Doing Wrong When Doing Right
Essay Posted November 6, 2007 by James E. Nelson
Have you been following the tragedy surrounding the French charity, Zoe's Ark? If you haven't, the facts are these: The charity chartered an airplane to Chad and was ready to take 103 children to France to put into foster homes, and probably to be put up for eventual adoption. Before the plane took off, the Chadian government arrested the aid workers, airplane crew, and journalists and charged them with kidnapping and extortion. If convicted, some or all of the nine French and Spanish nationals could potentially spend five to twenty years in a Chadian jail doing hard labor. The French government has distanced itself from the mess and said the charity was working outside of French government's knowledge, so the future of the aid workers looks pretty bleak.
Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has studied Zoe's Ark extensively. They are a relatively new charity. He believes their intentions were good but they were in over their head in this latest project and things quickly spiralled out of control. Because the charity had no experience in the region, they were working through third parties. There are accusations that some of these third party workers bought and kidnapped children. There is also evidence that Zoe's Ark faked injuries and sickness in the children (with bandages and other accessories) that made it look like many of the children were desperately illy when in fact they weren't.
He also reports that the Chadian government is exagerating the situation for their own political gain. The accusations of children going into slavery, etc., are ridiculous, but play well in Africa where people are deeply suspicious of Europeans and North Americans.
I don't want to imply that I think there is a one to one correspondence between Zoe's Ark and other aid and mission groups, but the excesses of both the charity and the Chadian government put some of the issues of cross-cultural aid (and missions)into sharp relief and help us clarify some difficult questions.
While the magnitude of this "misunderstanding" is unimaginable, the fact that such misunderstandings should not come as a surprise. Different cultures have different values and different values cause us to act (or not act, as the case may be) in different ways. The charity workers saw abject poverty and sought to remove children who might otherwise die from harm's way. It's a perspective one would expect from someone raised in the industrialized West: a premium is put on economic well-being while social and societal relationships are viewed as less important.
From the Chadian perspective (and here I'm speaking of the reaction of typical citizens, not the official government propoganda), societal and familial relationships are held in the highest honor and Chadians are scandalized that these children would be torn out of that proper web of family and community. This is the world, after all, where Hillary's infamous battle cry, "It takes a village," is rooted. A life of poverty is not all bad as long as one has the community, and that community is precisely what those French charity workers were stealing from the children.
I once heard a missionary (who was not associated with either Campus Crusade for Christ nor the Russian Orthodox Church) tell about an evangelism campaign in rural Russia sponsored by Campus Crusade. It was a year-long campaign and was going to culminate with a conference in Moscow. New converts would be taken to the conference with all expenses paid. It would be a gathering of missionaries, Christians (ie, underground Baptists, not people from any of the state churches), and new converts rejoicing in their faith together.
The outsider missionary telling the story said that the response was overwhelming. It was one of Campus Crusade's most successful campaigns. He also said that he had absolutely no question that most of the converts would return to the Orthodox Church or their communist-influenced atheism within months after the conference. For these desperately poor people, an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow was unbelievably excessive. It was not unlike telling a twenty year old college student that if they join ABC church, the church will give them a brand new $100,000 sports car. It was a trip of a lifetime, and hardly anyone would be able to resist succumbing to such a bribe.
Yes, I called it a bribe. Of course that is the last thing Campus Crusade was trying to do, but the American planners had absolutely no sense of economic scale. In America these sorts of conferences are a dime a dozen. They happen every Fall Break, Christmas Break, and Spring Break, and many times every summer. But the campaign simply could not be conceived in these terms by Russian peasants. It was excessive beyond imagination, and therefore, irresistible.
The missionary telling the story had spent his life in the USSR (and then Russia), so he had a sense of propriety that the Americans could never have. The American context was so utterly foreign that the evangelists didn't even have the ability to ask the correct questions because the correct questions and proper context were simply unimaginable.
I remember former President Carter telling a similar story about farm aid. Millions of dollars worth of tractors were sent to India. They were delivered to the farms and then rusted away, never used. The tractors were a "solution" dreamed up by American farmers for a "problem" perceived by the American delegation visiting India. In order to make use of the tractors, Indian agriculture would have had to undergo a profound change which would have cost millions and put thousands out of work. Again, the sense of American scale was completely inappropriate in the Indian subcontinent.
Two of the most successful Christian missionaries in history, Cyril and Methodius, evangelized the Slavs. They were successful because they were able to think in the scale and context of the people they were working with. Cyril knew that imposing Greek language and culture was no solution, but short of that, a solution would have to be created from scratch. And that's what he did. He created an alphabet (Cyrillic) and they began translate the faith into something that worked in Slavic culture. And did it ever work! After some time for growth and development, Christianity exploded in the Slavic world.
Of course there are other examples throughout history: the Moravians who sold themselves into slavery in order to evangelize the Carribean islands, the Wycliffe Bible translators who have done yeoman's service in some of the darkest corners of the world, the Slavs who came to Alaska and introduced the Eskimoes to Christ without defiling their culture in the process.
The Christmas fast (or Nativity Fast) is just around the corner (it starts Nov. 15), and that means we ought to consider how we are going to serve others this fasting season. One possibility that I commend to you something which is about as far from traditional alms giving as one can get. But it is an up-and-coming model which is receiving rave reviews as a way of promoting economic development in a manner that does not enslave needy people to Western values (and debt!). Neither is it just a hand-out, but rather a loan program by which individuals can find both self-esteem and a needed economic boost.
I'm talking about micro-loans. Certain wealthy people have created banks that operate with radically different values than those in the industrialized nations. It was originally viewed as a mostly charitable effort to help desperately poor people, but it turns out that micro-loans are a viable economic model and the principle is catching on fast around the world.
Americans now have a relatively easy way to get involved through Kiva.org. (And for my Republican leaning readers, don't let the picture of former President Clinton throw you off. It's a program enthusiastically endorsed by people across the political spectrum, but American Republicans have a very serious image problem worldwide at the moment. Since Kiva appeals to a worldwide audience, former President Clinton is a better face for them to show than, say, former President and CIA Director George H. W. Bush.) Through Kiva, individuals can loan money to entrepreneurs from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe so that they can better themselves economically, and in turn better their regions and countries by establishing local businesses and a new tax base.
All would-be loan recipients are carefully vetted by local banking institutions, but many of these loans are very risky just because of their locale. For instance, a vendor in Afghanistan may have a near perfect business plan, but local violence could bring his plans for a new business crumbling to an end. In spite of that, Kiva currently has a repayment rate of 95%—far better than American housing loans!
But their rate of repayment or average rate of return (currently at 5.5% annually) is not the central point. Rather, micro-loans (and Kiva.org in particular) is radically different way of looking at the poverty crisis. I began this essay with examples of people who wanted to help but failed to understand the importance of scale and cultural norms and ended up doing more harm than good. Seeing the massive poverty in Bangladesh, the typical American solution is to throw millions of dollars at it all at once. History has shown that this "solution" nearly always creates massive corruption while little of the money actually gets to the intended recipients. Kiva.org seeks to deal with the problem $25 at a time. ($25 is the minimum amount a lender can invest with Kiva.org.)
Of course at that rate it doesn't—it can't—solve poverty all at once, but it deals with the problem in a long term, organic manner that does not have the unpleasant side effects that they typical foreign aid approach creates. In regions of the world where capital is desperately needed, micro-loans provide that very capital in amounts the people who need it can use most readily.
And let me be clear, I don't see micro-loans in general and Kiva.org specifically as an alternative to mission work. But mission work cannot be done in a vacuum. If people are starving it is unconscionable to give them the gospel and let them starve to death. Physical needs and spiritual needs go hand in hand.
The Christian fasting discipline is multi-faceted and demands prayer, refraining from food and other earthly pleasures, and alms. It also requires these disciplines be in balance. Abstaining from food without giving alms and prayer is harmful to the soul and in that case it's better not to fast at all. Supporting the Church's mission outreach is vital, but seeking to feed those who are hungry and clothe those who are naked is also required. It is in this context that I mention Kiva.org. It is so very un-American in its approach (small and organic rather than flashy, expensive attention-drawing). But that is precisely the point. It is a proven way to deal with people's physical needs in a manner that is culturally and economically appropriate.
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