Unfortunately everything you say about corruption and how it must affect our charitable giving and activities is true, at least from what I’ve seen over the years. Worse, it affects more than just our ability to help people with material things. Corruption in government and the criminal law system prevents people from getting justice after being robbed, enslaved, beaten, or killed by somebody acting in an official capacity. (That is, human rights abusers.) Corruption in education and the civil law system prevents people from obtaining the education that they need to improve their work skills, get a better paying job, or chasing a dream and making it real. (That is, people trapped in poverty of all kinds.)

Corruption is a lot like alcoholism or drug addiction, but on a societal level — it harms everybody, compounds the harm done by other things, and saps the energy and initiative needed to make things better.

My way of getting around this is to focus most of my giving on people I know, or whom somebody that I know and trust knows. The fewer steps between me and this person, the surer I am that nothing will intercept my donations.

A couple of examples…. My husband (I got married a few years ago) and I moved to Reno, Nevada in 2008. There’s a long-time Reno resident who, in the early 1980s after her husband died, decided that she was going to feed every hungry person who came to her door. Amazingly, she’s done it, and is now a local institution: her name is Evelyn Mount. After checking out her reputation, I called her donations number, and talked to her. She’s the real deal; I give to her confident that she’s got the wisdom and knowledge to use what I give to help (not harm) others.

Over a decade ago I learned about an orphanage in Russia run by an Orthodox priest and his wife, after the priest came to the United States and spoke at my old church in the San Francisco Bay area. He’s a personal friend of a Russian woman who also went there. He and his wife started the orphanage in the early 1990s when they saw children living on the street in their Siberian town because of chronic alcoholism or the death of one or both parents of malnutrition and exposure. This was after the fall of the Soviet Union; nobody took responsibility any more. Fr. Andrei and his wife did.

The Russian woman traveled to Russia to deliver donations personally to Fr. Andrei until the financial systems stabilized and it was possible to send wire transfers that would reach him. It was annoying, and a bit expensive, but she already traveled periodically to that part of Russia regularly because she’d come from there and still had family there. So that was the “way around” the endemic corruption of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.

I think of this as the “Good Samaritan” approach. We all have to pick and choose how to help other people; we can’t fix the world. For those of us who believe in God and want to obey Him, simply accepting the people that He sends our way in our everyday lives lets us let Him do the picking and choosing. Somehow it seems to work better, at least for me.

It’s good to “see” you, if only in the phosphors!