To Give or Not to Give

Here’s a dilemma that I as a card carrying Bleeding Heart Liberal, am grappling with right now:  Does my bleeding heart mean I have blood on my hands?

Disaster happens somewhere in the world, affecting millions of people.  One’s heart bleeds.  One sends off an immediate donation to a humanitarian aid organization who’s mobilized in the field.  One feels better, kind of.

But what’s actually happened to that money?  Has it gone to feed starving kids, rebuild broken homes, provide decent drinking water to a village or get child soldiers to throw away their guns and go to school?  Well after years of checking out various government and non government humanitarian organizations in the field, from Asia to Africa, I can say unequivocally, without hesitation,  without a doubt or even a moment to think about it, the answer to the above question is… not really.

But I can’t make the argument as well or with such fierce, and occasionally humourous, insight as Dutch journalist Linda Polman.  A couple of years she wrote one of the more readable indictments on foreign aid ever.   And now its out in English I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who gives a damn about the way the world really works.

War Games: The story of Aid and War in Modern Times is not nearly as heavy a read as its title suggests.  Meaning that you can whiz through this well written book pretty easily.  It’s not written in the dense jargon-infested, academic terms that similar treatises have been in the past, though I must add that I did feel my blood pressure climbing with each chapter.

Polman lived in and reported from Sierra Leone and Liberia for years, so she knows her stuff.  And she’s got an extensive bibliography backing up her main thesis: that aid not only doesn’t always do good, more often than not, it does real harm, perpetuating wars that could have fizzled out and keeping warlords and dictators in a high living style to which they become accustomed with millions of dollars of aid money literally being thrown at them.

She has met aid workers who work for the welfare of children by day and find comfort in the arms of child prostitutes by night.  She’s talked to crazed child soldiers who teach her the simple mathematical equation of horror:  ” the more people we amputate, the more money you will send us”.  She looks at the corporatization of aid organizations with a cold hard glare that could freeze any bleeding heart dry in a moment.  She more or less says that the need to attract and keep donors means that aid organizations have had to sell their soul to the devil.

She has questions, she raises questions, and then more questions about those questions.  What she doesn’t do is provide cut and dried answers.  But who can blame her?  There’s no answer to the question - “so what do we do?  Leave the most helpless to die?”

Polman does make a few suggestions though.  The main one being that we - not the individual or corporate donor, not a donor organization nor a donor government - cannot just sign a cheque and feel we’ve paid off the problem.

We need to make the aid world more responsible for its actions, we ourselves need to get  mobilized into tracking the money we give.  In short, sending off our 10 or 100 or millions of dollars does not absolve us of our responsibility.  We need to make sure that that money is not going to fuel any more wars, line the pockets of those who caused the problem in the first place, or pay towards the air-conditioned office of the big boys living off fat per diems in the capital.

War Games has made me question a lot of things, mainly myself and my motivations for giving.  It won’t stop me from giving to the charities I believe in which these days have narrowed down to a couple of grassroots organizations I have personal experience of.  What it has done is made me even more convinced that even in the business of bleeding hearts, no, especially in the business of bleeding hearts, we need to climb out of the hot tub of blissful ignorance and stand shivering in the cold reality of the world.

Photo: Flickr/Jason Wilson