My interest was piqued again by an interesting article by Jeffrey Zaslow in The Wall Street Journal today. Zaslow discusses the problems afflicting the relief efforts in Haiti with reminders of the same sorts of missteps in relief efforts aimed at previous disasters:
Every day, we see reminders of the limitations, and even the dangers, of good intentions. In Haiti, U.S. missionaries who said they only wanted to save orphaned children ended up arrested on child-trafficking charges. In Asian countries hit by the 2004 tsunami, residents still shake their heads over the warehouses filled with unusable donations, including winter coats and stiletto shoes. And earthquake-ravaged Chile is sure to receive its share of "useless aid" in the days ahead.
A further problem, of course, is that filling warehouses with useless items is worse than wasteful; it's taking up space that could go to much-needed items. And then there is the issue of visibility and promotion where relief efforts are concerned. An immediate, lethal disaster always draws massive attention and outreach; a low-grade conflict with a gradual churn of horror in an isolated part of the world? Not so much. I have yet to hear of a celebrity demanding attention be directed toward the ongoing human rights catastrophe in the Congo, where the on-and-off civil war-cum-small-scale-uprisings has put nearly 6 million people into graves. Congo has also redefined rape as a war crime; the many individual accounts of vicious, sadistic brutality—no mere gang rape of children here, although that is common enough—are beyond disgusting. But no one's singing "We Are the World" or even "We Are Vaguely Aware of You" for them.
Congo is hardly alone. Conflicts rage all over the world to this day, and disasters plague many nations. The weak and poor are killed with impunity. And aid, whether it comes from government foreign direct investment or through NGOs ... often prolongs the very conflicts and repressions whose depredations the aid seeks to address. It's an awful conundrum. And it never ends.
Zaslow shares the pointd comments of one aid organizer who has her head screwed on straight:
I think we all need to remember that the mad rush to help can be even more counterproductive than offering no help at all. Intentions mean nothing if they don't produce lasting good.
"Throw away your assumptions about what people need," advises Tori Hogan, a 27-year-old activist who has traveled the world studying the effectiveness of aid programs. Beyond Good Intentions, the Cambridge, Mass.-based charity-watchdog organization she founded, posts videos on its Web site that evaluate aid projects.
Ms. Hogan tells of going to a village in Peru where an aid group brought in tourists to help build public toilets. The group ran out of money and time, the tourists ended their volunteering vacations, and the toilets were never completed. The aid group had thought access to restroom facilities was needed to boost living standards, Ms. Hogan says. "But when I asked people in the community what they wanted, they said, 'What we really needed was irrigation, and to have our bridge fixed, so we could take our goods to market.'"
The never-completed toilets were gaping holes that had to be covered. Villagers feared their children would fall in.
3 comments:
You make a good point. A friend of mine runs a local homeless ministry here (Love Wins), and he always says the real issue of homelessness is lack of relationships - it is only in relationship when we can begin to effectively help each other.
You make a good point. A friend of mine runs a local homeless ministry here (Love Wins), and he always says the real issue of homelessness is lack of relationships - it is only in relationship when we can begin to effectively help each other.
I agree with your friend, Elaine. We have to have some kind of communicating stake in an effort to help, at the very least so we can understand what is needed. It does suggest a bigger problem: How do we develop that relationship with people halfway around the world, who don't have the benefit of advanced communication? We all get worn down with advocacy messages from many of the same sources, or frustrated with the apparent ineffectiveness of much aid (or worse, the corruption it seeds, and the conflicts that aid can actually help perpetuate). And then there's the whole issue of connecting with people who want to be helped in the first place, then separating when the help is rendered, so it doesn't become ongoing dependency.
Apologies for my long-windedness. I guess it's part of being human to notice that solutions only bring more problems. Yet we must continue trying, help where we can, and find some source of serenity about the necessarily limited amount of help we can provide, and the fact that so many won't get helped at all. Perhaps there is more mercy in death than we realize, or can admit to ourselves. I don't know.
I appreciate your taking the time to comment here, and wish you peace this day.
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