Lori (above) lives a humble life. The shed-like buildings behind her are her home (to the left), shared with 5 children. Directly behind is her shop. Two other families live in adjoining shacks.

It’s pathetic when compared to our vast dwellings, but it keeps the sun off, and the rain out (debatable). Lori received a loan of around US$100 to help with her small store (another one of those small shacks attached to the house). The loan was part of a micro-enterprise program from the Philippines-based Center for Community Transformation.

As Lori shared her story (sometimes in broken English, sometimes via an interpreter) – I came to the verge of tears. Emotionalism is unhelpful, so instead I smiled and laughed at the strength of these people.

Just after Lori had received the loan, her little daughter got sick. Very sick. She drank some of the water in a nearby well before it had been boiled. The diarrhea came rapidly and dehydration followed soon after. Lori said that she came close to dying and the loan was used to pay for the hospital visit that was to last for weeks. She was sure the child would have died without the loan.

The little girl came running up and jumped into her mother’s lap, and as I looked at her grubby face and those eyes… I just wanted to tear up. I felt angry at the injustice of their situation, and utterly humbled that a donation from me, in another country, came all the way through to this little family, and saved a little girls life.

The knife-edge of poverty has no mercy. One small incident (a 2 year old puts some water in her mouth) leads to pain and suffering, and economic hardship.

Lori’s little shop will recover but it will take years. By the end of our visit she was proudly taking us through her home (all one room of it), smiling and pointing at her kids.

She had hope.

And hope is one of the strongest forces in the universe. No matter how messed up life is.

Hope tells you there is more, there is purpose, there is meaning.

No matter how much material wealth we may have, without hope, we are still empty inside.

Hating on Bono hit new heights (lows?) recently with AC DC singer Brian Johnston spouting forth his wisdom regarding charity donations:

“I do it myself, I don’t tell everybody I’m doing it,” Johnson said.

“I don’t tell everybody they should give money – they can’t afford it.

“When I was a working man I didn’t want to go to a concert for some bastard to talk down to me that I should be thinking of some kid in Africa.

“I’m sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done. It just makes me angry. I become all tyrannical.”

The ensuing comments (both on huffington post and the HeraldSun) make for some entertaining reading. AC/DC fans appeared to have crawled out from under their rocks to praise their shrieking overlord, and bag the self-aggrandizing Bono.

Johnson says that he doesn’t tell his concert-goers to care about causes because “They can’t afford it”.   Except of course they just paid $120 to get into the AC/DC concert.

Celebs walk a fine line when they advocate for causes. Our innate sense of fairness tells us that if we’re going to shell out cash, Celeb X better shell out ten times as much or else…

The Bono backlash seems to get louder as the years go on, and, so too I suspect, the growing distrust of Aid in general. Billions of dollars has gone the way of poor countries and things don’t seem any different.   The belief that we can fix anything and everything with money is flawed. It makes those of us with money think that we can fix everything.

To be fair to Bono – he calls his celebrity status “currency” – that allows him to rub shoulders with world leaders and help to shape policy. That is a good and gutsy thing to do. However, seeing Bono spout forth simplistic and cheesy save-the-world messages at a U2 concert made me cringe – as if understanding and fixing world poverty can be attended to with a 10 minute charade at a rock concert.

We love our entertainment, and it has a place in our hearts like no other. Let’s not kid ourselves.

World box office takings for the movie Avatar: $2,074 million.

Hope for Haiti Now concert donations: $61 million.

Maybe AC/DC has some wisdom on the matter:

You got me ringing Hell’s Bells
My temperature’s high, Hell’s Bells
I’ll give you black sensations up and down your spine
If you’re into evil you’re a friend of mine
See my white light flashing as I split the night

Okayee….

Access is built into almost every wired and wireless device. It’s exciting and it’s creepy.

The onset (onslaught) of new technology is so rapid I wonder how many people take time to ponder the broader implications of such rapid changes in communication style. Technology is amoral. The way we use it decides whether it will harm or help.

Facebook: A great way to keep in touch with people (particularly those overseas). It’s also a quick and easy way to look up that girl that flirted with you when you were 19, and toy with some dumb fantasy in which you basically cheat on your spouse. In the situation of relationship breakdown things can get very messy indeed on social media. Some even cite tools like Facebook as being a factor that lead to divorce.

The Internet allows both convenience and faux anonymity. Two factors that lead us to do things that we would not normally do in other environments or contexts.  Those of us that have made heroic messes of our life at times (like me) need to be careful what we devote our time to.

As at the beginning of 2010 Facebook demographics are changing rapidly. The biggest growth area is that of ages 55+, followed by aged 35-55. Ages 18-24 are trending downwards (as a percentage) – a year ago this group made up 40% of Facebook users, now they are 25%.

The Great Twitter Experiment

Twitter’s had some great press over the last 12 months prompting explosive user growth, yet I believe that few use it regularly.

Twitter: Narcissist’s dream come true or builder of deep and abiding relationships?

My experience with twitter has shown that the former could have some truth, and the latter – not so much.  It’s a great tool for getting blog updates, and inspiring words from great thinkers.  Outside of that it’s a little weird to tell people what you’re doing as you’re doing it.

Life becomes a commentary rather than… life.

There is a great temptation to make Twitter a rollercoaster of highlights – carefully devoid of anything that is not a highlight.  Here’s some tweets that you don’t see a lot of:

“I’m desperately lonely today”

“Just had a brutal argument with my husband”

“Sat in a chair and watched TV for 5 hours straight. I’m so bored.”

I guess nobody wants to read that stuff, so we make out that life is a nonstop fun-parade.

The Superficial

Social media is not a way to build deep and abiding friendship. It allows you to throw your net of superficiality to places you never thought possible. Without these tools you would have little to do with most of the friends/followers.  That’s because with social media most communication becomes unintentional. You broadcast yourself, and hope that people are watching/listening.   Yet the bigger the net of superficiality, the more of a blip on the horizon you become.

I know people who have 200+ friends on Facebook, and yet tell me face to face that they don’t really have any real friendships.

The question is: Are we still lonely? Surely the Internet with its wondrous ways of finding anyone anywhere would make us feel more connected?

I’m not seeing that. But I do see people becoming ‘commodified’ – items to fit into our agenda and to-do lists.

Maybe instead of taking 2 seconds to type out a ‘tweet’, I need to take 20 minutes to make a phone call.

cc - Drowning Man by just.Luc

If you’ve managed to sit through an entire TV evening news bulletin, you begin to realise that the word “news” is highly subjective.   Much of what is presented as news is really not-news.

Not-news is pretty much a combination of overly-long irrelevant sentimental pieces mixed with banal celebrity voyeurism.

Just a brief perusal of TV news over the last few days (some of which constituted headlines) :

• A guy who hits tiny balls around a field all day might have crashed his car, or maybe…?
• Some people went to dinner with some rich people – but they weren’t invited (a quick search on Google News shows 6,888 news articles devoted to the incident).
• A TV show about shallow self-obsessed people who think they look good will be filmed in NZ.
• The daughter of a guy who was president of some country many years ago just got engaged.

That’s just a quick round-up of the world news. You get the picture.

Hard to believe that right now various countries are engaged in war. Harder to believe that right now there are governments murdering their citizens.

The earth might just be teetering on the edge of irreversible environmental collapse.

We’re swinging from one food shortage crisis to another, with the world’s poorest bearing the brunt.

The world’s economic  system is in a woeful state… does anyone remember just how much debt the US has taken on?

Escapism or Stupidity?

Maybe we need to educate ourselves with silliness to escape reality. I thought that’s what the Internet was for? But now we have broadcast TV journalists and editors who can do no better than to appeal to the masses.  Once upon a time issues of injustice reported on TV might have inspired us to social activism.  A quick glance at today’s 5 most read articles on TVNZ… 3 of them are celebrity fluff.

Study Shows Celebrity Admirers Have Social Problems

Last year a study showed how:

[...] parasocial relationships [celebrity watching] can have self-enhancing benefits for low self-esteem people that they do not receive in real relationships. These parasocial relationships, which have very low risk of rejection, offer low self-esteem people an opportunity to reduce their self-discrepancies and feel closer to their ideal selves.

Essentially, people who have “a difficult time with real interpersonal relationships” feel better about themselves if they obsess over their favourite celebrities.

Given the mass hysteria over celebrities, one might presume that a lot people have difficulty with real relationships.

Triviality and celeb-watching is a symptom of the times. My take: We’re lonelier than ever.

It takes guts and determination to face truth full in the face.  How can we hope to change the status quo, if we can’t bear to face it?

They were a fictional affluent African-American family who starred in The Cosby Show.  The sitcom debuted in 1984 – the decade of “Greed is good”.   Although it has been described as revolutionary (black, American AND rich) – I didn’t really get that bit.

I thought all Americans lived in lavish mansions and had astonishing amounts of material possessions.

Those were the kind of people I saw on TV.  Even a small house seemed to have 5 bedrooms, two stories, and 3 bathrooms and a menagerie of animals that never pooed inside.  There were 2 or more massive cars parked in the garage, and a new set of clothes for every occasion.

No-one told me about the underclass – about the huge numbers of homeless people, or about entire communities living in (relative) poverty in the US.

After a bit of study I’m now aware of two realities about the world we inhabit:

Reality One: The world is a much darker, unfair, and unjust place than I ever realised.

Reality Two: Fixing poverty and inequity is far more complex and difficult than I ever realised.

UNFAIR

Pick up a newspaper and you will see individuals ripping each other off.  Dig deeper into the geopolitical realities  of the world and you see systems that rip entire people groups off.

FIXING THE WORLD

Despite 50+ years of so-called ‘development’ – poor countries are still poor and people still die from bad water.  There are a vast array of opinions on aid – from the sterling work of Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) who believes that enough aid can fix the world and eliminate poverty in a generation to William Easterly (White Man’s Burden) who claims that Aid is part of the problem.

This is a gross over-simplification but you get the picture.  Well-intentioned assistance and aid can have unintended consequences.

So Where To?

A simple note to self: Practice justice, mercy, and humility rather than cynicism, arrogance and judgmentalism.

Simple does not = easy. But there is hope… hope that stems from every single small act of kindness.

The girl in the foreground is Asan Bibi. She is 9.

She is from an ethnic minority group (kuchi nomad tribe) in Afghanistan who are tent dwellers. Her family’s tent was fired upon by a helicopter on Oct 13th 2009. Both Asan and her sister Salima – aged 13 (background) were badly burned, and three other family members were killed.

There is no righteous cause when burning children.

The 11th century crusaders thought they were “the chosen army of Christ, endowed with great valor by Him” (see letter from Stephen, Count of Blois, 1098). They massacred Jews, Muslims, or anyone that got in the way as they went after the riches of Jerusalem.

God save us all from ourselves.

Photo Credit Paula Bronstein/Getty Images / Boston.com

US: “No we can’t say that”

EU: “It’s ok this is not my problem”

The concept of Somebody Else’s Problem (let’s call it SEP) runs right through society and all issues in the world. Peter Shirley in his book “The Life You Can Save” looks at this. He calls it the bystander effect.

Shirley cites some fascinating research that goes something like this:

Researchers got people into a waiting room where they met the facilitator. Then the facilitator goes into a side room where she climbs on a stool, then pretends to fall over (crash, bang, ouch). The subjects can only hear (the side room is concealed with a curtain).

Essentially — when the subject was by themselves they were very likely to go help the facilitator. When there were two subjects in the waiting room (the second is a stooge who just sits there doing nothing), then they were very unlikely to go help!

What happened there? SEP.

We are less likely to help out when others stand by and do nothing.

I can’t think how many times I do this. I justify may lack of action by telling myself “there are other people around – they will do something”, or “if everyone else is standing around then it must be okay”.  I hate it when I do this.

However we all do this to some degree on an international scale – probably because we feel so powerless to being change.

The golden rule sets the standard high: “Do unto others…”

Fair call – especially when you’re paying serious money to hear music. However at least someone is using their celebrity status to draw attention to issues rather than for endless self-indulgence. What you do with your millions if you were a celeb?

Recent history shows we have individuals who have changed the world. William Wilberforce taking a stand on slavery. Rev. Martin Luther King taking a stand on civil rights and racism. These individuals catalysed entire movements that resulted in real and powerful societal change.

Nowadays we have big campaigns to Make Poverty History, or end 3rd world debt. We have massive initiatives like the Global Poverty Project that claim to “catalyse the movement to end extreme poverty”. These initiatives are exciting and inspiring. They lead people to think about the reality of the world outside our walls.

Can We Really Save the World?

The first rule of understanding aid and development is that is extremely complex. Like environmental interventions, the law of unintended consequences plays out over and over.

Could it be that we are a little bit… arrogant?

We in the West like to fix things. In much the same way as European colonisers thought they could save people in the rest of the world from themselves, we believe we can solve the worlds problems if we just have enough money.

We know best. We’ve got musicians and bands. We’ve got TV campaigns and the Internet. We’ve got power point.

Mea culpa. I want to change the world too. Maybe if I start buying fair trade chocolate I can end extreme poverty.

But then when I look into my own heart I realise I struggle to even stop doing things or having attitudes that I don’t like.

I can’t even save myself.

I watch my children fighting over a new toy. I didn’t teach them to do that – but they always want what the other one has.  I can’t even save my kids from their greed.

That doesn’t mean I don’t stop caring, or being moved by compassion to help those in need… but end the injustice and greed in the world when I find the same things in my own heart?  Maybe I just need to try harder.

Let’s do what we can, but let’s also get over ourselves.

Our enlightened civilizations in the West are also dogged by depression and suicide. Child abuse and wife-beating. Our enlightenment hasn’t seemed to have stopped us from endless self-medication in the form of drugs (US alone spends an estimated $57 billion to $91 billion per year on illicit drugs) and alcohol. Our money-laden countries are filled with lonely people.

We might have ended extreme poverty (in the OECD) — but we have not managed to create a utopia.

Are you sick of people who want to save the world?

- Photo cred: flickr/nimboo

It’s every retailer’s dream come true, with sales in the Christmas period sometimes matching that of an entire year.  Ask most people and they’ll tell you: “It’s about family”.

However our Christmas days can also be described in negative terms – such as busy, hectic, stress.  It gets darker than that – Christmas is often the time when the pain of those that are missing is at its sharpest. A reminder of broken relationships, families, and all the good times that might have been.

So how does your Christmas day rank? 5 out of 10?  8? 2?

Here’s a Christmas story that is outrageous. Yet it’s happening. Now.

Saw Ko Nu crying for his son, April 2008

On Christmas Day 2007, a Burma Army patrol wandered into Saw Ko Nu’s rice fields. Ko Nu ran away. He’d already seen what the army could do. In 2002 he survived a massacre by hiding under the body of his dead grandmother. He lost his wife and three of his children during the incident.

This time Ko Nu had his 13-year-old son Wilbur and nephew Saw No Maw working the fields with him. He thought they were safe. After the army patrol moved on, he went looking for them.

He found their burned bodies in the rice field. They had not been shot but had been captured and tortured to death. Ankle tendons had been cut open, throats cut, bodies disemboweled and then set on fire.

This happens now.

In our enlightened progressive modern world.

Saw Ko Nu is a real man – carrying with him the overwhelming weight of his loss.

“Oh my son, my son, I tried my best for you. I planned many good things for you, but now you have no chance to enjoy them. Oh my son, my son. Oh God. Oh my son, my son, you go ahead and wait for me” – Ko Nu’s words upon revisiting the place of his son’s death.

Please read more about reality in Burma (Myanmar). Maybe we can even do something about it.

Thanks to CCB, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Every where I go, somebody wants my money.

Maybe it’s the circles I mix in. Maybe the voices of charity are getting louder and shriller during this time of recession. I’m amazed at the generosity of most people.  However a lot of us give whimsically, randomly, and sometimes under coercion.

How do you figure out what to give to? Are some charities more important than others?

Think about this story (inspired by Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save):

You donate a large sum of money to an art gallery. They buy some pieces to display. The gallery catches fire, you are walking past and hear a child screaming. Do you rescue the child or the pieces of artwork?

I guess most of us would rescue the child. If that’s the case then shouldn’t you have used the donation money to rescue a child (or many) in the first place? Certain aid agencies do exactly that – they save kids from dying from the most preventable of diseases (diarrhea or measles for examples).

Why would I donate to a sports club – just to fund someone else’s hobby? Perhaps it comes down to our own priorities, interests – the things that strike an emotional chord within us.  It’s something that we should not stop wrestling with. The combined amounts of money we give has the power to make enormous change in this world.

The sobering and painful realities about charity is that we don’t really have a whole lot of evidence to know if it is working. GiveWell – a charity that researches other charities says this (from their blog).

Even if $1000 can save a life, your $1000 isn’t unless it gets used well. There’s no charity that makes me even 90% confident this is happening, and with the “average” charity I’d bet that it isn’t.

It’s not just about being generous and giving more – it’s also about taking careful consideration of how your donations are going to be used.