The hug-an-orphan approach to charity ...

Do I just want to make the kids happy, or do I want to change their world? Do I just enjoy the embrace, or do I think it through to what's going to make a difference?

Voluntourism, a setback for South Africa Aids Orphans

Studies suggest that spending a couple of weeks working in an orphanage overseas will make you feel better, but it may contribute to the sense of abandonment those precious children already suffer.  Wonderful intentions and a tender heart perhaps aren't enough by themselves to finish what's needed.

Generally volunteers will only stay at the orphanage [or school] for a few days, weeks, or at best months. While at the orphanage most volunteers seek to build emotional bonds with the children so they can feel they made a difference. Unfortunately, although well intended, this leads to a never ending round of abandonment for the orphans.

An open-door, unrestricted policy on filming, photography, and volunteering to anyone who shows up is often not in the best interest of children and is more about making the volunteer feel good about themselves.

Unless ...

The UN guidelines for the alternative care of children points out the need for reliable long-term relationships.  It suggests to me that if you want to love such a child, either adopt them and take them home, or establish a long-term relationship with them that has regular, dependable expressions of love and, most importantly, practical help.

The director of the NGO I work with in Africa sat me down rather insistently one day to talk about the 'save the children' approach to helping.  It's a great focus point, sponsoring a child, but taken too literally, it's nonsense.  Sponsoring just one child isn't what's needed.   

World Vision and others, fortunately, know better and use the child sponsorship focus to do family and community-based work that really does help.


So, then, here's the tough question of the week for us all:  do I respond so I'll feel better?  Or because I want to have a genuinely good heart toward my brothers and sisters.  Why am I so deeply stirred by the little faces? Why have I committed resources?  What am I hoping to make different?

What am I going to do with what I know?

The precious little girl is such an attention getter. Bright, cheerful, and in a difficult world. It's her family that could use the help, though. Dad lost his arm and his job. Friends in the US have helped out a bit, so for now, they don't go hungry.  They're getting help starting a family garden and some pigs. The kids are in school; they walk 2 miles to Guadalupe for class.

Every one of us would want to embrace this child.  Do better; embrace her family.  Want to lend a hand?  They could certainly use it.  I'll be glad to send your contribution along with ours to the NGO that we're working with there.  They're tax deductible, if that helps.

When I set up the sponsorship for our first two kids and their families, our teacher friends came and told us there were five more at the school, orphans in real hardship, that needed help too.  It hurt badly to say I couldn't afford more.  We have six families now; my daughter helped one of them buy their home.  

Update on the family mentioned above: with a little help, they've come a long way from when we first met.  Dad has recovered his health and is working again, and the kids are doing well in school.  It's encouraging to know the difference you can make.

Update 2015: With the help of friends, we now have eight families and their children plus another 90 kids or so on education assistance projects, single moms on developmental education projects, and point-of-need projects as they've occurred.  What a joy to be part of such things.  Oh, and two college grads, so far; pretty impressive considering few kids get to go beyond the sixth grade.

Update 2016:  ... and three of our girls are at the very top of their high school classes.  This is in a culture where girls don't usually go to high school.  More to come.

Waste of Time

If I speak eloquently, no matter how impressively, but if I don't do so from a loving heart, I'm just wasting time.

If I lecture with power, revealing amazing mysteries, and if I say to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm wasting everybody's time.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even pour out my last breath for them, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, without love I'm bankrupt.

Love is strong and never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
    Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
 Love doesn't strut, or have a swelled head,
   Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always “me first,”
      Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of other's imperfections,
      Doesn't revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in truth and clarity,
 Puts up with pretty much anything,
    Trusts God always, and looks for the best,
Never looks back, but keeps going to the end.

   Love lives on. Impressive speaking will be over some day; our understanding will struggle and reach its limits. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say is always incomplete. But clarity arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

 When I was a baby, I gurgled and mumbled like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways behind.

    Perhaps like an infant's understanding, we don't see things clearly yet. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, knowing just as we are known!

   But for now, until that clarity comes, we have three things to do to lead us toward that goal: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

      Anything less is just wasting time.

Gulf Oil Spill

Equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster fifty times over, the oil pollution in the Gulf is causing damage, some of which is irreversible and some that will be decades in correcting.  Millions have lost their livelihood, their communities, and their water.  Those still in the area are often hopelessly lost in poverty; some are rising up in revolt.  It's been going on, year after year, the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez, every year for FIFTY years.

Wonder where?  Nigeria, the Niger Delta, and the Gulf of Guinea.

The company at fault is not BP.  It's Royal Dutch Shell and the corrupt local government.  Folks have been jailed, beaten, tortured, and some just murdered, for protesting the destruction of the region.  No longer fit for farming or fishing, polluted beyond usability, the land and surrounding waters are their home and life, stolen from them by greed and big oil.  The warm Delta waters are a key spawning ground for tuna and other important species in the Gulf of Guinea.  The region's pollution exacerbates an already dramatic decline in those fish populations.

So here in the U.S., the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has caused extraordinary damage and expense.

Folks in the Niger Delta sympathize with our Gulf residents and the oil spill problems, but they shrug and wonder why the world-wide media attention.  The same thing has been happening to them for fifty years and no one cares, no one helps, no outcry, no global interest, nothing. 

From the The Guardian, "We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air."

"The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months."  See the LINK here to The Guardian's article.

Down these mean streets a man must go ...

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.  ...   He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.  He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. ...   If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."        Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888 – 1959)

You're missed, Dad.  Every day, especially the difficult ones.

Difficult times, conflicts of ethics, of clarity, of trying to understand and reach for the right goals; I remember well your grace and perseverance, your willingness to learn and change, but especially your tender heart toward others, all the way to the very end.  The world was a better place where you touched it.

A composer, conductor, a college professor with hundreds of students who loved him as an interim father; later a federal program administrator, a church elder ... and in his last few years, he taught piano lessons.  He had thirty or so students, children mostly.  After he passed away, an elementary school teacher told us how one of dad's students had said he wanted to be like Mr. Dickerson when he grew up.  The kid had minimal musical talent, but he knew he'd met a good man.   

Father's Day - 2010

Volatile Voltaire

Revered and sometimes ridiculed, he was a writer and philosopher who helped shape the world. He's commonly referred to as the father of the Enlightenment.

Voltaire wrote poetry and prose, history and philosophy, about civil rights and fair governance.  Too, he spoke out emphatically about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as well.

Voltaire was a self-professed theist; his anti-church writings were focused on the practices of the church in his day and over the years. In his "The Philosophical Dictionary", he recounts the  bloody centuries of religious intolerance and the millions who died from it.  At the end of the writing, though, he declares to the spirit that has explained it all to him, "Well, if that is so, I take you for my only master."

Neale Donald Walsch is author of the
series Conversations with God.

Today's culture shares Voltaire's disdain for the narrow-mindedness that can rule a religion and the exclusivist mindset that typically persists there.  Public discussions equate such judgmental thinking with bigotry and suggest that bringing up a child in that context is abusive.  That same religious thought-path we tolerate in the west is carried a step further to violence and slaughter elsewhere in the world.  Both Voltaire's and today's observations are relevant; you'll note they are unrelated to the legitimacy of one's faith or an honest pursuit of knowing God.

How then shall people of faith go forward?
Curious what comes next?

Voltaire died today in 1778 after a long life in an extraordinarily corrupt world. The revolution in France came a decade later, perhaps precipitated to some degree by Voltaire's writings. The revolution spread across Europe and portions of Latin America.  I wonder what Voltaire would think now of how things have progressed; or more appropriately, how many things remain unchanged.

Memorial Day

There are no words to describe the sacrifice so many have made.

In our hearts, we know their offering was not lightly given.

Most went, not because they were told to, but for deeply personal reasons; perhaps because they chose to do their part, to do what needed to be done for the sake of others.

We who made it home remember all too clearly, all of it.

The loss of their presence among us is greater still, and we remember each one.

The memorial is fifty miles from here;

it's been there for thirty years.

Someday, I'll go.