Emily's Worldview

Anyone who has been overseas has had the disconcerting experience of seeing an Old Navy t shirt in a rural village, or running into a kid wearing a shirt from their hometown Y, or seeing a grown man wearing a shirt that says "World's Best Grandma". Most of these clothes are donated by private individuals, cleaned and baled in the sending country, shipped to importers in Africa, sold to entrepreneurs, and eventually sold to a developing country consumer.

Today there is a cute Super Bowl story about what happens to the Championship shirts and hats that are made for the Super Bowl team that ends up losing. World Vision gets it, to send overseas:

“Where these items go, the people don’t have electricity or running water,” said Jeff Fields, a corporate relations officer for World Vision. “They wouldn’t know who won the Super Bowl. They wouldn’t even know about football.”

This statement is true, and the people who receive it probably are grateful, but it typifies a side of charity that I hate. Logic like this justifies the types of donations we often received at the children's charity I worked for in Tanzania: women's high-heeled shoes, stained clothing, random puzzle pieces, broken trucks, dolls with missing limbs. Of course, we also received beautiful children's clothes and brand new toys and boxes of sharpened crayons, and of course, our kids were happy with those broken toys and scraps of puzzles. But whenever I opened a box that was full of garbage, I felt like our children were being disrespected.

In the case of healthcare, this same type of logic gets applied, and the consequences there are even more severe. Water projects are done on the cheap and break less than a year after donors have left. Refugees are given a ration so deficient in nutrients that they develop micronutrient-related diseases like scurvy and Ricketts (hey, otherwise they'd be starving, right?). And right now, throughout Africa, HIV-positive mothers are being given a drug to prevent transmission of the disease to their children that is only half effective and allows 15% of those newborns to be infected (more on this topic in a later post). We can do better than that, and we should.