STORY - "The Bad Samaritans"

Darjeeling in India’s north is a hill town in the Himalayan foothills. Like many towns in India’s mountainous north, Darjeeling welcomed refugees fleeing the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The old refugee camps were once at the heart of a thriving community. If you enter the main refugee camp in Darj one of the first things you might notice is a large white bus, a mobile medical clinic. The side of the bus proudly proclaims that it was a gift of the ‘People of Taiwan.’

The bus is really a coach, drivers must have found it near impossible to negotiate the narrow, twisting roads of the mountain, yet there it sits. The bus never leaves the compound. It hosts the occasional clinic but it never plied the roads as the original donors intended. Useless in the mountains where small trucks and land rovers are the preferred transport, the bus cannot even be sold.

In neighbouring Bangladesh many villages during the ‘Year of Water’ welcomed a Christian team of retired tradesmen from Britain who wandered the region drilling small bores and installing hand-driven water pumps. Access to water is crucial and with the new bores women would not need to walk so far to queue and carry. Many of the pumps have since been painted red, a warning to stay clear.

Agencies such as Caritas and Oxfam have spent years and scarce funds to educate the villagers about the effects of arsenic poisoning. It had not occurred to the British teams that the water may not be safe. No testing was done, the water looked and tasted fine. Arsenic is a slow and silent killer and for a people unschooled in science it was difficult to make the connection between their illness and the bores that had made their lives so much more convenient. The struggle to provide alternatives is long and costly. The British helpers have gone, perhaps oblivious to the impact of their good deeds.

Heading south, the Jesuits of eastern India have established hostels in the Bakura district, five or so hours by train south west of Kolkata. The Jesuits do good work and regularly welcome groups from our own schools. The hostels make good use of gap year students from Europe, principally Germany. It was two years ago that we met Ulf. An impressive young man, he was as popular with our Australian students as he was with the locals. Ulf and a Sydney teacher came up with the idea of raising funds for a cow bank. School kids back in Sydney would raise money to buy cows to supplement the poor diet of the boys and girls of the hostels. The locals, ever polite and touched by the team’s good intentions, agreed.

The Sydney school did its part and close to a hundred thousand rupees was raised – enough to buy a small herd. Armed with funds from what we now called ‘the cow project’, we returned to the village ready to do some good. But what kind of cows should we buy? Jersey cows provide the best milk but they require shelter, struggle in the summer temperatures and need feed that is unavailable on the small holding worked by the children. Feed would have to be purchased. Perhaps the cows will prove more costly than we thought. Other breeds might be hardier but would fail the test of providing high quality milk for the children. At the same time the boys are sleeping under a leaky roof. Perhaps the money might be better spent.

At a function in 2005 an ex-school principal presented his plan to raise money through schools to purchase metal detectors. He was intending to distribute these metal detectors to Cambodian villages so that locals could begin clearing their fields of harmful bomblets themselves – they had waited too long for government to shoulder its responsibility. His plan was all about empowerment. The audience clapped. The speaker was impressive. Money was raised and detectors were purchased, I’m told some were even distributed. Thankfully, training let them down. No one knew how to use them.

In 2003 a religious brother working in East Timor planned to write to the schools of his Congregation asking students to purchase a bag or two of seeds and send them via the schools to his small mission in the Timorese hills. He wanted to establish a seed bank. Any problems with this? Go ask some geographers, you might find it’s not just money that gets wasted.

Did you hear about a generous Sydney independent school? It raised $35,000 for a church clinic in India. The sister in charge had spoken at a local parish and she had caught the imagination of some teachers. The funds were raised, the money transferred, the hospital closed within weeks. Perhaps the money retired some debts. Perhaps it retired the sisters. Who knows?

What do these vignettes have in common? Well, a number of things. First, it is difficult to spend money well in the developing world and those who come from the West often get it wrong. Even professional operators will make mistakes. The press delights in finding examples of waste and misuse by large charities. We rightly want our agencies to be efficiently run, keeping administrative costs as low as possible. Wanting bang for our buck we are often pulled to smaller projects pushed by individuals who have travelled and fallen in love with a particular school or parish, or become enthralled by a visit to an overseas mission or by a priest they’ve heard speak. We act impulsively, high on emotion and avoid asking hard questions. Hard questions can be embarrassing and we don’t want to appear insensitive. While we hate money going to ‘admin’ in the large organisations, just remember it also buys the professionalism that ensures that what we do contribute is spent well. Better to lose a percentage to research and other necessary expenses than to see the lot wasted on a flawed or poorly executed project.

Small niche projects that occur from time to time can be worth supporting but we should approach them in the same way that we might approach a small investment. Who’s behind this? How appropriate is this project – culturally, educationally and ethically? Have local consultation and input taken place? Does the group supporting this have reasonable credentials and experience – are they governed well? What happens if things go wrong? Is there financial transparency? Is the project sustainable?

Everyone gets burnt now and then. But for those of us who want to do good without taking too much risk of getting it wrong, the best bet is to stick with the major players. For Catholics that means Caritas and Catholic Mission. Both of these agencies have world wide reach, are accountable to the broader church and as charities they submit to government regulation. Too often we console ourselves with the thought that ‘at least their hearts were in the right place’. If we are going to make serious inroads against poverty and injustice it will take more than just good intentions. We need our heads in the right place too.

Michael Elphick is an educational consultant and a freelance writer.

Back to Aurora Homepage