The Perspectives section has the potential to raise quite a stir. The T-shirts used as a Haiti relief fundraiser were made in Haiti. Sweatshops? Incredibly likely. Ironic? Absolutely.
Certainly this fact raises many questions regarding the shirts’ potential to benefit the Haitian people but the Graphic staff would like to set those issues aside for the moment and look at the bigger picture. Far from being an isolated incident we believe these shirts are symptomatic of a bigger and more tragic trend plaguing the Pepperdine campus and society as a whole.
Ever eager to meet a need Pepperdine quickly sprang into fundraising action in response to the earthquake’s destruction. In doing so we joined the rest of the world in blindly reaching for our wallets when faced with disaster.
Now don’t misunderstand; we are in no way trying to discourage generosity. (We’ll let good ol’ George handle this one … you know “Freely ye have received freely ye give.”) But rather we need to be good stewards of our money even in how we give it if we truly want to make a difference. Too often we rush into what we perceive to be a solution without knowing the true consequences.
Take for example the 10 American missionaries who recently attempted to abduct 33 Haitian children. While the motives of the group’s leader Laura Silsby are yet to be determined it seems that by all accounts the other nine team members were drawn by an innocent desire to help.
Their naivete and ignorance seem shocking at first but on further investigation they are not much different than the average American philanthropist— all the right intentions but with tragically poor execution.
After all it seems simple enough. What poor little Haitian child wouldn’t want to live in the land of Girl Scout cookies and Saturday morning cartoons right? And besides Haiti was tragically decimated so why wouldn’t we want to donate and wear our red T-shirt with pride?
We’ve grown up in a culture obsessed with the quick-fix solution. Buy this machine and your abs will be tighter read this book and your life will be more successful give 30 cents a day and save the starving children of Ethiopia. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life really were that simple? If buying a T-shirt or throwing a few bucks in a bucket really would solve the problem?
Unfortunately such giving is often ineffective; even counterproductive.
Following the tsunami off Indonesia in 2004 the world rallied to meet the need and raised an estimated $13.5 billion— far more than the estimated cost of the damages— leading to waste and excess in relief efforts.
Saundra Schimmelpfennig who has worked with the United Nations and the Red Cross as a specialist in disaster recovery work details many of the consequences of uninformed giving in her blog. Examples include piles of donated winter clothing dumped on the side of the road in India excess orphanages struggling to find orphans to house and relief efforts slowed due to the influx of unnecessary goods and people flooding sea and air ports.
Her suggestions: don’t donate goods don’t go over individually to volunteer and consider holding off donations until later in the rebuilding process.
If we are really to make a difference we need to understand where our money is going and what it is doing. We need to understand the culture into which we are inserting ourselves and the infrastructures in place. We need to support efforts that produce lasting change such as education and micro-financing instead of temporary quick-fixes.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”