The other day someone called me because they wanted to donate some goods to help a really needy person in a developing country. I told them not to do it. At first, they thought I was heartless, but they didn’t understand what would happen to the contribution if it were sent.
First of all, it might never arrive. Oh, it would arrive but when it got there, someone could take it for himself if they wanted to do so. An abundance of well-intentioned gifts are simply stolen. Secondly, to get the package through, bribes have to be paid. And the bribes are very discretionary. Also if the package came from the United States, the needed bribe to move the gift along might be substantial. And how can a poor, destitute person who needed immense relief in the first place come up with a bribe? And if this isn’t enough, there are the postal workers there. They open the package and determine what it is worth (in a totally subjective way). Then they tax the recipient based completely on their appraisal. As you can guess, it is always higher than it is worth. As a result, the poor person cannot pay and the gift is left for someone to take it.
What I have discovered the hard way is that it is best to send money. Sure I know all the problems with that—but if you trust a person at all—it is best to send money (especially wiring it through a bank). I guess what I’m saying is that it is hard to help people. It is difficult because of corrupt people and dishonest systems. But all of it tends to surface back to bad leaders in the government. What is all the fighting about in North Africa these days? It is all about poor people who are tired of not being helped while leaders help themselves in a disproportionate way.
Is there a better example than Egypt? Lots of relief has been sent. But the President has offshore accounts with billions of dollars for himself that was supposed to go to the needy people.
What do you do? Well, you can’t quit helping whether you are a person, relief agency or a country. I am not naïve. I know we will get burned again. But we must be smarter how and where we help.
To understand the problem better, maybe you should check out The Global Corruption Index. You might ask, “Is this really needed?” Unfortunately, it is. You can understand it well if you check out the March 24 graphic at http://graphic.is/infographics/
We need to help the needy period. But sometimes governments do need to change. If justice is going to roll, channels must be opened and corruption needs to be eliminated.
Wow, this is a blast from the past! Milton, this is Cathy Hampton. I was at Northwest [the church where Milton was a campus minister and evangelist] in the mid-1980s, a quarter of a century ago. This afternoon I took a break from work (I’m a technical writer these days) and was catching up on the latest news on Haiti when I happened across this blog. I knew you’d moved back to Texas a few years ago, but not what you were doing now. The Christian Relief Fund looks like a good little group doing good work.
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!
And I think Milton is from the Philippines. Because he’s describing it only too well like the situation here in my country. What he said is all true.