The adage "charity begins at home" is often heard amid the economic downturn. Calls to cut foreign aid and focus on problems at home are understandable. Why help an unseen person halfway around the world when local food pantries are nearly bare and more Americans are homeless, jobless and without health care?

In fact, there is no greater time for America - and individual Americans - to think and act globally. Doing so at time when America's prestige and respect in the world.are struggling to recover from the damage of the Bush years is in our self-interest. And doing so is also just - since the trigger to the global recession was forged and tripped by the United States. Sure, Ponzi schemers, subprime mortgage hustlers and imprudent or, let's face it, financially silly consumers who wanted everything if they could pay for it later deserve plenty of blame. But Congress and the president who had veto power over its actions, are more responsible for the global downturn than most.

If members of Congress and regulators didn't know that, in the absence of rules, greedy people would cheat and scammers would scam they were blind to history and derelict in their duty as watchdogs.

The grim effects of this recession are clear to every family with a member who has been laid off, a neighbor facing foreclosure, or a job or business now endangered. But the impact of this recession is being felt much more heavily in much of the rest of the world than here.

Developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America are in dire straits, and the situation promises to get much worse. Remittances, the money immigrants legal and illegal send home to support their families from the United States and other wealthy nations, has plummeted as unemployment rates rise. The money was, in many cases, the sole source of support for a large family.

In the United States, the recession has filled soup kitchens, and it's sending an unconscionable number of children to bed and to school hungry. But in Third World nations, rising food prices and falling economies are killing people. The swollen bellies of starving children are the symbol of the downturn in lands whose people had virtually nothing before the economy collapsed.

Food riots have broken out in Haiti, Yemen, Guinea, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Burkina Faso and other West African nations. The care organization Oxfam says 900 million people in developing nations face starvation as the result of the recession.

Earlier this month, The Toronto Star reported that the severity of the economic downturn is leading more parents to sell their daughters to traffickers, which often, means into slavery and prostitution.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have both said that the crisis is so big that their resources are grossly inadequate to alleviate the suffering. Pleas have gone out for aid to other nations, but foreign aid contributions always plummet when times are tough.

Money is tight. But a hand extended to people the global recession is pulling under will save lives and help change America's image in the world. So for every $10 spent to help a fellow American weather this crisis, please give a buck or two to help rescue people who had absolutely no responsibility for the recession but face death because of it. Such aid can't wait until everyone back home is helped first.