Controversially, a petition signed by 100,000 people has called for a reallocation of the UK’s foreign aid budget to help compensate British flood victims and improve flood defenses. The £ 11bn annual budget aims to alleviate poverty and help crisis-affected areas around the world. Similarly, complaining voices in the right-wing media have criticized aid agencies like Oxfam for caring too much about international poverty and ignoring the poor in the UK.
This attitude seems to be the opposite of a more common sentiment that aid charities, associated with humanitarian disasters in the developing world, have no real businesses operating in the UK, where poverty is sometimes suggested. ” real “does not exist. In Venezuela in 1999, 30,000 were killed. The devastation in Bangladesh in 2004 was indescribable, as the waters covered 60% of the country and left an estimated 30 million people homeless or stranded. The 2011 Southeast Asian floods killed 3,000 more and wiped out the livelihoods of millions.
So should charity start at home? Should we first help our own people before we care about the rest of the world?
Help needed close to home
Someone said: “If you really want to make the world a better place, start by helping those in need right here in our city.”
In other words, there is no use sending money to a foreign aid fund if you ignore the needs of the people who sleep on your own streets and who need food banks.
Several international charities provide help in Great Britain.
The international charity Oxfam has had aid programs in the UK for the past 20 years.
UNICEF focuses on the most disadvantaged children wherever they are to help them grow up safe, happy and healthy. It works in 190 countries, including UK public services, to protect, promote and support breastfeeding and to strengthen relationships between mother and baby and family.
Save the Children works in more than 120 countries. He has worked in the UK since the 1930s when he set up nurseries in underprivileged areas of the country. Support children living in the most severe poverty by providing their families with basic household items, such as a child’s bed, a family kitchen, or educational books and toys.
“If you don’t have charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart problem.” (Bob Hope)
Aid for social exclusion
The need for food and shelter is an obvious need that pulls the strings of our hearts and is found in many war-torn regions and third world countries. Aid charities are not going to distribute emergency grain shipments to people in the UK because, in general, this is not how poverty is found here.
However, there are other forms of deprivation that are less easy to discern. Poverty looks different around the world, but disadvantaged communities have a sense of social exclusion, a lack of voice, and a lack of opportunities to shape their own lives. In Britain there are many families who are not starving, but who suffer from food and housing insecurity caused by low wages, unemployment: they are escaping the web of what some commentators have described as a social security system increasingly threadbare, where complications with benefits mean there are long delays.
Help that does not create dependency
A great concern that many of us have about giving to the poor is creating a culture of dependency. Where is the incentive to try to make personal progress out of poverty when one risks losing the benefit of regular giving? That is why genuine charity implies acting with common sense and with love.
“It is thought that charity with one’s neighbor consists in giving to the poor, helping the needy and doing good to all. But genuine charity implies acting with prudence and in order that good may result.” (Emanuel Swedenborg)
Oxfam uses the principle of “help”, rather than “permanent help”. On a practical level, it funds social welfare advisers to guide often desperate food bank clients through the maze of social security and offer advice on managing debt and getting back to work.
Another sensible way forward could be to donate money for low-cost loans that can create a “can-do mentality” on the part of recipients.
Help as daily charitable behavior
Giving to an aid charity is all well and good, but doesn’t it make sense unless we also do good in the normal course of our day-to-day duties? That would mean acting sincerely and honestly, caring for others rather than self-interest. Giving our time and efforts not for the sake of reputation, honor, and profit, but for the sake of meeting the needs of those around us.
“Charity towards one’s neighbor has a much broader scope than helping the poor and needy. Charity towards one’s neighbor implies doing the right thing in every task and doing what is required in any official position.” (Swedenborg)
At the center of this view is the notion that charity is about giving ourselves without seeking reward for our own self-interest.
Unless charity begins at home, in this sense of an attitude of goodwill and integrity in our relationships, then I would say that any donation of money for international aid is like giving a gift of guilt to a child to compensate for the absence of a father. or the fulfillment of an occasional social obligation without bothering to provide useful contact and input on a regular basis.
Help as a means of spiritual enlightenment
It is important to help those we meet and whose lives interact with ours in our daily lives. But that maybe should be just the beginning.
“Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there.” (Thomas Fuller)
Giving regularly to help others in need has been a common spiritual discipline and is found in various religious traditions. The Christian tradition of tithing, optionally pledging a portion of personal income for donation to charities, has analogies with the obligatory charitable traditions of Sunni Islam (Zakat), Judaism (Tzedakah), and Hinduism (Dana).
Copyright 2014 Stephen Russell-Lacy
