c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ There are those who complain about the glut and the greed of the American celebration of Christmas, even as they prowl the malls and comb the catalogs to secure the perfect gift for the man, woman or child who has everything.

While mailboxes bulge with publications full of useless items, three religion-based charities have altruistic Christmas projects offering comfort and assistance to those who have nothing.”All I want for Christmas is … a mouth free of toothaches … a full year in school … clean water so I won’t be sick all the time … to live beyond my fifth birthday.” Thus reads the opening page of the Global Gift Guide published by World Concern, the international arm of the Seattle-based Crista Ministries.

If you want to give the gift of helping others to someone on your Christmas list, here’s how it works: A donation of $15 provides a medical checkup for a pregnant woman in Bangladesh, Cambodia or Myanmar; $28 buys two pigs for a rural family in Cambodia; $12 buys a rabbit for a family in Rwanda (rabbits multiply quickly, providing food and income for a family, according to World Concern); $40 buys dental exams for 10 Cambodian children.

Larger donations of $300 buy a pair of oxen to be shared by four families in Uganda; $55 buys a year’s tuition for a child in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand or Tibet; $150 buys a pump to deliver clean water to five families in Cambodia.

World Concern then delivers a Christmas card detailing the gift purchased in your loved one’s name. A handmade Christmas tree ornament is included as a keepsake.

To order the gift guide, call 1-800-755-5022. Or, if you’re running out of time, view the catalog offerings on World Concern’s Web site: http://www.worldconcern.org, then place orders by phone or fax.

Though World Concern has operated as an evangelical ministry in the Third World since 1955, this is only the second year it has provided a gift catalog at Christmas, according to spokeswoman Christy Gardiner.

However, Heifer Project International, an ecumenical Christian organization established by the Church of the Brethren, has been providing gifts of food and income-producing animals to poor families in the United States and around the world since 1944.”It all began during the Spanish Civil War, when we were distributing powdered milk to feed hungry children. We decided it would be better to distribute cows instead,”explained John Dieterly, regional director of the development organization based in Little Rock, Ark.

The Heifer Project encourages tobacco farmers in the American south to raise livestock or chickens instead; provides llamas to families in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia; supplies widows in Zimbabwe with dairy cattle; and gives subsistence farmers in India camels and carts for hauling crops to market.

The group, Dieterly said, has several goals: concern for children, preserving the environment, promoting community development and keeping families together.

Livestock products do more than feed a family and provide extra income; they also keep families together. Dieterly said successful farm projects promote family stability and help curb migration of unemployed young people from agricultural areas to cities.

Sharing is an important value for those who accept Heifer Project animals. If a pair of animals are given to a family, the recipients are expected to spread the wealth around and share the animals’ offspring with their neighbors.

Though the Heifer Project’s work appears pastoral, it often unfolds in arenas of tension and violence. Dieterly said the organization’s projects in Bosnia are currently endangered by the mounting potential for violence. He said the organization is also concerned about the violence in Central Africa that has unleashed a flood of refugees.”In 1995, Heifer Project cows in Uganda produced more than 3 million gallons of milk,”Dieterly said. But political instability in Uganda and elsewhere in Central Africa has caused havoc.”Many of our cows disappeared into the bush with the families. It’s an extremely difficult time.” The Heifer Project has its own Christmas gift guide this year, modestly titled,”The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World,”which can be ordered by phone (1-800-422-0474).

Among the selections: $50 buys a share of a dairy cow; $10 buys seedlings to restore ecological balance to parts of Guatemala ravaged by slash-and-burn agriculture; $20 buys a flock of chicks for families from the Caribbean to Cameroon, providing high-quality protein for children, and enough eggs to share or sell at the market.

Some donors pool their resources to buy a really big present to be shared by families around the globe: $5,000 secures a”gift ark,”which delivers 15 types of animals, two by two _ a heifer and bull, two sheep, two camels, two pigs, two flocks of geese, two water buffalo, two hives of bees, and so on. The idea is to follow God’s instructions to Adam, Eve and all creation: Go forth, be fruitful and multiply.

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) doesn’t produce a gift catalog to promote its animal projects in the Third World, but its recent advertisements in the New Yorker Magazine and Harper’s Magazine on how to give animals to the poor as gifts for Hanukkah, Christmas, birthdays or bar mitzvahs have drawn thousands of dollars of donations in recent weeks, according to M’Annette Ruddell, director of donor services for the Philadelphia-based AFSC.

Founded in 1917 to give conscientious objectors to World War I alternative means of serving their country, the AFSC today sponsors education and health programs in the United States and 22 nations around the world.”Think of it as a good, better, bestiary way to show your love to someone special,”puns the advertisement for AFSC, the non-profit community service arm of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers.

A $35 contribution to the Quaker animal project can buy, for example, a covey of fowl for a women’s poultry cooperative in Mozambique, along with a gift card for the person in whose name the donation is made:”For you at Christmas: A flock of chickens instead of one lonely partridge in a pear tree.” A $100 contribution buys a pair of piglets for Haitian peasants. Haiti’s indigenous pig population was wiped out in 1983, the development group says, because of a U.S.-sponsored pre-emptive strike against swine fever. Or $80 can buy a fraction of a bullock, used for farming, transportation and food in Cambodia.

While purchasing pairs of animals has a certain whimsical appeal, some of the Quaker group’s projects carry a note of greater urgency. The Burundi Peace Project, for instance, is also seeking donations to further the work of David Niyonzima, a Burundian Quaker leader who is seeking to defuse the ethnic tensions that have been mounting in that Central African nation since 1993.

And in famine-plagued North Korea, whose farmlands have been devastated by floods, the AFSC is joining with other aid groups to help the 500,000 people left homeless and hungry.

For more information about the animal project, Burundi Peace Project or Korean Relief Fund, contact the AFSC toll-free number: 1-888-588-2372.

MJP END CONNELL