I was reminded of that yesterday when I received the results of a charity collection that we held in the church recently. We had asked for 'unwanted old and foreign' coins and notes for the Saint Vincent de Paul (SVP) charity to be used in its charitable work on supporting the poor and needy, here and overseas. The idea was that the contribution would be channelled via a commercial bureau de change who would convert the funds into Pounds Sterling and then pay the converted funds over to the SVP.
We collected the excellent total of about 5Kg weight of coins and notes - the great majority of it being foreign coins that had found their way into the collection plates and candle boxes of the church over the last few years.
All the Euro coins could be readily converted into Pounds, as could the coins and notes of quite a few other countries, however, there were coins weighing about 2Kg that could not be converted and had to be sold as bullion for recycling.
That was because the coins in question were of too low value to make economic conversion or because they were very old and no longer in circulation (and not sufficiently desirable to collectors). The countries that these coins came from were Argentina, Bahrain, Barbados, Botswana, Columbia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech, Danish, Egypt, Estonia, France, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaya, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Philippines, Polish, Portugal, Russia, Seychelles, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Reading the list, I was again reminded of what a marvellously diverse - 'catholic' with a small c - church we are...or maybe our members are just well-travelled!
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