Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow 2020

Scripture quotations marked ‘ESV’ are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked ‘NJB’ are taken from The New Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1985 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd and Doubleday & Co., Inc., a division of Random House, Inc. and used by permission.

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008360016

eBook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008360023

Version: 2020-05-27

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my parents.

Thank you for showing us that charity begins at home

but does not end there.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Introduction

7  1. ‘We Have It in Our Hearts’

8 2. Charity in the Dock

9  3. Organising Love

10  4. The Heart and the Head

11  5. Charity and Beyond

12  6. Mapping the Stars

13  7. Without Trumpets

14  8. Blessed and Broken

15  9. Transformation

16  10. Charity Remains

17  Epilogue

18  Acknowledgements

19  About the Author

20  Also by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

21  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

Charity to me will always smell of freshly baked bread. During the summer of 1985, even as the man on the radio updated us on the Ethiopian famine and its mounting death toll, my mother was pulling yet another batch of loaves from our oven. She was supporting a local fundraising effort aimed at helping those facing imminent starvation. Each warm loaf was adding to the delicious aroma in our house, before being delivered to the village hall to be sold amid an assortment of donated home baking.

Beyond our village, across the whole country, a plethora of such fundraising events were taking place that summer, the world having been stirred into action by an extraordinary news report by BBC reporter Michael Buerk. From a refugee camp in Tigray, surrounded by the dead and dying, he had described to us ‘the closest thing to hell on earth’. Among the many fundraising efforts born in response to that horror, one dwarfed all others in its scale and ambition.

On 13 July 1985, along with 30 per cent of my fellow human beings, I sat down to watch Live Aid on the television. For a teenager living in the pre-internet era, the opportunity to spend a whole day with my friends enjoying live performances by the superstars of rock and pop felt almost too good to be true.

It was a great day. We cheered the bands we were fans of and ridiculed the ones we didn’t appreciate – although once or twice we had to begrudgingly admire even some of their performances. As the bands in Wembley played on into the evening, the US version began in Philadelphia and some live performances from there were also beamed back to us. No one said as much, as we joked and laughed and debated each artist’s performance, but it felt as if we were part of something special. By now Bob Geldof was giving us regular reminders of what this spectacular event was all about – raising funds to help the 8 million people who faced starvation in Ethiopia. At one point in the evening, David Bowie, having belted out ‘We Can Be Heroes, Just for One Day’, introduced a short video. It was four minutes of the most harrowing images I had ever seen. Suddenly in the room with us were emaciated children with protruding ribs and bloated stomachs, the piercing scream of a child, a tiny bandaged corpse. It was deeply shocking. We took turns using the house phone to call and pledge our own donations. I think it might have been the first gift to charity I ever chose to make. (I had long been putting coins in the plate at Sunday Mass but that didn’t feel very optional.) As I hung up the phone, having shared my bank card details and a very little of my summer job earnings, I was surprised by a fleeting, unfamiliar feeling; a stab of joy and a momentary yearning to be someone better – and for the world to be something better too. I don’t think it was just the beer.

Aside from the trauma of watching Scotland play football in the World Cup, Live Aid is the only vivid recollection I have of watching something on television in my youth. I am not sure if the experience played any part in my later journey into overseas aid work – there were certainly other, more obvious, triggers that led me to that – but I do believe that event in the summer of 1985 had an influence on the way I, and others of my generation, feel about certain things. The advances in technology that enabled us to watch those simultaneous concerts and which brought us distressingly close to the suffering in Ethiopia were creating new neighbours in distant countries; both those who urgently needed our help and those with whom we could respond in solidarity. Live Aid not only made charity feel possible, it made it feel ‘cool’, to use a word of the time. Having grown up in a devout Christian family, I had a fairly well-developed understanding of, and belief in, our duty to help the poor. From earliest memory – long before our house became a bakery that summer – I had been witnessing acts of charity. Some, like the making of bread, were quite mundane while others, such as my parent’s unlikely decision to foster a seven-year-old boy with serious health issues, were more radical. I was familiar too with the stories of saints of old and their heroic acts of charity, but even so, the message just felt a bit different when delivered by Neil Young or Elvis Costello and received in the company of my best friends. For better or worse, without us knowing it, the era of celebrity-led charity campaigning had just been born.

Seven years after enjoying Live Aid, my brother and I watched another harrowing report on the television, this time about refugees whose lives had been devastated by the war that was tearing apart the former Yugoslavia. Our response on this occasion was very different. We made a little appeal to friends and family for donations of basic supplies and, having been given them in astonishing quantities, we took one week’s holiday from our jobs (we were salmon farmers) to drive the gifts from Scotland to a refugee camp near Medjugorje in Bosnia–Herzegovina. I had no notion then that this would lead to the founding of a new charity which would eventually become Mary’s Meals – a global movement which, today, sets up community-owned school feeding programmes in the world’s poorest nations, providing over 1.6 million children with a daily meal in a place of education.

Like the founders of Live Aid, I had no relevant qualifications to lead this work, having simply been moved to act (in a much less ambitious way) by compassion for the suffering people brought close to me by the media. Nor did I have any long-term plan. The journey I set out on twenty-eight years ago has become my life’s work only because that initial outpouring of kindness to our first appeal has never let up. That first trickle of donations has grown into a mighty river fed by little acts of love performed by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world in support of our mission. In Malawi alone, where over 30 per cent of the primary school population eat Mary’s Meals each day, over 85,000 impoverished volunteers freely offer their time to cook and serve the hungry children of their communities. Meanwhile, in many wealthier countries, a vast army of volunteers, young and old, organise fundraising events, give public talks and take part in sponsored activities in order to provide the funds required to buy the ingredients for each meal. Each day we receive donations of all sizes made by those willing to share what they have so that others might at least eat. Children in primary schools collect coins and sell homemade baking, while their parents might commit monthly donations from their bank accounts. And while most of our support consists of these humble, unheralded deeds of charity, sometimes gifts of spectacular size, or representing radical life choices, are also presented amid this assortment of startling goodness. And each year as the number and value of these gifts grow, so does the number of children being fed.

The story of Mary’s Meals suggests that charity is alive and well. And in many ways, indeed it is. However, this is only one story. There have been many less happy ones pertaining to charity during the same span of time. Charities seem to provoke consistent criticism, and a few have even been the cause of great scandal. Several concerns about how charities do things never seem to go away entirely: ‘Charity CEOs are paid far too much!’ or ‘They just waste our donations on high overheads!’ are among the familiar refrains.

In 2015, Olive Cooke, a ninety-two-year-old English charity volunteer, took her own life after being hounded by charity begging letters. Three years later, the high-profile sex abuse scandal initially relating to Oxfam staff in Haiti dominated headlines around the world, deepening further a crisis in public confidence. A survey that year, carried out by the Charities Aid Foundation in the UK, found that only 50 per cent of people ‘agreed that charities were trustworthy’, while a similar survey in the USA revealed that less than one in five Americans ‘highly trust’ charities. On taking up her post as the Chair of the Charity Commission for England and Wales in 2018, Baroness Stowell declared that their extensive independent research showed that ‘people now trust charities no more than they trust the average stranger they meet on the street’.

Charity, in some quarters, has a bad name, her reputation tarnished by behaviour not fit to be associated with her. And each fresh scandal provides a new opportunity to ask other more fundamental questions. ‘Does aid do more harm than good?’ is one I first heard asked in the aftermath of Live Aid. Accusations that some of the funds raised had been siphoned off by the Ethiopian government, whose policies had played a huge part in causing the famine in the first place, led to suggestions that Bob Geldof’s intervention had actually exacerbated the problem. As the years went by people pointed out that Ethiopia remained as poor as ever despite all the support given, and queried whether charitable efforts such as Live Aid just mask the underlying causes of poverty rather than helping address them.

Perhaps we were being simplistic and naïve that summer of 1985, carried away by a heady aroma of baking bread and rock-star righteous anger. Are those who persist in donating to charities just incurably gullible? And is the very concept of charity itself out of date – supplanted by things more sophisticated? For those of us who want to make the world better, maybe it is time to move on and engage in efforts aimed at supporting growth in the economy, international human development, the environment and political change?

There is no doubt that some aspects of Live Aid were flawed. The fact that no African artist graced the stages of Wembley or the JFK Stadium is cringe-inducing. The dramatic upturn in the careers of many Live Aid performers and their subsequent financial success is also, perhaps, troubling. And it is probably reasonable to suggest that the relationship with the government of Ethiopia could have been handled differently.

However, Live Aid and our response to it clearly did change things. It eventually prompted the international community to release enough surplus food stocks to end the famine. One million people died unnecessarily, but a much higher percentage of the 8 million people who faced starvation at one point might otherwise have succumbed. And surely Live Aid played a part in the subsequent change in attitude towards international aid by Western governments and helped inspire some of the effective campaigns that have targeted debt relief and fairer trade arrangements in the years since? After all, amid the multitudes who tuned in to watch the event, in addition to aspiring salmon farmers were future prime ministers and presidents. And the fact that in the years since, more timely, robust international responses have meant that no famine has ever resulted in a death toll like that seen in Ethiopia is another testament to the positive changes induced by that effort.

The debate about the merits and flaws of Live Aid corresponds to a broader one about charity and aid in general. One of the obstacles to productive discussion on these topics is a confusion about the scope and purpose of certain interventions. For example, Band Aid (the organisation founded to organise Live Aid and other related initiatives) never set out to lift Ethiopia out of poverty, and yet it was criticised for not doing so. Even the name itself should have pointed to the fact that this was always about relieving the immediate suffering caused by a human catastrophe. The objective was to save lives, not to tackle the underlying causes of hunger. The emaciated people of northern Ethiopia, days from death, were not in a position to await the outcome of some long-term development plan.

A better shared understanding of, and genuine respect for, different types of charity is much needed. However, while more clarity on this is an essential starting point, it will not alone restore faith in charity. For the way in which we carry out our work of charity is as important as the end results. Even if an organisation has developed a laser-sharp focus and the most efficient systems, but along the way has lost respect for those it serves, it will sooner or later become a scandalous thing. A charity that has established incredibly sophisticated fundraising techniques but has somehow forgotten that the people whose support they seek are humans who love, not ATM machines that just spit out money, is no longer worthy of the name. And even if they are implementing the most robust financial systems, when charities no longer revere each gift entrusted to their care as precious and unique, no matter their size, they are heading for a fall.

Charity is love. When we forget that, we horribly diminish this most noble human virtue. To be tasked with organising charity is no small responsibility. When we do it well, we elevate charity and help people to understand more about the wonder of humanity and the wonder of themselves. We can help both the giver and receiver of charity to become more fully human and to have more meaningful, more joyful lives. We can create places for faith, hope and love to flourish and thus allow the impact of our efforts to ripple out from the specific cause we are addressing to help create even more fundamental change in the world – change that can be subtle and substantial at the same time. But when we fail in our stewardship of charity, we can crush the human spirit and provide new reasons for cynicism, selfishness and even despair. We can encourage people to turn inwards instead of outwards. We cause harm that also ripples out beyond our particular failure – further damaging a broken world.

For many years my co-workers and I have been grappling with questions about the essence of charity and how to be its good stewards. In the face of our own mistakes and doubts, we have repeatedly been challenged and lifted up by those carrying out their little acts of love in support of our particular mission. They have spurred us on to try again and again to get it right; to renew our efforts to live up to the standards of charity that they, our supporters, set; to attempt to return always to a belief that those of us who are lucky enough to be employed in this work are servants of love – a love received and given.

And so we keep asking questions of ourselves. How do we best exercise stewardship of the resources entrusted us? How do we maintain a deep, authentic respect for those we serve and those who support our work? How do we define our mission in regard to where our responsibilities begin and end? How do we build appropriate relationships with governments and other key stakeholders? Are the values and approaches that served us well when we were a very small organisation still relevant to us today when millions of people in many different countries have a stake in our mission? I believe that only through finding answers to these questions and trying to put them into practice on a daily basis can we become stewards more worthy of the task of organising charity.

But journeys into charity are not only important for those of us involved in running charitable organisations – they are vital for anyone who wishes to become a better person. How we practise charity defines us as individuals. The way we encourage and foster it will shape the future of our societies. And yet, today more than ever, despite charity becoming a conspicuous part of Western culture, it is questioned, misunderstood and sometimes ridiculed. It might even be said that charity is currently suffering an identity crisis. But our fractured world, in which the loudest voices are so often egotistical, would do well to listen to the quiet voice of charity; to learn from it and to celebrate it – even if authentic charity does not seek that for itself.

And by practising charity more fully we will come to know ourselves more fully. We might discover along the way that it is not only the poor person over there that needs charity, but ourselves too. Within our very selves we may even discover famines – parts of us starved of love – or areas of darkness into which we have never before ventured. These journeys into charity might take us beyond the monthly direct debit donation we rarely think about (good though that is), or the sponsored run with our friends that is mainly fun (good though that is) and ask us to embrace things that involve risk and discomfort. Our relationship with charity can be a key that opens previously locked rooms where our greatest treasures lie in wait – where gems such as joy, peace and a deeper sense of meaning and purpose glint and glimmer in the dark.

But these journeys can be difficult. Maps are hard to come by and treacherous terrain can prompt us to turn back towards the comfort of home. And this would be a tragedy – especially because the joy to be found by those who persevere is one that can transform our lives. The happiest people I have ever met are the most charitable people I have ever met. And they are the people who will surely also have the biggest impact on the world in which we live – and its future – even if that might not always be immediately apparent. Things I have seen on my own journey thus far leave me in no doubt that even good deeds that seem very tiny to us can reverberate across oceans and even down through generations, causing all sorts of joy that would not otherwise be felt, in the lives of people who might seem very far removed from us.

During those first days of trying to help the people of Bosnia I fell in love with charity. I became enthralled by it. I was fascinated by those I saw practising it in ways that made me want to become a better person. I have been on that journey ever since and the truth is that sometimes I wonder if I have travelled any closer to my destination. Despite all these years enrolled in this very privileged school of charity, I am still a novice when it comes to practising it. Some seem to find this much easier than others and, in this matter, I have not been blessed with much talent. But I persist in the knowledge that God loves a trier and that charity is something within reach of each one of us at every moment – not just those with certain attractive personalities, or those who have chosen certain vocations or professions, or those with a particular education or adherence to a certain creed.

The work of Mary’s Meals, which has spread around the world in a way I could never have planned or even imagined, has been fuelled by charity – by lots of little acts of love. By witnessing such acts countless times, I feel like I have come to know what real charity looks like, even though it might manifest itself in very different ways across diverse cultures and situations. The poor, the rich, rock stars, children, the elderly – all of us – are capable of the most beautiful and startling acts of charity that can change us and the world around us for the better.

I dare to write this book about charity then, not because I am a star pupil or an expert practitioner, but because this protracted journey of mine has allowed me to befriend many who are. While visiting distant famines or local school assemblies, in the aftermath of earthquakes and challenging sermons, and in the face of child hunger and adult surplus, I have encountered radical acts of charity being performed by profoundly charitable people. Their acts of love have surprised and challenged me. They have made me ask questions and they have renewed my desire to understand better what charity is. Through them, I have also come to believe, that where we see authentic charity, we see God.

When I hear charity misrepresented or belittled, I feel almost as if someone has spoken that way about my own mother, even as she quietly goes about the business of kneading another lump of dough in her desire to share some of the bread that belongs to all. For charity is too precious a gift to be disparaged and demeaned without defence. She is too crucial in our personal quest to become more fully human to be distorted by ill-chosen words and lazy rhetoric. And she is too wonderfully distinct to be confused with something she is not, and certainly too noble to allow wickedness to cower beneath the shelter of her name.

And that is why, despite not knowing all the answers, I have chosen to write this book.

1
‘We Have It in Our Hearts’
The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not only given on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.
PERICLES

Acts of charity let light into the world. This is more obvious when they take place in the dark.

On 12 January 2010, less than an hour after a devastating earthquake hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, night fell. Even before the sun had set beneath the Caribbean horizon, many were already in darkness, trapped and crushed beneath piles of broken concrete and twisted metal. Many died instantly, followed by thousands more during the ensuing days and weeks. Of a total population of 3 million people, around 220,000 lost their lives, another 300,000 people were injured and over 1.5 million were left homeless. The term ‘humanitarian disaster’ is, perhaps, overused but on this occasion it felt like an understatement.

The tremors that devastated Port-au-Prince, which climbs from the dockside area up steep, eroded mountainsides, lasted only 35 seconds. Given that no one had experienced a significant earthquake in Haiti in living memory, very few would have realised what was occurring in those moments, during which ceilings began to fall on their heads and the ground heaved beneath their feet. Even after the strange deep thundering noise had stopped and been replaced by screams and pleading prayer, no clear sense of what had just occurred could have been possible. Certainly no one, from their own limited vantage point, could have had any notion of the scale of it. It would have been catastrophic and life-changing for each individual even if this event had just engulfed their own street or school or hospital, never mind the reality that a large city had just been devastated by this nameless thing.

One scientist later estimated that the force unleashed that afternoon on Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas was the equivalent of thirty-five Hiroshima bombs. However, this disaster didn’t fall from the sky, but emanated from an event 6 miles below the town of Leogane, 16 miles west of the city. The rubbing of two tectonic plates, which had been moving innocuously past each other for a few millimetres each day for many years before the earthquake, and which will probably continue to do so for many years to come, released the energy that so violently shook the relatively soft and crumbly ground to which the city clung.

It is not so easy to be precise about where an act of charity originates in a person. I think most of us would say it begins in the heart; a feeling of compassion which normally precedes any reasoned decision to act. We know that often the journey from our heart to our head (and back again, sometimes) can be a long and complex one. That night in Port-au-Prince the survivors did not have the luxury of having much time to think much about what to do. Amid the agony and mayhem people began to act: fathers and mothers responding to their family’s screams beneath the rubble by digging with their bare hands; bloodstained school children carrying friends who couldn’t walk towards hospitals that no longer existed; a small mother carrying a large broken son to who knows where; everyone all the while covered in a coat of white dust. Around some piles of immovable, contorted concrete slabs people huddled to speak words of comfort to dying loved ones below. Strangers helped wounded strangers, aiding and carrying each other in an exodus towards empty spaces – like a whole throng of Simons of Cyrene.

In the days and weeks after the earthquake, an enormous global outpouring of help and goodness was directed towards Haiti. Thousands rushed to donate to various appeals. A wide assortment of people and organisations from all over the world were drawn to Port-au-Prince in order to try to help – myself among them. While many of those co-ordinated efforts of people from outside Haiti should be lauded (and have been quite often), they should surely seem small when compared to the innumerable heroic acts of charity – most of them forever unrecorded – carried out by the Haitian people themselves in response to this previously unimaginable horror. That local response, though, should probably have been expected. It should be no surprise that an irrepressible people whose forefathers and mothers gloriously defeated Napoleon and slavery, and who have battled tirelessly with every kind of cruel injustice through many generations since, would respond to this latest calamity with such strength and with such love for each other. And perhaps any group of people, even one that hadn’t experienced a history like that of Haiti, would respond heroically to such suffering among their own families and communities, discovering depths of love and strength which had previously gone untapped. We know that human beings are like that, and yet each time such acts prompt in us new feelings of wonder and awe. When a darkness covers the earth, very quickly little lights begin to flicker among the ruins, as they did that unforgettable night in Port-au-Prince, attracting around them close knots of people who can hold each other and wait for dawn.

I wish that the heroism of the Haitian people in the aftermath of the earthquake had been better reported. It would have been good for the world to have learnt more about that rather than hearing messages which reinforced stereotypical generalisations about endemic corruption and lawlessness. Those things do exist in Haiti, and are significant challenges that should be reported on, but not in an exaggerated, lazy way. There are serious consequences to such journalism and political rhetoric. When we portray a country like Haiti in this manner, we suggest it is completely reliant on outsiders to come and solve the problems it faces. Some reporting after the earthquake gave the impression that only foreign aid workers were pulling people from the rubble and that the aid efforts’ biggest challenges were the lawlessness and inefficiency of the country. It is true that some areas of Haiti suffer high levels of violence, and that the capacity of the government and key national institutions is very limited. These realities made it a very difficult place to work effectively long before the earthquake. However, creating an impression that Haiti was at best passively waiting for aid, or at worst actively undermining or obstructing it, would be to tell a terrible lie about that multitude of dust-covered, bloodstained individuals carrying out extraordinary acts of goodness.

Indeed, it would be to slander humanity more generally to suggest that people would wait passively for outside help to arrive rather than engage in spontaneous acts of individual kindness, like those who poured out kindness in the flickering light of candles after that cruel earthquake. While it is certainly necessary, in the face of great human suffering, to move beyond that chaotic phase towards something more organised and cohesive, among those instinctive actions we can sometimes witness the most pure and inspiring examples of charity. And to see the splendour of a truly selfless act is to be reminded of how astonishing and wonderful human beings are. Those glimpses can leave us with a desire to become more fully human ourselves: they can move us from looking inwards to looking outwards; they can transform our world into a place full of hope and possibility. They can leave us, too, with a desire to understand better what it is that inspires people to do these things.

Once, in Malawi, we decided to conduct a survey in an effort to shed light on that very question. We conducted a whole series of meetings in communities across Malawi where tens of thousands of volunteers – without any financial reward – give their time to cook meals each day for the children attending their local school. They are part of a vast army of porridge cooks spread across every district of the country, from Karonga in the north to Nsanje in the south.

We arrived at one village school, perched in the lee of a steep, rocky mountainside, long before the children, but the volunteers had been there for some hours already. As we climbed out of our car, we could see their fires glowing under enormous pots of porridge which some ladies were stirring with huge paddles that looked like oars. They were expecting our arrival and left their simmering porridge to sit with us in the dusty sparse grass of the empty playground. One unwrapped a baby from the cloth that had held him safely on her back and began to feed him.

We wanted to better understand their motives, to avoid the risk of taking them for granted and to ensure we found the right ways to recruit others like them in new villages as our work expanded. What was it that led these woman (and a much smaller number of men) to give up their time in order to cook and serve the free school meals for the children of their communities? What compelled them to arrive here each morning, long before dawn, to light those fires? Why take on that extra responsibility, knowing that the remainder of the day was going to be taken up with the exhausting work of survival? They would be planting, digging, weeding, pounding, carrying and chopping their way through another day, often while hungry and sick, in one of the ten poorest nations on Earth.

As most of the women who sat with us had never had the chance to go to school themselves – unlike the children they were volunteering to cook for – we conducted the surveys in the form of group discussions based on a standard list of questions. During the conversation on this particular morning, as the dawn began to brighten and warm, we posed our core question once again: ‘Why do you do this?’ A thin woman, with a shy smile cleared her throat.

‘Because we have it in our hearts,’ she said quietly, her smile growing like the huge rising sun behind her.

Charity is probably the best word to describe the thing in that woman’s heart. Charity is an Old English word originally meaning ‘Christian love of one’s fellows’ or ‘benevolence for the poor’. It is derived from the Latin word caritas, which in turn is a translation of agape, the Greek word for a particular type of love; God’s love for man and man’s love in turn for God, including that expressed through his love of neighbour.

The earliest English translations of the Bible used the word ‘charity’ when translating caritas or agape, but later versions have tended instead to use the word ‘love’. While it is a wonderful word, ‘love’ has a multitude of meanings – meanings that have their own separate words in many other languages. So when translated into English, the same word that St Paul uses in his famous letter to the Corinthians (‘Love is patient, love is kind …’) is also sung in a thousand pop songs about romance, is spoken by a mother to her child and is used to express a desire for a drink on a hot day (in my case, usually in the form of ‘I would love a beer.’). It is correct to say that charity means love – but only if we mean a particular kind of love.

And the use of the word ‘charity’ today can cause similar confusion. It covers not only that particular type of Christian love but more generally, any activity related to helping those in need, whether it be those of an individual or the organised initiatives that enable groups of people to help other groups of people – sometimes in faraway places. In addition, ‘charity’ can refer to efforts aimed at meeting immediate basic needs, tackling injustice, addressing the underlying causes of suffering or aiding longer-term human development. Charity today also includes helping animals and the planet more generally, although such activities can indirectly improve the lives of people too. To add to the potential confusion, in addition to being the name of a virtue or the activity prompted by it, ‘charity’ can also mean an organisation or body responsible for carrying out such work. It is certainly a hard-working word capable of some impressive multitasking.

Charity, in most of those senses, seems to have existed long before Christians began using the word. Perhaps charity is as old as humanity itself. The philosophies of the Ancient Greeks and Chinese incorporated some philanthropic ideas, while certain aspects of the belief systems of Native Americans and the civilisations of sub-Saharan Africans pointed towards ideas of sharing with those in need long before the colonialists arrived. And certainly beliefs and practices closely related to charity are central tenets of every major world religion.

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the practice of charity is called daana. In sacred texts, daana has been described as ‘any action of relinquishing the ownership of what one considered or identified as one’s own and investing the same in a recipient without expecting anything in return’. Daana encourages the cultivation of generosity and an attitude of detachment, and can take the form of feeding or sharing directly with someone in distress or the support of philanthropic public initiatives aimed at empowering and helping many. The teaching and practice of daana is very ancient indeed and is first mentioned in a sacred text called the Rigveda, probably written between 1200 and 1500 BC.

I once witnessed a remarkable example of daana – a spontaneous outpouring of benevolence similar to the one which met the horror of that Haiti earthquake – in the immediate aftermath of the other colossal natural disaster to afflict humanity in the first ten years of this millennium, the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. Three days after that wave surged out of the Indian Ocean and killed a similar number of people to the Haiti earthquake (the victims on this occasion were spread across fourteen countries rather than one city), I watched local volunteers wearing homemade masks working through the wreckage of a coastal fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. The overwhelming stench of death and the gut-wrenching screams of the bereaved made their job of recovering decomposing bodies even more hideous. Resolutely, hour after hour, and even after they had recovered 100 bodies from the mangled debris, they continued with the utmost dignity and gentleness, covering each corpse respectfully with a sheet before carrying it to the gaping hole on the beach. Some of the remains were of very small children, laid to rest while their parents cried in agony and held each other nearby. How could anyone find the strength to volunteer to do a job like that? They were driven that day not so much by their respect for the dead, but by their love of the living. The first step that had to be taken towards any kind of recovery and healing was this dreadful one, and so somewhere inside them they found the strength to move their feet and do this unavoidable thing.

And later that same day, in the nearby city of Chennai, hundreds of people not directly affected by the horror on the coast turned up at a relief centre bearing gifts of food, among them school children carrying mugs of rice – sharing what they had so that those who had lost everything could eat. It seems that every awful, distressing, human calamity can prompt an amazing, generous human response. And in this part of the world many call it Daana.

For the Jewish people tzedakah means ‘righteousness’, and its central place in the Torah, many centuries before Christ, laid the foundations on which Christian charity would later be built. It represents a religious obligation to behave in a way that is ‘right and just’. Jews give tzedakah by helping the needy through donations of money, time or other resources. The Torah teaches that a tenth of your income should be given to ‘righteous deeds or causes’ (this practice of ‘tithing’ was later embraced by Christians). In the Middle Ages the influential Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides listed eight levels of giving as written in the Mishneh Torah. The list, which has had a huge influence on Jewish charity ever since, extols things such as giving anonymously to a known recipient, giving before being asked and, at the top of the list, a very particular form of charity: ‘giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need, so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others’.

When I first read this centuries-old decree, it made me think of a story I had just heard from a close friend. His brother, having some years earlier emigrated to the USA, had recently fallen on hard times. Having plummeted through a series of personal disasters related to drug and alcohol addictions, he had ended up homeless on the streets of New York. His desperate poverty and psychological state left my friend back home in Scotland fearing greatly for his brother’s life. My friend and his family had tried to help in various ways but to no avail – his brother had reached a point of self-imposed isolation that made it impossible for his family to reach him.

One day, as my friend’s brother sat on a park bench in Central Park, watching the tourists walk by, an elderly lady sat down beside him. After a little while she looked at him and asked him how he had come to be living like this and he began to tell her a little of his story. She invited him to meet her there again, and on their next meeting he poured out his life to the stranger. On their third meeting the little Jewish mother explained that she had had a son of similar age to him who died. She offered him her spare room rent free, with a set of firm rules including total abstinence from drugs and alcohol, until he got his life back on the rails. He accepted the startling offer and when I last heard he was rebuilding a new, better life. Through the ‘partnership’ this elderly lady chose to form with a homeless stranger, she has enabled him to journey towards becoming a ‘person no longer living by relying on others’. I have no idea how deliberate it was on her part, but she was certainly practising tzedakah in a wonderful way.

In some respects zakat, one of the ‘five pillars’ on which Islam is based, is similar to Tzedakah – in fact, some scholars believe the word zakat derives from tzedakah. Zakat also obliges Muslims to give a prescribed amount to good causes – an amount usually set as 2.5 per cent of savings over a certain minimum threshold – and in some Islamic countries this is obligatory in law and collected as a tax. In addition to Zakat, Muslims may also practise sadaqa, that is, voluntary charity, which as well as donating to those in need can even include smiling at people.

Some Muslim doctors who I met one dark frightening night in Somalia were doing more than smiling at people. It was during the terrible famine of 2011. They were from South Africa and were there to volunteer their urgently needed expertise in a health clinic. I was there with a load of food we had flown in from Malawi. We had landed there at a particularly messy moment in a war which had, by then, already inflicted twenty-one years of suffering. At that point Mogadishu was said to be the most dangerous city in the world; it was teeming with men in ragtag uniforms with AK-47s slung over their shoulders and there was uncertainty as to which neighbourhoods were controlled by which faction. My nerves had not been helped on our first evening there when, as we were being shown to our shared sleeping quarters by our host – a teenage Somali man with perfect, gently spoken English – there was a huge explosion close by. It made me jump. Our young host turned to me.

‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry,’ he said, as if soothing a very young child.

‘It was just a bomb.’

The doctors and I laughed a lot about this over our late evening meal together, but the next morning our mirth died when we began to encounter those we had come to try to help. Hundreds of thousands of people had recently arrived in the capital in a desperate search for food. We began hearing the stories of women who had walked over 150 kilometres – some of them had seen their children die on the way. Others were caring for children not their own, the children’s parents having died in a famine that had already taken the lives of tens of thousands.

Fartune was one of the mothers who told us her desperate story as she stood in a long queue for food holding her sick child, Pinte. His head looked grotesquely large compared to his tiny body and his swollen eyes could no longer see. He was three years old and had been sick for six weeks. Until now Fartune had never had the chance to take Pinte to a doctor or receive any medical help for her child. She told us she had another three children at ‘home’ (a hastily erected hut made of sticks and plastic, surrounded by thousands of other similar temporary abodes). We asked her how those other children at home were.

‘Yes, they are fine,’ she said, before adding. ‘Apart from the malnutrition. We never have enough to eat.’

I didn’t get much more time to talk with the doctors during those days, absorbed as we were in our respective missions to feed and treat so many sick people. But late at night, back at our base, our conversation turned to matters of faith, as is the case sometimes when in extreme situations. We talked about our different religious beliefs and about why our young people seemed to be losing their faith; about secularism, materialism, social media, the need for fellowship and community. We talked about how our faith, if it is sincere, must impel us to do works of charity. We talked too about our devotion to a Jewish woman, Mary the Mother of Jesus (who they call Miriam) – mother of the Christ, mother of the Prophet. They loved the fact I worked for an organisation who held her as their patron. Once again it seemed to me that in each of our hearts something similar had been etched despite our very disparate backgrounds and beliefs. And each morning, as my friends assembled outside on their prayer mats for their morning devotion, I said my rosary and pondered some things in a new way, grateful for fresh perspectives.

Even louder than the call to prayer, echoing across the war-weary city, and the thunderous blast that had made my heart leap on the night of our arrival, the clarion call of charity had summoned each of us here from our different corners of the Earth. It is a very beautiful thing when sadaqa or charity or tzedakah or daana – or whatever we wish to call that thing we have in our hearts – brings us together like that, in the service of strangers. I watched a particularly dramatic example of this on one occasion while visiting a little Mary’s Meals project in a slum near New Delhi.

There I met Angela, a high-caste Hindu, who was volunteering her time to teach a group of dalit children. For the largest part of each day, these children search in rubbish heaps for things they can sell to help support their families. There were about ninety of them gathered around Angela’s little blackboard, on which were written letters of the Hindi alphabet that they were taking turns to name. They had been drawn from their all-consuming work by the daily meals that were being cooked in the adjacent courtyard and by Angela’s smile, which seemed to illuminate the gloomy little room in which they sat. The room itself was a gift. A Muslim gentleman, whose little house it was part of, was the free giver of that gift, allowing the raggedy group to make it their classroom for a short time each day while his adjoining courtyard became their kitchen and dining room. Meanwhile the delivery of the food and its cooking was being overseen by the project’s administrator, a stubby nun adorned in the black habit of her order.

Did you hear about the Muslim, the Hindu and the Catholic? That has to be the opening line of a great joke – and maybe it is – but it is also a question I like to answer by telling the story of that little trinity of goodness, meeting in a country deeply wounded by sectarian hatred, where the caste system condemns millions to spend their childhood working instead of learning. The need of those dishevelled little ones – so often an object of scorn and derision – was drawing together representatives of three world religions.

What is striking, from even a cursory glance at the place of ‘charity’ across very different cultures and religions, are the very strong common threads. The idea that charity improves life for the giver, on Earth and beyond, as well as for the receiver, is one that seems to transcend creeds. That everything we have is a gift from God to be shared is another. There are also key differences, however, that become even more obvious as we explore further the practice of charity – especially the distinct nature of Christian charity, which smashes the boundaries and obligations of giving by proclaiming every person in need as deserving of our charity, not just those sharing our faith or ethnic group or political view, but in fact even our enemies.

The story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan is among the most famous of His parables. He told it when a lawyer asked Him how to inherit eternal life. Jesus initially replied with a simple confirmation of the ancient teaching of the Old Testament: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ (Luke 10:26–28, ESV)

It was only when the lawyer then enquired who his neighbour was that Jesus answered with a story that has resonated through the ages, helping to shape Christian, and other, works of charity ever since. His tale was the one of the ‘Good Samaritan’ who had stopped to help a man lying badly injured after being attacked by robbers. Two others – a priest and a Levite – had passed the man without helping. But this Samaritan (and Jesus clearly did not accidentally make the hero of His story a Samaritan – Samaritans were foreigners, despised and considered heretics by the Jews) showed what it was to love your neighbour. And, crucially, he also revealed who our neighbour is – every human being in need of our help. As Dorothy Day, a radical modern-day disciple of Jesus, put it two thousand years later, ‘The Gospel takes away our right for ever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.’

But, of course, charitable activities are not only practised by those of faith. Even as the Western world has become rapidly more secular it has retained and developed a strong brand of humanitarianism – a type of charity that has clearly been informed by its Judeo-Christian heritage, even while, ironically, that heritage is being rejected and forgotten. This modern form of secular charity is vast in its scale and spectacular in its practice. It holds a very prominent place in society. Politicians, pop stars, entrepreneurs – in fact celebrities and influential people of all sorts – are the enthusiastic leaders and ambassadors of this ubiquitous charity of the modern age, which is presented in TV extravaganzas, star-studded events, high-street shops, cause-related marketing campaigns, sponsored events in our schools, 5-kilometre runs in our parks and even by filming ourselves having buckets of ice-cold water poured over our heads. Supporting charities has become an extremely popular mass-participation pastime.

But while certain cultures and belief systems have encouraged and celebrated charity, others sometimes do the opposite. For example, the impact of Communism’s antagonism towards charitable activities, viewing them as an encroachment on the role of government and a legacy of religion (the ‘opium of the people’, as Karl Marx referred to it) can be seen even today in Communist and post-Communist states. A global survey on participation in charitable activities revealed that in 2017 only 14 per cent of the people of China donated money to a charity, placing it third from bottom on the global league table. In comparison, in Indonesia, at the top of the table, 78 per cent of people gave donations. The same exercise found that while in 2017 only 11 per cent of those living in the Russian Federation volunteered their time for an organisation, 47 per cent of Liberians did so, despite inhabiting one of the poorest nations on the planet.

In fact, curiously, it sometimes seems that the poor give more (as a proportion of what they have) than the rich. In the early days of our own mission this was something we experienced in quite a dramatic way. Each week we would make appeals for food in supermarkets, inviting shoppers to place donations of dried and tinned foods in our trolley for us to load into our van and drive to the hungry refugees in Bosnia–Herzegovina. The response to each of those appeals was incredibly generous but especially so in the more deprived parts of town. This became quite a marked pattern over a number of years.

So, while the charity that resides in the human heart might be universal, it is clear that our circumstances, cultures, religions and ideologies have an enormous influence on whether these feelings of compassion are acted upon, and if so, in what way.

But regardless of our environment, the charity we feel in our heart remains an intrinsic part of our humanity. This love for the other, even the stranger, seems to dwell in us – and doesn’t need to wait for some disaster or cataclysmic event. It is acted out quietly every day, in modest ways and in all sorts of places.

One dark night I was queuing for a train ticket outside an obscure railway station in Bihar, Northern India. There were rows of people sleeping on the pavement around the main entrance, huddled under blankets. As I waited to be served, I noticed an elderly lady sitting up with her blanket around her. She coughed an agonised, rasping cough that made me shudder. After a few moments she climbed slowly and very unsteadily to her feet. She glanced down and noticed that a baby beside its sleeping mother was uncovered and she bent down, with some difficulty, to very carefully tuck him in before walking off to spit out what her coughing had brought up.

On another occasion, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, I visited St James’ Primary School. In the playground Beatrice was sitting in the baking dust. She was nine years old. It was 1.30 pm and she was devouring her school meal – it was the first thing she had eaten that day and it was likely to be the last. She noticed that a distraught-looking classmate had no plate with him and had missed his serving. So she walked over to him and, without exchanging a word, they squatted beside each other in the dust and began to share the maize and beans from the plastic plate in front of them.

Ahead of structure and co-ordinated effort, with no need for recognition or thanks, and perhaps without knowing any theology, our hearts can sometimes no longer resist the impulse to act. Long before the journalist reports a misery, or an international appeal is launched, or planes carrying food arrive, charity is already burning in our hearts and igniting little fires in the gloom.

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.

In recent decades a series of high-profile scandals relating to the running of charities have had an impact on how charities are perceived and the public’s trust in them. These have included some very different types of alleged wrongdoing. Some have been cases of blatant fraud, such as that of William Aramony, who as President of the United Way had helped turn it into one of the USA’s largest charities. He was convicted in 1995 of defrauding the organisation of US$ 1 million, which he used to fund lavish extra-marital affairs, among other things. Prior to being jailed for six years he had been lauded as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘genius’.

Other damaging headlines have often related to the salaries of charity chief executives. Sometimes these salaries have been made public during the airing of some other scandal – for example, it was revealed that, when convicted, William Aramony had an annual compensation package of US$ 460,000.

In the UK there has been strong public feeling on this subject for many years, summed up nicely in this opening paragraph of an article published by the Guardian newspaper in January 2019: ‘It says here in this letter you sent that £4 from me could help save a life. So how about your CEO takes £40,000 less salary next year and saves 10,000 lives?’ This was a message received from a monthly donor by one of the UK’s best-loved charities in August 2013, following sustained media coverage about the high pay of chief executives in the UK voluntary sector.

This recurring issue of salaries is often linked to ‘administration costs’ or ‘high overheads’ and sometimes to allegations of extravagant spending by charity bosses. The Wounded Warrior Project, one of the best-known organisations in the USA working with disabled and wounded veterans, hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2016 when the media exposed its ‘lavish spending’. It was reported that in 2014 alone, they spent US$ 26 million on conferences and meetings at luxury hotels – similar to the total amount they were spending on combat stress recovery. While other similar charities were contributing over 90 per cent of their funds to directly supporting veterans, The Wounded Warrior Project was spending only 60 per cent.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a high-profile London charity called Kids Company, a favourite of celebrities and politicians, many of whom seemed in thrall to its charismatic founder Camila Batmanghelidjh, spiralled into a financial meltdown and closed suddenly in August 2015. It left behind a string of empty promises and red faces within the government departments that had provided it with £46 million of public money despite repeated concerns that had been raised about how it was being run.

And then there was the very sad case of Olive Cooke, from Bristol, who took her own life at ninety-two years of age. She was the longest-serving poppy seller in the UK and supported numerous charities. It was revealed that by the time of her death she was receiving 180 letters from charities each month, and was also being plagued by their phone calls. Her family revealed that she had been suffering from depression, and they believed the pressure she felt she was being put under by the charities had contributed to her death. The fact that the charities she had chosen to support had been sharing her details with others provoked a public outcry. It prompted new interest in and criticism of aggressive fundraising techniques and led to reforms of charity fundraising regulation.

But the worst was yet to come. If the charity sector was already feeling a bit battered and bruised by this point, it was about to receive a much more devastating body blow.

Amid the debris of Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the earthquake, we sat down for a meeting led by our Haitian co-workers, most of them victims themselves who had already been helping those around them in whatever way they could.

An early theme of that meeting was ‘humility in action’, a phrase that Father Tom and Doug used often and which resonated with our own approach at Mary’s Meals. This phrase was to become a guide for our discussions and decision-making in those days. We needed to recognise from the outset that, in the face of a gigantic earthquake, we were very small and very insignificant. While we were committed to striving with all our strength to do whatever we could, and while we believed that we might, with God’s help, ease the suffering of many, we also needed to be realistic about our own very obvious limitations as individuals and as a group. We needed to become clear about we should try to do and, perhaps even more importantly, what we should not try to do. Perhaps this sounds blatantly obvious, but not being properly grounded in this attitude – whether we are responding to an earthquake or a homeless person in front of us or making ongoing strategic decisions about our organisation – can be the root of all kinds of later problems.

It is this approach that eventually led the Mary’s Meals mission to concentrate solely on one simple thing: the provision of one meal every day in a place of education. Each day, when serving those meals, we see other needs we would like to address, but we have chosen a focus that leads us back to doing one thing and trying to do it very well. And that requires a certain discipline, to resist the temptation that tells us we can do everything or that we have responsibility for everything. I am not suggesting every organisation should restrict itself to becoming specialists in only one simple activity: each organisation should have its own unique mission, identity and approach. I am only suggesting that a very common problem in this kind of work is the ‘mission drift’ that inevitably occurs if a certain kind of humility is not our starting point, and something we deliberately remind ourselves of on a regular basis. Of course, we can also go to the other extreme. A singular focus can be applied so sternly that we stifle all promptings of the heart, becoming cold even to the suffering person right in front of us as we tick our boxes and talk of targets reached. Or we can miss opportunities to learn or to innovate in ways that could help everyone move forward. These are real risks too, which I will return to, but on this hot January morning, surrounded by death, destruction and desperate need on an epic scale, it felt as if ‘humility in action’ was an essential starting point.

And then we began to gather information from the local co-workers in our midst, asking them for their thoughts on the most immediate needs. Most of them were from Cité Soleil and they explained to us that Cité Soleil was in some ways less dramatically affected than other parts of the city. The people there were certainly in urgent need of help, but ironically their resounding poverty had spared them in certain ways. When your home is constructed of salvaged rusty corrugated tin, it is much less likely to kill or maim you when shaken to the ground by an earthquake. The loss of life in Cité Soleil was relatively low as a result. Other basic human needs, which the people of Port-au-Prince now found themselves deprived of – electricity, water, healthcare – were things already lacking in Cité Soleil. There, every day had been a battle to survive even before the earthquake. Certainly, though, some needs had become more acute, and the insecurity in Cité Soleil meant few aid organisations would find it possible to operate. With Hands Together’s huge experience of Cité Soleil and its deep connection with the community – in the form of relationships built over many years – it seemed obvious that this was where we should concentrate our efforts, especially given it was likely to be eschewed by other organisations more recently arrived. It seemed water, food and medical care were the greatest needs and we began discussing how we could provide these in Cité Soleil. We recognised that the Hands Together school compounds, with their high surrounding walls, could possibly become the secure bases from which we could work and safely distribute emergency aid. We decided to go and assess that possibility ourselves.

As we drove through Cité Soleil, life did not seem dramatically different, although the people crowded around us and told us of their needs and asked us for help even more urgently than normal. But when we got to the first school our hearts sank. The perimeter walls had collapsed, along with some of the classrooms. Huge cracks ran through the walls that were still standing – and through concrete playgrounds too. For the first time I saw our co-workers, very hardened men who had grown up here among the gangs of Cité Soleil, break down and weep. I realised more than ever before that these schools were the most powerful symbols of hope in this community. They were a source of great pride too. Some of the men in tears had worked on their construction and some helped run them. To see them in ruins was too much and the dam that had been holding back their grief collapsed. But soon they had wiped away their tears and resumed the discussion of practicalities – pointing out that the blocks of the toppled perimeter wall could be reused to reconstruct them very quickly, and thus we would have our secure base. They began debating whether the school could be repaired or whether it would need to be pulled down – most were optimistic about repair. We continued on to the next school, and then the next, where children who should have been in class played amid the rubble while we assessed the damage.

Having inspected all the schools, we finally arrived back to find a hive of activity at Father Tom’s little compound. Already a group of men were rebuilding a collapsed wall to make our space secure once again; some ladies were cooking a pot of rice, while nearby the Hands Together water tanker truck was filling up (even in the best of times this vehicle took clean water into Cité Soleil each day on a regular basis for people to fill their buckets and bottles). We sat down for another meeting with teachers and community leaders who, like most here, had been living on the streets since the earthquake. Various teams were formed with immediate tasks. One was to begin making an immediate assessment of each school community. Who had died? Who had lost their house? What was each family’s current situation? Another team was to begin picking out the reusable bricks from the debris around each school.

As we talked further it dawned on us that unless we could secure a supply of fuel, all our other plans would become futile. Doug and I decided to head immediately to the UN compound, where various organisations seemed to be making their base, in order to try to secure some of that vital commodity.

It had already been a long day when we arrived at the UN base. We entered a reception area and explained our urgent request to the man at the counter. We were directed to another office and then another, explaining our situation anew each time and pleading for some fuel. Nobody disputed the legitimacy of our request, or the fact that they had a large supply available for this purpose, but none was willing to take responsibility for giving us what we needed. Eventually, an earnest young man pointed at a large tent and suggested we try it, explaining that there was a meeting of various international NGOs taking place there. We slipped in quietly at the back of a meeting that was already under way. I looked around at a tent full of white people. A wide variety of accented English was being spoken from all over the world, but there was not one black face in the crowded tent. I couldn’t help but make the comparison with the meeting we had just left in Father Tom’s yard. It became clear from the discussion that most had only just arrived in Haiti.

A man stood up and introduced himself as belonging to a well-known global aid organisation. He began to complain at great length about the poor accommodation that he and his colleagues had been provided with. He was indignant about this and some others began to raise their voices in support of him. Doug and I looked at each other. I could see the anger rise in his face and I was concerned about what he might do in his state of exhaustion and post-traumatic stress. I was relieved when he simply walked out of the tent, leaving behind a lively debate about the deficiencies of the sleeping quarters. Without saying a word to each other, we marched straight back past the offices and into the warehouse where we could see an enormous stack of barrels. We told the startled man in the stock room that we needed one barrel immediately, and could he please have it placed in the back of our pick-up straight away as we were in a very big hurry. I think the pent-up fury, borne of our experience in the tent, must have been plainly evident in our faces. He didn’t even ask a question, let alone put up an argument, and a few minutes later we were heading back through the pitiful streets with our precious cargo, passing thousands of hungry, injured people who really would have had a reason to complain about substandard accommodation if there had been anyone to listen.

That experience in the tent with the international NGOs was the first thing I thought of when, eight years later, I began reading about an emerging scandal centred on the behaviour of some staff working for foreign aid organisations in the aftermath of the earthquake. On 9 February 2018 The Times’ front-page headline read: ‘Top Oxfam workers paid Haiti survivors for sex’. The article also alleged that Oxfam covered up the claims that senior staff working in Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake used prostitutes, some of whom may have been under age. Two days later a follow-up article in The Times reported new claims that more than 120 workers from UK charities had been accused of sexual abuse in the last year. A series of revelations and allegations emerged in the following days and weeks. The UK government’s Department for International Development cut all funding to Oxfam – previously one of the biggest recipients – and the government of Haiti later banned the organisation from working in their country ever again. They explained that they took this decision because of the ‘violation of its laws and serious breach of the principle of human dignity’.

The impact of all this was not only felt by Oxfam but sent shudders through every charity working in international development. The media pressed each aid organisation to make public any cases of sexual misconduct and a plethora of other such cases emerged, dragging many others into the scandal. Some experienced significant decreases in support. The reputation of the international aid sector was further tarnished. And charity was in the dock once again.

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