Haiti - part 4

CNN Money reports that Americans have donated over $275 million for Haiti relief (“Open up more than your wallet for Haiti,” January 20, 2010). Offers to go to Haiti to help with disaster relief have also poured into relief agencies; medical personnel in particular fill a critical need.

A recent David Brooks op-ed column in the New York Times raised important questions about giving financial assistance to other countries (David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” New York Times, January 15, 2010). Brooks identifies four difficult truths: nobody knows how to reduce global poverty; micro-aid is “vital but insufficient”; ending poverty requires honesty and putting cultural issues at the center of global anti-poverty efforts; the need to promote locally led paternalism.

Given decades and billions of dollars expended on foreign aid from nations, non-governmental organizations, and individual citizens, the lack of proven strategies for promoting economic development and human well-being is startling. Jagdish Bhagwati in “Banned Aid” (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2010, 120-125) echoes Brooks’ observation that nobody knows how to reduce global poverty with a carefully reasoned, documented analysis.

Extreme poverty, graphically depicted in images or even words, touches the purses of many and hearts of yet more people. However, the problem of unwise expenditures (not to mention fraudulent or wasteful expenses) compounds the donor fatigue about which I wrote in my second posting about Haiti. Conducting experimental programs one should expect failures as well as successes, perhaps even more failures in the beginning than successes. Continuously throwing large sums of money at global poverty with a very shallow learning curve, with minimal demonstrable results, and with no expectation that additional funds will change that pattern conforms to a popular definition of stupidity, i.e., repeatedly doing the same thing but continuing to expect different results. Furthermore, this pattern of ineffectual aid is rapidly eroding support for continuing assistance even though global poverty, hunger, thirst, and disease are all increasing.

Brooks in his third and fourth observations about cultural issues and paternalism touches on fundamental issues that may explain why so much foreign aid has so little effect. Learning to view the world through the eyes of people in a different culture is exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Resources are limited; the need is unbelievably large; better to get on with the immediate task – at least that seems to describe most relief efforts accurately. The people behind most of those efforts and programs are decent, caring people who perceive themselves trying their best to improve the lot of the least among us, a commitment honoring Jesus’ teachings.

Unfortunately, life is not that simple. Aid recipients who perceive, rightly or wrongly, that donors and their representatives desire to remake the recipient and recipient’s society into an image of the donor/representative and their society often respond by rejecting that as paternalism. Other aid recipients become dependent upon the aid, reducing their motivation to strive for independence (not a new psychological pattern, cf. 1 Titus 5:11). Aid programs sometimes have a structure that intentionally or unintentionally promotes dependence rather than progress toward independence. Bureaucracy becomes entrenched, in both the donor nation and recipient nation, a problem corruption exacerbates in the latter.

What then shall we do?

Responding to immediate need is imperative. No substitute exists for feeding the person who is literally dying for want of a meal, giving water to the person literally dying of thirst, medically treating the person in the grips of disease. We must also name those steps for the band-aids that they are. Those steps offer no hope of resolving the root causes that cause hundreds of millions to live in such a perilous state.

Building bridges that transcend cultural divides, bridges that require identifying and moving beyond our paternalism, is a second imperative. This step is very difficult because of the distances (emotional, cultural, geographical) that separate people and no promise of immediate improvement. But decades of largely futile efforts apart from this step demonstrate that this step is inherently imperative.

In time, such bridges between people and groups that transcend cultural divides will expand the commitment to mutual interdependence intrinsic to reciprocal altruism. That offers the best hope of ending extreme poverty.

Such bridges also imply a question: what can those whom the affluent regard as aid recipients contribute to the affluent? Genuine mutual interdependence requires reciprocity in relationships. If that reciprocity is not fiscal, what might it be? Without reciprocity, avoiding a “messiah” attitude is almost impossible, defining the relationship as paternalistic rather than mutual.