Late Friday night, I got an e-mail from  a person who contributed generously to my requests for help for the new women’s basketball team being put together by RISSE, the refugee and immigrant refugee center in Albany.

She wanted her donation back, I believe the first person to ever make that request.  “I donated $100 earmarked for girl’s basketball uniforms back on February 16. Since it doesn’t appear that this project being pursued, I’d like to request a refund of my money.”

My policy is always to refund the money of anyone who might mistrust me or who doesn’t believe I am using their money in the precise way that they wished. No questions asked. I guess I am surprised it never happened before. I don’t want to take a penny from anyone who doesn’t trust me or who doesn’t feel good about their donation to the refugees or the Mansion residents.

I take trust very seriously – this work depends completely on it –  and I work very hard to make sure every donation goes quickly to the place or person for whom it was intended, and I document every gift and expenditure, because I know there are some people out there in the world for whom trust is almost impossible.

I told this donor the project is very much being pursued, and I refunded her money instantly. I don’t want it.

I don’t have any control over what the people who run the girl’s basketball team do or don’t so,  or when it meets,  but I did help arrange for the team to have uniforms, and this woman’s money bought several of them.

I am grateful to have helped the girl’s team, and will continue to help if asked. They will get it together.  My focus is and will remain Ali’s soccer team, they are always available to me, and they have suffered more than children should ever have to suffer.

I am also concentrating now on the adult refugees and immigrants in urgent need as the subsidy’s and aid programs they once received are being drastically cut. This work is fluid, it changes all the time.

The day before my e-mail message, a woman, a refugee from the Middle East who was about to lose her job when I met her because she couldn’t pay for repairs came to thank me for giving her the money to fix her  car and keep her life together for a while longer.

She clasped my hands told  me, “I don’t know how I can thank you, I believe God sent you to help me, and he will bless you a million times. You are an angel.”

She was crying, and soon enough, so was I.

And so it goes. I can be a good guy and a bad guy at the same time.

I do sometimes live in a fantasy world, where I imagine we all trust one another and appreciate each other, but I know that is not the way the real world works or that  real people work and live.  I was a reporter too long to be naive.

Why should I be immune to it, when so many millions of other Americans are choking on anger and suspicion every day?

This work is immensely satisfying to me, but also often painful and difficult and sometimes hard for people on the outside to grasp, or for me to explain. I see it is hard to do the work and explain it all both at the same time.

I meet so many people I can’t  help, their needs are just too great for my very limited resources or time or strength. One person asked for help, got it, and misused it. It only happened once, but it won’t happen again.

I meet many people who don’t want to be helped, or for one reason or another, are beyond help. I meet people who have suffered so much it is almost impossible for me to bear, or for them to cope. I meet people who are terrified to be photographed or written about or noticed in any way. I meet women who are terrified of the men who control them and their families.

These are often people with relatives, even husbands, back home in a faraway place, and their families could be harmed or even killed if they said the wrong things. People, they assure me, are watching.  Yet I have to turn them down, I tell them I don’t help anyone that I can’t write about, that the donors can’t see for their own eyes, that’s the contract I have with the people who call themselves the Army Of Good.

With the refugees, it often takes great bravery to ask for help or take it.

I meet many woman who believe it is a great sin to be photographed by a strange man, or who have never seen a Jew, and who shake at the sight of a camera, or cover their  faces as Mawah did the first time I meet her, insist that they not be written about.

None of them have ever heard of a blog, few can comprehend the idea that people from all over the country who have never met one another would send money to help them.

I have never found a simple way to explain it.

I often think I’m failing more than I succeed, but Ali and I are a good team, and we are beginning to succeed more than we fail. That is mostly because we are so careful about who we help. I think often of those who are too far lost to help. We let them go.

Whenever I get discouraged now, I look at these two photos, Hawah when I first met her – she covered her face entirely when she saw me and said she thought of killing herself – and Hawah a couple of days later (below).

She wants me to buy some new clothes, has invited me and Maria to dinner, and wants me to come and meet her dying husband in a nursing home. She wants him to see the person who has been helping her.

I felt very good about myself and Ali and the work we are doing. I am used to going up and down, and sometimes I just get too weary to keep all of it going in my head. Faith needs nourishment and attention.

It is not always easy to keep people happy.

Someone mailed Ali a donation directly, rather than me or RISSE,  and a week letter, he got a scorching e-mail protesting that the sender had not been immediately thanked for the donation. How rude, she said.

Poor Ali, who is never rude,  hadn’t even seen the letter, someone else in his office had opened it up and deposited the check. Ali works day and night to help people, it is wrong to treat him in that way, even as it is so righteous to support his cause.

I try to thank people who send donations, it is just not possible, which is, I guess, both a blessing and a curse.

I tell people who send things to the Mansion or the refugees that they can’t expect personal thanks or acknowledgement. Most of the refugees or Mansion residents are not able to do it, while I try to send thank you’s to as many people as  I can, there are just too many to it to every person who contributes.

Nor can I keep track of every package that is sent, or when it arrived, or how it was received. I wish I could, but it would be a lie to say i can.

Sometimes the residents get sick or die. Or they can’t use a pen and write. Or they are confused and forgetful.

Few of the refugees speak English, and hardly anyone has envelopes and stamps and pens and paper.

For me, giving is the reward. Doing good has saved my soul.

And seeing a smile like the one on Hawah’s face above. That is my nourishment, really, that is what puts a smile on my face and brightens my lifel. I don’t look for thanks,  I don’t need that.  But when i compare the difference in Hawah’s face in these two photography my heart lifts. I’m home, I’m where I need to be.

The work is its own rewards, the challenges a part of learning how to be an ethical and decent human being.

The spiritual philosopher Richard Rohr writes that living in a sometimes hostile world, coming into contact with people who might dislike or disapprove of or even hate me, takes a toll on any man, certainly me. Living in the negative environment in which we all find ourselves today is spiritually and mentally draining.

Every great spiritual leader, from Jesus to the Dalai Lama to Pope Francis, tells of searching for ways to brace themselves against the negativity and debilitating energy of toxic and broken people.

The wise man or woman ought never be afraid to do the same, I have learned.

He  protects his or her own boundaries, moves through the past the ugliness and away from the spiritual weakness of others  in order to gather  spiritual strength. That is what I try to do every day of my life.

In my case, I  seek always to find or form a new community open to a new and better and more loving way of living, and I promise to keep faith in a new and better way to live. This is a community of hope, because sometimes faith is the only promise of a new way.

I seek this new way of acting in the face of brute power, despair, greed,  and disenchantment. I don’t seek academic or religious solutions, but practical and empathic ones. I gather online and off with a group of honest brothers and sisters who trust each other and  protect each other from harm

We affirm in each other something other than passivity, suspicion, judgement and helplessness.

It cannot be done alone.