The Trouble With Helping People
I’m having trouble with my fairytales. I like to try to view the world with a bit of wonder, so I come up with ideas like God’s disguise is an old man you give your lunch to and heaven is where frogs turn into princes. It helps me with the stale language of faith droning out of churches and gives a little glory back to a tired world. But sometimes it’s hard to keep it up.
We drove out to Baharak today. It’s a beautiful town in a green valley where three rivers meet to flow west through Badakhshan. It’s a nice place with a lot of farmland, not enough of which is used for wheat. The rest is for opium, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment. For now, what you need to know is that the town is hopping with industry now that the harvest has come in and everyone’s spending the take on making their houses nicer, or just making nicer houses. If you’re in the right business, this place probably has a higher employment rate than anywhere in Canada. Tradesmen can name their price. But good luck trying to find one. My friend works with an NGO with a gigantic operation based in Baharak. He told us he’d been trying for a month to get a carpenter to build a railing around his second-story balcony… without luck. People are busy, too busy. They’ve just been given a big hydroelectric power station, and we had to reverse down a whole block because some guys had a ladder propped up in the middle of the street to string up power lines, and they wouldn’t move. The bazaar was bustling, and business must be good, since rent for a shop on Main Street has recently gone up from 300 USD a month to 2000. Housing is not any cheaper. Rent for a dumpy place – a “fixer upper” it would be called back home – costs as much as a furnished two-bedroom in the Canadian suburbs. All of this in one of the poorest places in the world, according to the UN surveys. It’s hard to gauge these things. Apparently the UN doesn’t count the satellite dishes. Or satellite dishes don’t mean people aren’t poor. But surely it must mean they’re not really poor. On the other hand, the kids outside the satellite dish houses are drinking out of the ditch, same as everyone else. The point is it’s hard to tell who’s the poorest around here, which makes it tricky because that’s who we’re trying to help.
What we mean to do here is known in humanitarian aid lingo as a food-for-work project. You hire people to work on some project like building a water supply system for their village and pay them in food. You usually do it in places that are “food insecure” which is a fancy way of saying they don’t have enough of it, can’t produce enough of it, and it’s not coming anytime soon. In other words, you do it in places where people are starving, and ought to be grateful for food. The town of Baharak didn’t seem too stretched, but maybe we were missing something. We asked around. Other groups shrugged about food-for-work. They said it doesn’t work most of the time, because everyone gets more from their garden plots of poppy. When it does actually work, you know you’ve found the poorest of the poor because they’ll accept it. Sort of. The funny thing about the poor is that when you help them, they smile, bob their heads up and down, put their hands over their hearts in gratitude … and complain. It’s not enough, it’s not the right thing, it’s not what we wanted, it’s not a TV. The funny thing about the poor is that you start by wanting to help them and end up wanting to kick them in the teeth.
I came here with an idealist’s question: “How do you make the world a better place?” That, apparently, is what I’m up to, besides paying off my student debt. Surely there’s a simple answer. This is what they write the stories about. If you are the woodcutter’s nice (but picked-on) son in the fairytale you give your lunch to old man who turns out to be a wizard and gives you a golden goose. The world turns out right in the end. But now that I’m here, I’ve got a new question: “What on earth are we helping people for, anyway?”
When they psyche you up for helping people in Sunday School, Scouts, and Seventh Grade they don’t tell you that people will grouse about it. They don’t tell you what to do when the old man turns out not to be a wizard at all, but a belly-acher who keeps asking for your lunch everyday and complaining because there’s not enough mayo. They don’t tell you what to do when the old geezer takes your lunch and sells it at a profit to someone even more unfortunate and goes and buys himself a TV. They don’t tell you what to do when you kiss the frog and it just ribbits and puckers up for more.
This type of work is championed. People stand up in churches and parliaments and award ceremonies and list all they ways the poor have been helped. The audience nods appreciatively, happy to be in proximity to such noble work. Those poor poor, how good it is to help them. No one really wants to burst the bubble, but the truth is the poor grumble.
And don’t think it’s just here. In Vancouver I used to buy sandwiches for guys begging on the street. I’d take them to food stores or McDonald’s rather than give them change because I thought it would be more helpful than giving them money for who knows what. I was surprised at how picky they were. One guy insisted on two tall chocolate ice cream cones instead of dinner. Some guys just wanted the money and would walk away from me in disgust when I offered to buy them food. I’m not sure why I was surprised at that. I guess I just assumed that the really poor were an honest bunch, down on their luck, and happy for any help they could get. But it turns out that they’re just like you and me, trying to get ahead. Except they don’t do it in all the civilized ways we do it in, edging people out of jobs and getting better grades; they do it by being tricky. After you take away all the advantages of wealth and birth, and add in years of oppression of every kind, the one worldly resource left to the poor to get TVs and the so-called good life is plain old cunning. They don’t tell you that in the World Vision ads, but there it is. It puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it? Are you still supposed to give your lunch to the old guy if you’re pretty sure he’s pulling one over you?
I’m sure there are some clever and well-researched answers to that question. There are whole doctorate programs devoted to answering it, no doubt, but the old guy is still out there, taking your lunch. They still all claim to be the poorest of the poor in every village. If you come to give out carpets, they hide theirs in the cowshed and get more. If you’re building cowsheds they pull theirs down and get a better one. Not all, of course, but the really poor are tricky to find, harder than you’d think. If they’re really poor, they’re probably bedridden and sick and can’t make it to your survey, or women with no freedom and all the kids and no time to come and tell you. And even when you find them and help them, some wealthy, gun-toting, drug-smuggling landowner with the ethical development of a two year-old comes and takes it all away from them – if he doesn’t already have it. So now what?
Now we try to apply what we learned in the doctorate programs, which amounts to being tricky ourselves about handing things out. We do monitoring, which means sneaking back and taking a peek after we’ve handed stuff out, to make sure they really needed it. We give them half of it, wait to see if they’ll be good, then give the other half. Then, when we’re sure we’ve actually helped people, we write up the numbers and turn them in for a chance at getting more money from the people who fund the helping of people. This may eventually work, but there are a lot of factors involved. I won’t explain them, because when I just tried to write about them I read it over and decided my explanation would be clearer if I deleted it. Let’s just say it won’t be sunsets and roses and happily ever afters for Afghanistan anytime soon, short of a miracle.
Personally, I’m in favour of the miracle. The way we’re doing it now, it’s like the woodcutter’s son is setting up a bureaucracy to give the old man lunch. It kind of kills the story. I tend to favour the heart-warming turn-about in my stories, the part that J.R.R. Tolkien called the eucatastrophe – when things that have been going terribly and hopelessly wrong take a sudden turn for the good ending we all thought was impossible but wanted anyway.
The trouble is that I get so in love with eucatastrophes that I forget all the work that goes into them. Tolkien again: Frodo and Sam have to keep struggling away, hopelessly trying to do their bit for the beautiful ending to finally come. They can’t even see it coming, they barely even believe in it, they just keep moving. And maybe that’s the real miracle, anyway: that we keep going. What this means is that somehow, even with no good reason to believe in a good ending to all this, we believe in it anyway and keep going. It means – to come back to fairytales and my big question – it means that no matter how he gripes you should keep giving the old man your lunch. Maybe after enough tuna and mayo, he will become a wizard. You should keep kissing frogs, not because they taste so good, but because princes do, and just maybe…
I’m saying all this because I suspect that in the end, we’re all grumpy old men and frogs. For instance, roads in Canada are so good that roads here dream about them at night, and so do I, after seven hours of potholes and boulders. But you didn’t think about the wonderful roads on your commute, did you? You swore at all the traffic. Griping villagers and muttering commuters, we’re all the same breed. If we write people off, if they have no chance to be wizards and princes, well, then maybe life in general has no chance, because none of us are that good. Some of us have just been given a chance at real life, that’s all, and we can’t quite bring ourselves to ditch it, even when not ditching it means slogging away at real life for the rest, for grumpy old men, warty toads, and grouchy villages in Afghanistan.
All this gets a little personal. It invades your space, makes you swallow your indignation and give up your own life a little to make room for the life of this rabble of ingrates. Mother Teresa told people she didn’t want their excess, but for what they gave to her poor to cost something. So your extra change in the UNICEF box might not quite do it. And it’s not just in Calcutta or Afghanistan that it costs. It may cost us to leave our nice homes to go serve soup to the bums downtown for an evening, for example. Then it may cost us our comfort to begin talking to one of them, cost us our Friday night to spend time with him, and cost us our nice home when we invite him in and he soils the couch and steals the stereo. It all may cost us. But what exactly are we living for – Friday nights, nice couches, and stereos? Probably. But should we be? That’s another question I have.
I’m not sure I’m ready for all these costs, but I do know that I’d rather have a eucatastrophe than a stereo. I’d rather have a kingdom called heaven and a world gone right than a satellite dish. And more to the point, maybe, I’d rather have these things with wizards and princes than a lonely kingdom to myself with old men and frogs croaking outside. It’s probably not quite sound, but I have this idea that it’s not heaven until we’re all there. And that means I need to go out and invite them all in, grumps and frogs and Afghans and all.
We drove out to Baharak today. It’s a beautiful town in a green valley where three rivers meet to flow west through Badakhshan. It’s a nice place with a lot of farmland, not enough of which is used for wheat. The rest is for opium, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment. For now, what you need to know is that the town is hopping with industry now that the harvest has come in and everyone’s spending the take on making their houses nicer, or just making nicer houses. If you’re in the right business, this place probably has a higher employment rate than anywhere in Canada. Tradesmen can name their price. But good luck trying to find one. My friend works with an NGO with a gigantic operation based in Baharak. He told us he’d been trying for a month to get a carpenter to build a railing around his second-story balcony… without luck. People are busy, too busy. They’ve just been given a big hydroelectric power station, and we had to reverse down a whole block because some guys had a ladder propped up in the middle of the street to string up power lines, and they wouldn’t move. The bazaar was bustling, and business must be good, since rent for a shop on Main Street has recently gone up from 300 USD a month to 2000. Housing is not any cheaper. Rent for a dumpy place – a “fixer upper” it would be called back home – costs as much as a furnished two-bedroom in the Canadian suburbs. All of this in one of the poorest places in the world, according to the UN surveys. It’s hard to gauge these things. Apparently the UN doesn’t count the satellite dishes. Or satellite dishes don’t mean people aren’t poor. But surely it must mean they’re not really poor. On the other hand, the kids outside the satellite dish houses are drinking out of the ditch, same as everyone else. The point is it’s hard to tell who’s the poorest around here, which makes it tricky because that’s who we’re trying to help.
What we mean to do here is known in humanitarian aid lingo as a food-for-work project. You hire people to work on some project like building a water supply system for their village and pay them in food. You usually do it in places that are “food insecure” which is a fancy way of saying they don’t have enough of it, can’t produce enough of it, and it’s not coming anytime soon. In other words, you do it in places where people are starving, and ought to be grateful for food. The town of Baharak didn’t seem too stretched, but maybe we were missing something. We asked around. Other groups shrugged about food-for-work. They said it doesn’t work most of the time, because everyone gets more from their garden plots of poppy. When it does actually work, you know you’ve found the poorest of the poor because they’ll accept it. Sort of. The funny thing about the poor is that when you help them, they smile, bob their heads up and down, put their hands over their hearts in gratitude … and complain. It’s not enough, it’s not the right thing, it’s not what we wanted, it’s not a TV. The funny thing about the poor is that you start by wanting to help them and end up wanting to kick them in the teeth.
I came here with an idealist’s question: “How do you make the world a better place?” That, apparently, is what I’m up to, besides paying off my student debt. Surely there’s a simple answer. This is what they write the stories about. If you are the woodcutter’s nice (but picked-on) son in the fairytale you give your lunch to old man who turns out to be a wizard and gives you a golden goose. The world turns out right in the end. But now that I’m here, I’ve got a new question: “What on earth are we helping people for, anyway?”
When they psyche you up for helping people in Sunday School, Scouts, and Seventh Grade they don’t tell you that people will grouse about it. They don’t tell you what to do when the old man turns out not to be a wizard at all, but a belly-acher who keeps asking for your lunch everyday and complaining because there’s not enough mayo. They don’t tell you what to do when the old geezer takes your lunch and sells it at a profit to someone even more unfortunate and goes and buys himself a TV. They don’t tell you what to do when you kiss the frog and it just ribbits and puckers up for more.
This type of work is championed. People stand up in churches and parliaments and award ceremonies and list all they ways the poor have been helped. The audience nods appreciatively, happy to be in proximity to such noble work. Those poor poor, how good it is to help them. No one really wants to burst the bubble, but the truth is the poor grumble.
And don’t think it’s just here. In Vancouver I used to buy sandwiches for guys begging on the street. I’d take them to food stores or McDonald’s rather than give them change because I thought it would be more helpful than giving them money for who knows what. I was surprised at how picky they were. One guy insisted on two tall chocolate ice cream cones instead of dinner. Some guys just wanted the money and would walk away from me in disgust when I offered to buy them food. I’m not sure why I was surprised at that. I guess I just assumed that the really poor were an honest bunch, down on their luck, and happy for any help they could get. But it turns out that they’re just like you and me, trying to get ahead. Except they don’t do it in all the civilized ways we do it in, edging people out of jobs and getting better grades; they do it by being tricky. After you take away all the advantages of wealth and birth, and add in years of oppression of every kind, the one worldly resource left to the poor to get TVs and the so-called good life is plain old cunning. They don’t tell you that in the World Vision ads, but there it is. It puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it? Are you still supposed to give your lunch to the old guy if you’re pretty sure he’s pulling one over you?
I’m sure there are some clever and well-researched answers to that question. There are whole doctorate programs devoted to answering it, no doubt, but the old guy is still out there, taking your lunch. They still all claim to be the poorest of the poor in every village. If you come to give out carpets, they hide theirs in the cowshed and get more. If you’re building cowsheds they pull theirs down and get a better one. Not all, of course, but the really poor are tricky to find, harder than you’d think. If they’re really poor, they’re probably bedridden and sick and can’t make it to your survey, or women with no freedom and all the kids and no time to come and tell you. And even when you find them and help them, some wealthy, gun-toting, drug-smuggling landowner with the ethical development of a two year-old comes and takes it all away from them – if he doesn’t already have it. So now what?
Now we try to apply what we learned in the doctorate programs, which amounts to being tricky ourselves about handing things out. We do monitoring, which means sneaking back and taking a peek after we’ve handed stuff out, to make sure they really needed it. We give them half of it, wait to see if they’ll be good, then give the other half. Then, when we’re sure we’ve actually helped people, we write up the numbers and turn them in for a chance at getting more money from the people who fund the helping of people. This may eventually work, but there are a lot of factors involved. I won’t explain them, because when I just tried to write about them I read it over and decided my explanation would be clearer if I deleted it. Let’s just say it won’t be sunsets and roses and happily ever afters for Afghanistan anytime soon, short of a miracle.
Personally, I’m in favour of the miracle. The way we’re doing it now, it’s like the woodcutter’s son is setting up a bureaucracy to give the old man lunch. It kind of kills the story. I tend to favour the heart-warming turn-about in my stories, the part that J.R.R. Tolkien called the eucatastrophe – when things that have been going terribly and hopelessly wrong take a sudden turn for the good ending we all thought was impossible but wanted anyway.
The trouble is that I get so in love with eucatastrophes that I forget all the work that goes into them. Tolkien again: Frodo and Sam have to keep struggling away, hopelessly trying to do their bit for the beautiful ending to finally come. They can’t even see it coming, they barely even believe in it, they just keep moving. And maybe that’s the real miracle, anyway: that we keep going. What this means is that somehow, even with no good reason to believe in a good ending to all this, we believe in it anyway and keep going. It means – to come back to fairytales and my big question – it means that no matter how he gripes you should keep giving the old man your lunch. Maybe after enough tuna and mayo, he will become a wizard. You should keep kissing frogs, not because they taste so good, but because princes do, and just maybe…
I’m saying all this because I suspect that in the end, we’re all grumpy old men and frogs. For instance, roads in Canada are so good that roads here dream about them at night, and so do I, after seven hours of potholes and boulders. But you didn’t think about the wonderful roads on your commute, did you? You swore at all the traffic. Griping villagers and muttering commuters, we’re all the same breed. If we write people off, if they have no chance to be wizards and princes, well, then maybe life in general has no chance, because none of us are that good. Some of us have just been given a chance at real life, that’s all, and we can’t quite bring ourselves to ditch it, even when not ditching it means slogging away at real life for the rest, for grumpy old men, warty toads, and grouchy villages in Afghanistan.
All this gets a little personal. It invades your space, makes you swallow your indignation and give up your own life a little to make room for the life of this rabble of ingrates. Mother Teresa told people she didn’t want their excess, but for what they gave to her poor to cost something. So your extra change in the UNICEF box might not quite do it. And it’s not just in Calcutta or Afghanistan that it costs. It may cost us to leave our nice homes to go serve soup to the bums downtown for an evening, for example. Then it may cost us our comfort to begin talking to one of them, cost us our Friday night to spend time with him, and cost us our nice home when we invite him in and he soils the couch and steals the stereo. It all may cost us. But what exactly are we living for – Friday nights, nice couches, and stereos? Probably. But should we be? That’s another question I have.
I’m not sure I’m ready for all these costs, but I do know that I’d rather have a eucatastrophe than a stereo. I’d rather have a kingdom called heaven and a world gone right than a satellite dish. And more to the point, maybe, I’d rather have these things with wizards and princes than a lonely kingdom to myself with old men and frogs croaking outside. It’s probably not quite sound, but I have this idea that it’s not heaven until we’re all there. And that means I need to go out and invite them all in, grumps and frogs and Afghans and all.
posted by rjs | 9:34 PM
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