Remember the scene in Apocalypse Now when Kurtz told Martin Sheen about a mission to an African village to administer malaria shots to all the children?The minute the do-gooders left, the village shaman, certain that evil had been injected into the children, ordered all the vaccinated arms amputated.
And then there’s the true story about a South American village whose people carried their water a mile uphill for centuries. One day a group of environmental science students came along to install an uphill pressure fed system. The natives helped out, watching curiously, smiling. Weeks later, feeling great about their success at educating these villagers, the humanitarians left for home. And the minute they disappeared into the jungle, the villagers quickly tore out all the piping, joyfully returning to their timeworn method of trudging uphill, shoulders laden with water vessels.
In our travels we’ve all witnessed foreigners handing out candies to impoverished third-world children. You know the scene. Usually it’s this big production of largess, where the giver walks around all gleam-eyed and saintly. But could this act of giving actually be an act of taking? (There’s a great thread on this in the Thorn Tree Forum.) You may be thinking, “C’mon, they’re only lollipops!” But there’s a real danger here. The foreigner is giving something the parents are too poor to provide. Now forced to compete with complete strangers, the parents may feel immense guilt, frustrated that they don’t have the means to fulfill those needs. Meanwhile, it’s possible the child might become a beggar. And here’s some food for thought: Has the giver merely empowered himself by disempowering another, applying balm to his own conscience at the receiver’s expense?
Giving is an extremely powerful act, and with this power comes certain responsibilities that many westerners fail to consider. Obviously, phoning PBS during a fundraiser or writing a check to the March of Dimes are wonderful and purely anonymous charitable acts (in 2008, charity in America amounted to $307 billion.) But when visiting foreign countries, the rules change, and one’s humble respect for another culture is relative to the richness of the experience. There’s a big difference between giving motivated by pity and that propelled by compassion. And it’s one thing to “forget” an article of clothing your host admired when moving on, and quite another to showboat around, flinging rupees to street kids. For more on responsible travel, check out Lonely Planet’s Responsible Travel page, or Responsible-Travel.org, where there’s a wealth of information on how to keep it real when visiting foreign cultures.
Photo courtesy of Sune Frack via Flickr.