Charitable harm

One of my graduate students shared a story the other day about how she had given some street urchins a bag of left-over food from a party she had earlier attended.  She then went into a church to pray. When she came out, she found her car surrounded by more beggars waiting for more blessings from the car.

I thought I would share more stories of this type to underscore how charity can be problematic.  My student was actually encountering not just a group of beggars but an entire mendicant culture that grew out of well-intentioned charity.

My student knew of the dangers of giving money, and thought the food would be helpful, but that didn’t solve the problem of entitlement, meaning the distorted sense of “fairness” among beggars.

An expatriate friend of mine had a similar problem some years back, when his congregation decided to distribute Christmas gifts in one urban poor community near their subdivision. They forgot that there were other poor communities nearby, which got upset about not getting their share, and went to the extent of threatening the expatriates with harm.

Many schools have Christmas charity drives, asking students to donate old clothes, toys and books.  That can be problematic, too, because some of the donated stuff aren’t just old but ancient, and worn out.  I have heard stories of yellowed and tattered underwear, broken toys, even expired medicines, still being included in the donation boxes. Then there are the inappropriate donations like high heels, gowns and suits.  Beggars can’t be choosers true, but if we are going to give, we should still keep dignity in mind.

Gift packs

Even when schools and organizations try to be more practical, they may still end up with inappropriate gifts.  My son’s school recently organized an “interaction” day with urban poor children.  They sent parents a letter telling us to prepare a standard gift pack consisting of a pencil case with pencils, erasers, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste.

I liked this idea of having standardized gift packs as well as an interaction day where our kids would give out the packs, and to interact with urban poor children. But there was a problem with what they asked us to pack, which was 250 ml of orange juice and a jumbo hot dog. The problem was that these are foods my kids know as junk food.  The only 250 ml packs of orange juice available on the market were water with a bit of orange flavor and lots of sugar.  And while I don’t forbid hot dogs, I never serve them at home because of its sodium nitrite content.

Here now was my son being asked to give these things to the poor.  I can imagine the indigent children going home and asking their parents to buy the particular brand of fake orange juice and hot dogs.  There was no time for me to express my reservations to the school, but I am suggesting now that next year, parents should just contribute money and the school can get their canteen to prepare healthy, local foods.

I do like the idea of interactions and hope the teachers can explain to the students that there is overwhelming and dehumanizing poverty out there, a stone’s throw away from their schools, and that that while we give Christmas gifts in the spirit of the season, charity should be a year-round concern.

We need to be talking as well with our kids about the hordes of street beggars that come out every Christmas season.  When they are younger, it’s mainly to remind them that they are fortunate to have a roof over their heads, and food to eat and toys and books and schools.  Later, they will have to understand that giving alms does little to address the inequalities, including how we tend to consume so much more at the expense of the poor.

I have been teasing my son and asking him if he wants to be renamed “Bilika” or “Baimie” because he keeps asking me to buy more toys for him, and it isn’t right that he should have so much, when poor kids have so little.  It is heavy stuff for a 6-year old, but it’s a message we have to keep repeating.

Badjao beggars

Later, too, we have to address the stereotypes of indigenous peoples (IPs) who come around during the holidays to beg.  Last Sunday, while driving through Del Pan bridge in Manila, I saw beggars every five meters, mostly elderly and women carrying children.  The women were in malong and when I asked, they said they were Badjao. They had been doing this for several years now and I hear people in Manila complaining and saying: “It’s in their culture to beg.  No matter how much you give, they’ll never be satisfied.”

Yet older Filipinos will remember the same remarks said about the Igorots, the generic term for indigenous peoples from the Cordilleras, because they used to come down to Manila in large numbers.  You rarely see Igorot beggars now in Manila and we have instead the Badjao and Negritos.

It’s not just Manila that has mendicants from indigenous communities.  The larger cities in the Visayas and Mindanao also have their share.  Davao, for example, has large numbers of Matigsalug.

Our kids have to understand all these groups were once proud people, resisting Spanish and American colonizers.  Through the years though, as their lands were grabbed by the colonizers and Filipino lowlanders, they were pushed further into the hinterlands.  While they could, in the past, survive through barter with lowlanders, the demands of the cash economy today have reduced them to abject poverty.

I refer to the IPs to underscore how a culture of mendicancy can develop within a few years and how destructive it can be.  Ironically, mendicancy thrives because it exploits positive values of giving that exist in our culture.  Both in Christianity and Islam, the two strongest religious traditions in the Philippines, charity and alms-giving are praised as virtues, but such charity has become distorted, reinforcing feudal relationships where the poor become indebted to the rich and powerful who dole out alms.

It is time we reexamined these religious values and see how they might be rescued and made more useful for our times.  Charity should move beyond alms-giving to finding ways to help people help themselves.  Projects like Habitat, where homes are build by donors together with the poor themselves giving “sweat equity,” are attempts to redefine charity.  Instead of encouraging more mendicancy, this Christmas we should be giving to organizations that are building a new tradition of charity and philanthropy.