Give a man a fish...

I was intrigued and excited by the story in 'Act one' of this recent This American Life episode.  In it, Planet Money reporters looked into the work of GiveDirectly: a charity that, rather than giving poor people cows or seeds or other goods or training, simply gives them money.

The reporters went to a village in Kenya where the poorest residents had each received the equivalent of US$1000.  From what I could gather, they were people living in a cash economy and this money was roughly what they would normally earn in a year.  The reporters were keen to find out what that money had been spent on.

The villagers lived in thatch-roofed huts and the majority of them had used part of their money to replace the thatch with corrugated iron.  Iron is not only more water-tight and much less hassle to maintain than thatch, over its 10 year life-span it also works out considerably cheaper (you have to buy special grass for thatch).  With the remainder they did all kinds of things: mostly buying income-generating assets such as a cow or a motorbike, but not always.

The story that moved me the most was that of one man who spent the remaining money on a mattress.  Previously he'd been sleeping on the dirt floor (maybe on some kind of a mat - I can't remember for sure), now he sleeps on an actual mattress.  When he was asked why this was important to him, he said something like: "Before, I was just the image of a human, but now I am a human.".  I was stunned.

It got me thinking, too.  I've never heard of a charity that gives away mattresses.  Cows or grain mills, yes: but not mattresses.  Yet it was a mattress that this man wanted, and he wanted it because it gave him dignity.  And surely that's really important?

It also made me realise my own racism.  It keeps on popping up within me: racism.

When I heard about GiveDirectly, I was uncomfortable.  It didn't seem right to just give these people money.  I wasn't confident that they'd spend it well, whereas I was confident that a trustworthy aid agency would give them the right goods and training to really improve their lives.  "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day" and all that.

However, a while ago when I heard that the New Zealand government was proposing to limit what certain beneficiaries could spend their money on, I wasn't very happy about it.  Partly I was concerned on a practical level - how could WINZ know what was best for everyone in all their different circumstances? - and partly I was concerned that it would take dignity away from already vulnerable people.

Why had I thought it would be any different in Kenya?

In the This American Life story they also talked about how all the people in a nearby village had recived cattle from another charity.  In the GiveDirect village, some people had chosen to buy cattle, but others had bought all kinds of other things instead - including the man who had more-or-less bought himself dignity.  It seems that my concerns about the New Zealand welfare proposal may well have been valid, but I'm ashamed that I didn't apply the same respectful thinking to vulnerable people far off as I did to those in my own country...


NB If you don't want to listen to the whole This American Life story (it's 28 minutes long), you could listen to a 6 minute version on the Planet Money website or read an article about the investigation on the New York Times website.

Caring for onesself

In a recent issue of Meeting Place, (the magazine of ANZMES, the CFS support society for New Zealand) I was struck by three articles placed close together.

The first was by a Christian woman with whom I have corresponded over the years.  She made a complete recovery from CFS a few years back and was writing here about the therapy through which God healed her: Mickel Therapy.  It is a talking therapy and is based on three principles.  In my words, they are:

1. being honest/not being afraid of creating waves
2. looking after your body and your needs
3. not letting people abuse/manipulate you.

Although the therapy is secular, she was keen to emphasise how these were principles that she has since been seeing again and again as she reads the Bible.  The principles all seem to me to deal with different kinds of looking after yourself.
Soon after this article came two more.  One was from a woman who had recently been on a holiday on a cruise ship.  While she was on the cruise she found her health greatly improved.  She wondered if this might be because she wasn't pressuring herself to get things done, so when she returned to NZ she put in place some strategies to limit how hard she pushed herself day to day.  Since doing so, her health has been much better than it's been in years.  The other was from a man whose quality of life greatly improved once he learned to live within his limits and look after himself better.

It was both encouraging and scary to see what a difference learning to look after themselves had made in the lives of these three people.

It reminded me of something we'd been discussing in our Bible study group a few weeks earlier.  We're studying Paul's letter to the Colossian church and, on the week in question, were looking at Colossians 3:5-17.  In verses 12-15 Paul says:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

We talked about whether this meant that we should just let other people walk over us (something that I believe the church often encourages women, in particular, to do).  However, we concluded that it probably actually meant an active and strong kind of love for other people: the kind of thing you can only do if you are deeply established in Christ (something that Paul was talking about in the previous chapter).


How sad (and scary!) to think that the church, by taking passages like this in isolation and using them to encourage people to let others treat them badly, may actually be encouraging people to do something that could leave them significantly ill for years on end!

Spring!

Our neighbour's kowhai tree this morning from outside our bedroom window :-)

Big Fair Bake

Yesterday I submitted an entry in the Big Fair Bake: a baking competition that aims to promote Fair Trade.  All entries must use at least two Fair Trade ingredients.  Here's my entry photo and my answer to the competition question "why did you bake fair".

When I heard about the Big Fair Bake, it inspired me to research some new fair trade ingredients.  I first started buying only fair trade cocoa and chocolate a few years ago when I learned that much of the world's cocoa is grown by child slaves.  I didn't want anything to do with that!  Later we switched over to buying all our coffee and bananas fair trade, too, as we didn't want poor people being abused so we could get our treats.

For the Big Fair Bake I decided to try out a new recipe: Earl Grey tea biscuits.  The recipe uses icing sugar, butter, flour, salt, lemon zest and powdered Earl Grey tea leaves. I'd never bought Fair Trade tea or sugar before, but here was my opportunity to research it!  I learned that there is forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, just like for cocoa.  No one seems to sell Fair Trade icing sugar, so we bought some ordinary sugar from Trade Aid, ground it to a powder in a spice grinder and added some cornflour.  Voila!  Fair Trade icing sugar.  Unfortunately the supermarket was out of stock of Scarborough Fair Earl Grey tea so I used Trade Aid black tea instead.  The lemon zest still gave them an Earl Grey flavour. 

Researching fair trade sugar was interesting.  I went into this knowing very little about the sugar industry, but I decided that the time had come to find out whether people were being treated poorly to grow our sugar.

I learned that there is some forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, but that in general the problem that Fair Trade is trying to solve is the precarious living sugarcane farmers make due to price fluctuations and the protectionist policies in and sugar dumping by some wealthy countries.  I decided that forced labour and child labour bothered me, but that the other problems would be better addressed by interventions other than price floors for certain farmers.  So it turned out that I did need to care about the provenance of our sugar!

I knew that, some years ago at least, Chelsea purchased all their sugar from Fiji.  As that wasn't on the list of countries where people were being enslaved to produce sugar, I decided to find out if that was still the case.  From their website, I found that they now actually purchase all their sugar from Queensland.  So, I now needed to know whether the sugar farmers of Queensland were beneficiaries of subsidies or other anti-competitive practises.  Turns out that they aren't.  So, while I bought TradeAid sugar for my competition entry, in the future we won't be doing so.

This process has still changed our sugar purchasing practises, though.  I'm no longer comfortable with buying 'home brand' or other sugars of unknown provenance: that sugar may have been farmed by slaves or children.  From now on, our sugar will all be from Chelsea (just as, for similar reasons, we buy all our tea from Dilmah).

Fun with Shadow :-)

Sarah recently got a kitten, a wee boy named Shadow.  Today he was outside when Martin and I were blowing bubbles....

What's that??

No, really, what's that??!!

They're everywhere...

That one's floating!  But if I investigated, I'd have to get wet :-(

It's safer back here.

But I really must go see!

What IS it?!

He jumped for them a few times, tried to pounce them, seemed confused when they kept on disappearing, and generally was a heap of fun to watch :-)

40 Maps That (Might) Help You Make Sense of the World

A friend recently drew this to my attention.  I found instructive the maps of:

• where Google streetview is available (map 1),
• how much maternity leave is available in different countries (map 6),
• global population density (map 12) and
• alcohol consumption (map 14 - look where NZ ranks!)

and the maps of where MacDonalds operates (map 5) and of the longest straight line you can sail in the world (map 38) were just plain interesting :-)

God is a person

Martin and I are currently reading the Old Testament book of Ezekiel.  Two recent chapters have really struck me.

Ezekiel 16 is an extended metaphor of God's relationship with Israel.  God describes how, when he found her, Israel was rejected and weak - like a newborn baby that no one was bothering to take care of.  He took care of her, then later married her and gave her riches.  In response, she rejected him: she gave the gifts he'd given her to other men (i.e. offered them to idols - idolatory seems to be a huge theme in Ezekiel) and was as promiscuous as a prostitute.

The chapter is full of pain and anger.  God is no dispassionate force here: he is a person.  Rejection hurts him.  His wife taking other lovers makes him jealous and angry.

Then a few days later we came across Ezekiel 20, which starts like this:

In the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month, certain elders of Israel came to consult the Lord, and sat down before me. And the word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, speak to the elders of Israel, and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: Why are you coming? To consult me? As I live, says the Lord God, I will not be consulted by you.

God goes on to explain that he is refusing to talk to the people because they have rejected him, have refused to come back to him and are even seeking help from other gods at the same time as coming to him.

I've been sobered by both these passages.  I think I'm too casual in my relationship to God.  I think of him as always being there for me - yet these passages suggest that that's not quite true.  God is a loving God but also a jealous God.  He's only available to those who are willing to give him his rightful place: who are willing to serve him exclusively and to trust him and not seek help from other sources.

These passages have made me see that I need to treat God like a lover not a service-provider!