pay a generous wage to do things that we genuinely need to be done?" So we employed someone to clean our house and cook a couple of times a week. Now, we could clean our own house; we could cook our own food. But this woman and her son had no other source of income. And we realized, “Wait! We can give her respect and a livelihood—a stream of income. We were able to encourage her as she raised her son by herself in poverty.
Donate Services
Doing side work for free may not be doable in every situation. Monetary or cultural restrictions could rule it out. But when an appropriate opportunity arises, volunteering your time for something you would normally charge for can be a beautiful form of generosity. For Amy, this strategy powerfully impacted a student’s life and forged a beautiful friendship that continues to this day.
I’m thinking of another time in Inner Mongolia when I had just had a baby. I was teaching part-time; my husband was teaching too. At this point, we didn’t have a lot of extra money. I got a phone call out of nowhere (I don’t know who was giving away my number, but somebody did) from a gal who said she needed tutoring for the TOEFL. Normally, I would have said no because I don’t usually take side work. But I felt like I should consider doing it. So I invited her over to hang out with me and my little baby son, thinking I would do my best to help her.
I thought, “What should I charge for this?” And I remember being in my tiny kitchen with my son in his bouncy seat and about one square foot of working space, chopping an onion, and I was just convinced I needed to do it for free.
So she walked in, and we sat down and looked at her essay samples. We talked about what a Western essay looks like, and it was like lightbulbs! It was a wildly productive session, and it was such a sweet time because she met my baby, and we just enjoyed being together. Then, as she was getting up to leave, her hand went to her pocket, and she said, “Okay, so how much do I…” and I just said, “It’s free for you, don’t worry about it.” And she said, “But I want to come again,” and I said, “Okay! You can come on Tuesdays.”
So we set a weekly meeting. And as we talked, she would ask me about why I came to China—so many questions about my life. We would go for walks on the university campus nearby, even though she didn’t attend there. She was trying to attend a university in the U.S. She’d had some hard times at her university in China, but for now she had come home to Inner Mongolia, and we would go for long walks and talk about philosophy and deep things.
Then one day, she said, “I want you to know that first day, I showed up with [500 dollars] in my pocket, ready to pay you whatever you asked me. And then you said you’d give it to me for free. And I would never have been brave enough to ask you my questions about life if you hadn’t given in that way. I knew you cared about me.”
So what is that, $70? $70 for a priceless human soul to know that they are loved, and for me to make a delightful friend.
Whether it was through budgeting for a margin to invest in others, creating opportunities for work, tutoring for free, or finding ways to invest in the local community through day-to-day tasks and purchases, Amy’s family structured their lives around generosity. The wealth of beautiful friendships in their community continues to impact their family, friends, and students years later.
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