Give

2

Charity in the Dock

We must know ourselves well enough to recognise our own illusions … enough to be able to tell when it is not the Charity of Christ that speaks in our hearts but only our own self pity … or ambition, or cowardice, or thirst for domination.

THOMAS MERTON

I landed in Port-au-Prince four days after the earthquake, just as the response was making its transition from spontaneous and chaotic (and no less heroic for it) to a more co-ordinated and orderly phase. I had been propelled there by an unprecedented outpouring of goodness from our supporters all over the world, and had come to assist in planning the next phase, including agreeing immediate priorities and use of the funds with which we had been entrusted. I walked from the runway through a no-longer-functioning, half-collapsed terminal building onto streets teeming with misery. A mob of children begging for food beset us. It was early evening and in every space between piles of concrete and twisted metal people were looking for a place to sleep. I soon found myself doing something similar, although I had the luxury of Father Tom’s courtyard.

Father Tom and his co-worker Doug are co-founders of an organisation called Hands Together, which we had been working with in Haiti for some years. They focus much of their work on the nearby, notorious slum of Cité Soleil, where hundreds of thousands live on what was a rubbish dump: they are Haiti’s poorest of the poor, and endure a poverty as squalid, oppressive and violent as any I have witnessed.

I arrived at Father Tom’s place during the short dusk of the tropics and, though I had stayed in this compound several times previously, I was finding it hard this time to get my bearings. The small pile of rubble that Father Tom and Doug pointed to as they recounted events surely could not be the remains of the substantial house that had accommodated volunteers and frequent visitors like me? I could see familiar twisted bits of green metal balcony railings and I thought of a moment during my first visit here four years earlier. It was early evening and I was sitting on the roof of the house with a co-worker from Scotland. We were praying together and trying to understand better what we had seen that day during our first visit to Cité Soleil. Father Tom had appeared up the little staircase to join us in prayer and had then spoken to us, trying to help us understand things there – the suffering, the history, the violence, the politics – while telling us several times that even after all these years he didn’t understand it either. He disarmed us by telling us he wasn’t even sure all his years’ work here had really achieved anything.

And now I was looking at a pile of concrete and metal which had, until four days ago, been arranged in the shape of that house in which we had sat and prayed and made friends. Father Tom and Doug were doing their best to explain what had happened. It was distressing for them, but it seemed they needed to speak of it and I hoped that it was cathartic in some way. Two of the men who lived with them, and who had been in the house as it collapsed, had died. Doug and the other dazed survivors had dug with bare their hands, initially to try to save them, but in the end only to recover their bodies. We walked together a short way past the rubble to the back of the courtyard to pray where two simple wooden crosses marked their graves.

Meanwhile, their courtyard was becoming surprisingly well-ordered and a number of friends and co-workers were gathering to sleep there. An old bus parked in one corner was serving as accommodation for the women and children; in another some tin and tarpaulin had created a new temporary head office for Hands Together. I noticed that one of the high walls which had previously made this compound secure had toppled over. Under a tree Father Tom had created a little chapel. We all gathered there to pray together – our little, newly formed homeless community – before lying down on old mattresses recovered from the ruins to sleep. I stared at the stars above me and thought of childhood camping trips and my own children at home. Planes and helicopters were roaring incessantly across the sky. It was loud but reassuring. People and aid of all sorts were beginning to arrive. Later gun shots and shouts punctuated the night, together with screaming and groaning.

The next day was one of intense information-gathering and planning. What could we best do, as two small organisations working together, to relieve at least some of this enormous sea of suffering around us? We sat down that morning in the makeshift office to begin our discussions with Nelson, the Hands Together general manager who had lost his wife and children in the earthquake, and other local leaders of the Hands Together team. They personally were making the transition from instinctive, individual acts of charity towards something more co-ordinated and planned, while also just starting to deal with their own horrendous loss.

This step, from one to the other, occurs in the aftermath of any humanitarian disaster, when it becomes clear that the scale of suffering requires an organised reaction. It certainly doesn’t mean that the personal, spontaneous kindnesses stop – God forbid that should ever happen – rather, it enables these to be co-ordinated and provides them with the tools they need to become more effective. This move towards co-ordinating and managing charity is also, in essence, what leads to the birth of new organisations. A desire to go beyond an initial informal act of goodness to create a new ongoing mission in order to meet an unmet need, which allows others to join and play their part, is what prompts the registration of a new organisation, the figuring out of objectives and the writing of a constitution. It is how Mary’s Meals and a multitude of other charitable organisations were born.

Most studies of modern humanitarianism locate its origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to new types of human suffering; the plight of the new urban poor, the rights of women, the hunger of children and many other human sufferings prompted various political movements and charitable endeavours. This was also the era of Empire, fervent missionary activity and new kinds of internationalism. Taking advantage of their countries’ empires, Christian missionaries took the gospel message to distant lands, but they also brought back a new awareness of life in the colonies and issues relating to human rights and poverty. This then became the era distinguished by the anti-slavery campaigns, which galvanised large numbers of people to fight together for the rights of people on another continent for the first time. And, when the abolitionists won their battle against slavery, new questions and needs arose in regard to support of the newly emancipated former slaves and their communities

Heroes emerged, such as Florence Nightingale, who became famous as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ while caring for injured and sick soldiers during the Crimean War of the 1850s. She then set up the Nightingale Fund and began fundraising to set up a new Nightingale Training School for nurses in London. As well as being considered the founder of modern nursing, she was also a key figure in various campaigns for social reform, and among other things fought for the abolishment of unjust prostitution laws and for more effective hunger relief in India.

In 1863 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), often described as the first international humanitarian organisation, was founded by a Swiss businessman called Henry Dunant. Four years previously he had witnessed first-hand the battle of Solferino in northern Italy and the atrocious human suffering it caused. This led him to found an organisation with the purpose of providing humanitarian relief during times of war. Realising that in order to do this effectively the neutrality of the Red Cross would need to be recognised and respected by all parties in a war zone, he then instigated the ground-breaking work that led to the signing of the Geneva Convention.

It seems that the term ‘humanitarianism’ was first entering mainstream language at this time and the Red Cross led the way in attempting a definition of it. Their commentary on the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross contains the following statement:

Humanitarianism is a doctrine which aims at the happiness of the human species, or, if one prefers, it is the attitude of humanity towards mankind, on a basis of universality. Modern humanitarianism is an advanced and rational form of charity and justice. It is not only directed to fighting against the suffering of a given moment and of helping particular individuals, for it also has more positive aims, designed to attain the greatest possible measure of happiness for the greatest number of people. In addition, humanitarianism does not only act to cure but also to prevent suffering, to fight against evils, even over a long term of time. The Red Cross is a living example of this approach.

Part of the purpose of this new term, humanitarianism, was to make a distinction between this universal doctrine – something every person of good will could accept – and ‘charity’ as something understood to mean Christian love, or other doctrines inspired by religion. However we choose to define humanitarianism, war very often seems to inspire it. In the twentieth century the World Wars and their aftermaths compelled many new, charitable initiatives. Save the Children and Care International were born in response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the First World War, while Oxfam was founded during the Second. All three of those charities – like the ICRC before them and Médecins Sans Frontières (born during the Biafran War) since – have grown out of the horrors of war to become vast global charities today.

During the post-war period, as the European Empires began to disintegrate, it seemed that the aid and development efforts which had helped rehabilitate a broken Europe might be applied to the poverty and suffering now visible in the former colonies. After all, if the Marshall Plan, which saw the USA provide US$ 12 billion to Western Europe after the Second World War, could play a part (how big a part is debated by historians and economists to this day) in bringing about a remarkable recovery and record-breaking economic growth, and if organisations such as the Commission for Relief in Belgium, founded during the First World War by future US president Herbert Hoover, could save millions from starvation, then surely the world’s poorest nations could be helped in the same way?

During the subsequent decades of the Cold War, and up to the present day, each major conflict or natural disaster has spawned new organisations. The lifespan of some of them lasts no longer than the crisis itself, while others take what they have learnt and the network of support they have formed and begin to apply these to future crises – or indeed ongoing projects in impoverished places. That is just how our work began.

When driving our first little consignment of donated aid from Scotland to Bosnia–Herzegovina in 1992, I remember us joining a ragtag convoy of vehicles, all on the same mission – the delivering of donated goods from various European countries to the refugee camps of the former Yugoslavia. Battered trucks, cars pulling trailers and converted camper vans, all bulging with precious gifts, were converging on the scene of that shockingly close Balkan war. Some flew their country’s flag; others had painted or stuck the name of their mission on the side of their automobiles, naïvely hoping this might induce the border guards to show them mercy. I am sure some from the UN bodies and the large, established aid organisations must have laughed or shook their heads in horror as we passed – and I wouldn’t blame them if they did – but there was something very uplifting about the spectacle too, rather like a latter-day mission to Dunkirk, when all those civilians sailed their little boats among the naval frigates, painfully aware of how small and inadequate they were in that unfamiliar and daunting setting, but doing it nonetheless.

Of those little missions to the former Yugoslavia, most completed their good deeds during those war years and then went back to their day jobs, but a few, like us, grew into something else. We certainly never originally intended that – we didn’t envisage anything beyond just one local appeal for donated goods and one week’s holiday from our jobs to drive a Land Rover full of aid to Bosnia–Herzegovina. And even when we first registered our organisation (then called Scottish International Relief), we didn’t initially foresee that this might grow beyond the simple direct delivery of donated material aid from Scotland to Bosnia–Herzegovina. However, as we began to learn how to do things more effectively – both in terms of building support and in the delivery of aid to those in need – the idea of replicating it in order to help other suffering people, some of whom were now requesting us to do so, became a very convincing one – irresistible, in fact. And in this sense at least, the founding story of Mary’s Meals is similar to that of many other organisations.

And so, with each passing decade and each new humanitarian disaster which stirs fresh charitable responses, the number of such organisations continues to grow. It is impossible to know for sure how many international humanitarian organisations there are today, but some estimate there are over 7,000 based in the West and working in other countries. These are known as international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), defined as being not dependent on government funding and with operations in at least two countries other than the one in which they are based. Even more striking, perhaps, is the scale to which some of them have grown. The very largest, such as World Vision, Care International or the ICRC, have annual incomes of over US$ 2 billion. A report on the sector in 2018 estimated that 570,000 people are now employed in international humanitarian charities globally, and that their total global budget is over US$ 27 billion – although it should be pointed out that around US$ 20 billion of that comes from governments. This is an important distinction because, even as far back as the Marshall Plan, ‘government aid’ was never so much an act of charity as a key strand of foreign policy.

At that point, as the new Cold War rivalry with the USSR kicked off, the security of their Western allies, and their influence over them, was crucial to the USA. The Marshall Plan supported those aims and, today, even a cursory glance at the biggest recipients of US and UK aid budgets reveals that current policies are not based on a simple charitable desire to help those who are most in need in the world. Neither Pakistan, which benefits most from UK funding, nor Israel, which has received nearly US$ 3.2 billion from the USA, are among the poorest nations on Earth. In fact, Israel is ranked as a ‘high-income country’. The objectives that drive political decisions on how to distribute this ‘aid’ are not some grubby secret. In 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May stated that ‘Britain’s aid budget would be used to promote British trade and political interests’, while President Trump, during his first cabinet meeting of 2019, said: ‘It’s very unfair when we give money to Guatemala and to Honduras, and to El Salvador, and they do nothing for us.’ Two months later the USA cut all its funding of humanitarian aid to all three countries.

However, while these leaders are not hiding their motives, it remains troubling that they call this kind of funding ‘aid’ and thereby create confusion among the public – and perhaps among humanitarian organisations too. As this is a journey into charity, rather than politics, I will not dwell on the political agendas at play, but this miscalling of an activity as ‘aid’ when it is very clearly something else is an important example of how certain things choose to present themselves as charity for their own ends and how damaging that can be. Certain criticisms and condemnations of charity can be misplaced because of this. And the charities that become dependent to a greater or lesser extent on this type of government funding are embracing another risk – the loss of clarity about their own focus and purpose.

This is just one of many complexities to be grappled with by charities working in international aid today. It is a very long way from a small homespun effort to provide direct help to some people suffering in a war that we saw reported on our televisions, to the management of organisations with tens of thousands of staff working in over a hundred countries, funded by myriad different sources and engaged in projects with a whole variety of objectives. The initial desire to help save the lives and relieve the suffering of some people will often lead to a desire to tackle the underlying cause of their problems. Then there will inevitably come the questions about justice, human development, economics, political change, advocacy, certain ideologies and now – more than ever before – the environment and its essential place in the better future of humanity.

We will encounter again some of these questions as we continue onwards on this exploration of charity, but what is already clear is that the bewildering diversity of activities which call themselves charity presents a huge challenge, as does the maintenance and organisational development of such gargantuan international bodies. How does a charity operating in scores of different countries, employing tens of thousands of staff, retain unity in adhering to its founding vision and values? When present in a multitude of environments and societies, how might it create and maintain its own distinct organisational culture? As the pressure grows to raise funds in order to grow, or just to meet existing obligations, how might fundraising efforts preserve a profound respect for their supporters or potential supporters? And when the organisation needs strengthening in order to deliver effectively, how might the required investments be made in a way that a public, who at times seem fixated on charities’ ‘overheads’ or ‘admin costs’, can understand and support?

These are only a few of the plethora of thorny questions facing charities in the modern era. And in failing to satisfactorily answer some of them those of us leading charities have at times allowed their good names to be besmirched.