I haven’t asked for permission yet, so I’m posting the below comments anonymously.
It’s by someone who’s worked in disaster relief for a number of years.
Dear Friends,
We have all seen the terrible news that is happening in Haiti especially in the capital of Port au Prince. What I want to ask each of you to do is to give with your head and not just your heart. There is an obvious urgency for immediate relief efforts to rescue and save lives. But the reality is that for these purposes giving at this time is already too late. Aid agencies and other NGOs will determine a budget looking at what they have on hand and what they can hope to recover with immediate donations and spend accordingly. Money collected now for emergency relief will go to replace what is spent. Any extra will then have to be spent on ad hoc ‘emergency’ projects to be created in the months to come. The extraordinary outpouring of donations with each major catastrophe is an indication of Canadian sympathy but not wisdom. As with other major catastrophes aid agencies will collect more moneys then they can spend. This fact along with not-for-profit rules which require donations collected be spent only for the purpose for which they were collected (a good rule that protects donors), means agencies will have to come up with ways to dump cash at the end of the fiscal year. This kind of spending only encourages wastefulness at best and often leads to creating a culture of corrupt behaviour.
For aid agencies each disaster is a windfall and they must ‘make hay while the sun shines’. The administrative portions they keep for themselves are a strong motivator. They are not at fault for this rather it is the giving pattern of their supporters who only give when they see death, suffering and destruction on their TV screens. An earthquake of this magnitude is still beyond our human technology for prevention or even early warning. However, the risk reduction and amelioration that is part of disaster preparedness should have accounted for an event of this scale. And those preparations should have been attended to from year to year, requiring steady and targeting giving from donors and governments and the attention of the NGO community.
I visited Haiti in 2001 inspecting water and sanitation, community development projects of and preaching at a church of the Evangelical Baptist Churches of Haiti (EEBH). Port au Prince sits at the edge of the water and spreads up high mountains. The steep roads where they exist become torrential rivers with every rainfall sweeping anything not secured down into the harbour and knocking over the sheds and makeshift shelters of the poorest that live on the edge of the sea. Other construction is in concrete but often with limited use of expensive rebar; but even rebar would not have saved many of the buildings in this particular earthquake. The lack of adequate infrastructure will seriously hamper relief efforts. The lack of adequate in country stock piles of emergency supplies will mean that aid will come too late for many. Many have been killed and many more will die in the coming days.
I am asking you to hold of giving for emergency relief. For many this may sound callous. But as I have indicated, the emergency funds that will be spent are already in the accounts of the aid organisations; they can’t handle more in any real useful way for this emergency. The giving from the knee jerk reaction of governments and the general public will more than adequately cover these funds and replace the contingency funds.
What I am asking you to do is to hold off until the rehabilitation efforts get under way; when specific projects are developed that will rebuild and hopefully improve conditions. Every tragedy is also an opportunity. In the villages I visited water was managed using spring capping and rainfall capturing technology that provide safe an ample water for healthy communities. Many of these systems will need to be repaired or rebuilt in the coming months.
I hope to be able to get in touch with the General Secretary of the EEBH who hosted me during my visit and ask him to direct our giving.
In the meantime if you want to contribute to the relief efforts I would like to suggest channelling that through the Salvation Army or some other long term agency which does not spend a great portion of what they receive on themselves and a great deal of advertising. But do save the bulk of your generosity for the coming months when rebuilding efforts get underway.
I’m such a jerk. I’ve been sponsoring a child for the past couple years and after several handwritten letters to me, only today have I finally got around to emailing her back.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s easier for someone of my piddly income to fork over cash each month, than simply write a personal letter of compassion.
The problem with financial support is when it ends there. Sure, a child gets needed funding and I feel slightly absolved of my guilt. But when child sponsorship organizations like world vision get reduced to a distribution center, we get the illusion that everyone connects and gets what they need… but is anyone truly transformed?
Anyhow, here’s my open letter to this child I ought to be loving on…
Dear Uwayisaba,
Thank you so much for your past letters! I need to start by sincerely apologizing for taking so long to write back to you. We have a photo of you up on our wall and think about you often. However, it’s silly how busy our lives can get here in Toronto. It is so easy for us to get caught up in things that aren’t meaningful and forget what’s truly meaningful.
Your life is meaningful. We believe your struggles and your hopes are meaningful to this world we share as well. We have a daughter who’s a bit younger than you, and she reminds us everyday how every single life is precious and sacred. Once she learns to write we really hope that she can write to you herself as well.
I know that God is working in your life and ours, and we look forward to hearing more about you, your school, and your family.
With love
Anyhow, I know every one of you can do better than I have. I’m currently partnered with Food for the Hungry, I hear great things about Compassion as well.
Below is a recent video from the Catalyst conference of a child meeting their sponsor after 19 years. The sharing starts around the 3 minute mark.
Since my last post about U2’s song “moment of surrender”, there’s been a number of verses that provoke me, but the line “vision over visibility” has really stuck with me.
Is there something that you see, that others can’t? A vision, a reality of what could be, that others don’t seem to ‘get’?
It looks dark and murky but you’ve got this strong gut-level hunch it’s a direction you ought to be going in?
Please keeping moving forward.
Seize it, for the love of God. Do something about it.
We’ll always be working in low-visibility, but vision doesn’t always come.
Take a hold of it and make it into a reality. We need you to help us see it. Our world is filled with too many people with eyes wide shut, working merely with the visible.
That statue waiting to be carved out of that stone block; that word of truth or encouragement that no one else can quite articulate the way you do; that service your community or city desperately needs but knows how to go about it… we need you to help us see the invisible.
Because if you don’t, it might slip away. And worst yet, it might be lost to humanity forever.
Besides the content and ‘nuggets’ I jotted in the notes, my biggest highligh quite honestly, was simply being released for a full day from family obligations to just soak. I really believe in the business of providing space – there is just so much random clutter often in our lives, to be offered an intentional and formative space to simply be, just did it for me.
Of course, being in the presence of great thinkers and practitioners helped. I’m not sure if it was on purpose, but I felt the plenary folks were a bit too heady for the general audience. I’m coming from a seminary background and thought some of the insights were too dense to move on to the next point. Maybe academics/scholars aren’t suppose to compress their thoughts like this?
Having said that, I loved getting the random soundbites and interactions from the twitter channel as other folks were in different workshops. Everyone always bashes online connections, but I think just as with ‘real’ life physical relationships, it’s what you make of it.
The good thing about all the rich and compact thoughts was there was a lot of good conversation after where people asked – what did he/she mean by… ? Maybe the calling is for those of us who did catch it, to help translate those thoughts to others.
I love thought provoking insights and conversations but as with most conferences I’m always left with – now what?
For now I’m left keenly aware that I’m steeped in powers both good and evil, I contribute and enforce powers that I rail against, and somehow in it all, Jesus is with us making the world new again.
Our community of faith is part of the advent conspiracy again this year, and we’re trying to pool our funds to help provide clean water to those who need it.
Part of the advent conspiracy tagline is ‘buy less, give more’.
I don’t think we’ll have a problem with giving more.
Charity is hip again in America, but consumption seems unstoppable.
Saving the world is an emerging theme and trend, but our lifestyles remain unaltered.
There’s no relationship between consuming less and giving more.
At least, not in the ‘middle-class’ circles I travel in.
We have so much we can give more and consume more.
I don’t blame the companies. They have shareholders to appeal to. Are they replacing our need for justice in the world by selling us they’re somewhat socially-conscious goodies? Maybe.
But at least they’re doing something.
In the Book of Acts, people had to sell their possessions so that they could give and meet the needs of others.
Charity used to cost us something.
What are we really willing to change, to see change in the world?
Jesus calls us to change; Gandhi and Obama talked about change, heck I think Michael Jackson even said something about changing the man in the mirror.
Photo by LOGAN ABASSI/AFP/Getty Images)
