Helping others

I talked to a friend yesterday. When you do something nice for someone, you feel really good about it. It is better then doing things for yourself.
But then why do we not help others as much as we could?
After talking to a friend we established that it's often because when we help others, we are helping people that we feel have a need. We feel good that we fill it.

The thing with giving to aid is that we can't see the results so much, we don't even know who we are helping. This is probably also why child sponsorship is much more popular then other forms of aid. Because people can actually see results.
Perhaps this also leads to the guilt tripping mentality, aid agencies have to bring in stories for us to actually have some form of compassion that drives us to help.

I look forward to going on a mission trip. I guess its about seeing things and not just taking someones word for it. Actually having that experience is greater than facts like half the world's population lives on less than $2 US per day.
We don't all need to go on mission trips having said that. I hope to keep some form of diary that I will blog up later about the experiences I have. Hopefully that will be better than just facts and my compilation of other peoples journeys.