This article about Why You Should Never Give to the Poor really put some questions in my mind about a lot of different things, manly on why the author decided to name this article this in the first place. I thought that it was going to be about the people on the corners of intersections asking for money. Yet, it was about a misunderstanding on the behalf of the givers and the receivers. Here is the link for a quick read.
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/why-you-should-never-give-to-the-poor/
To me people do great things for others all the time and they are really motivated to do it. But I feel that if you are going to reach out, make sure that you don't judge people who don't understand the importance of asking how this works and why.
The article is about a humanitarian group installing a water system and waste disposal system for the village that was in need of clean water and a place to dispose of their waste. That to me is a good resource, but then after this initial humanitarian group left, a few months later another group returned to see how the village was doing. To their surprise the village had let the systems go to waste.
I could see their point, you give a village a way to have clean water and a place for sewage, and then they abuse the systems. It also mentioned that these installments were not cheap.
The fact that these humanitarian groups came the first time was great, but the chief of the tribe made sense. They came in and installed it and left, didn't teach them how to fix it if it broke down or didn't even place some type of regulations on the equipment as well. So these people were in a place where okay it's broken nothing I can do about it, and hey it's free. To me you can't expect people to just be like okay I get the picture thanks. Yes, they are grateful and no they will abuse it because it's a necessity they have never had before.
So here are some questions if you were doing an article on this piece would you name it what it is currently or change it to something else? Also, if you saw this going on and you were the second group, would you do the same thing? Or if you were the first group would you explain the whole thing to the village first and show them how to fix it if were to ever break? What do you think the motivation of the village is the second time around?
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