To Give - or not to Give

What should be the response of the wealthy of the world to the suffering of people in Africa? We like to come and look at the animals and we are very keen to preserve the natural heritage that we Africa has in terms of wildlife. We also sympathize with people who find it difficult to feed their children properly, and cannot afford light to read after dark, and have no money for transport to get to hospital to give birth or to have broken limbs treated. 

We tend to gloss over the suffering and hardship the wild animals cause to the local people both in terms of risk to health ( there is usually a death or two a year here in Mfuwe from elephants and hippos and a similar toll from crocodiles), and damage to crops and property. Of course it is true that the camps provide employment - but the majority of people living in the area are not directly employed in the tourist industry. They are small scale farmers and fishermen and traders of various sorts. 

The various Safari Lodges, which are mostly but not all run by Europeans, try hard to help the local community in various ways. One way is to arrange for a Mzungu (i.e. white) doctor i.e. me to come from abroad to help at the rural clinic which would otherwise be run by nurses who have a pretty basic education. Another is to provide public health measures such as impregnated bed nets to prevent malaria. 

There are also Charity run feeding programmes for schoolkids and there are several organisations that sponsor schoolchildren by paying fees and providing textbooks and uniforms to children that otherwise could not afford to go. Furthermore the supply of drugs to Zambian hospitals and pharmacies especially for HIV and Malaria seems to be largely funded by overseas aid from the developed world. There are lots of churches in Mfuwe - but to my perhaps jaundiced eye - their well fed pastors do not seem to be a help to their poor parishioners - perhaps the opposite, at least in material terms. 

But are the donations wasted and does all this help lead to a culture of dependency? And might Zambia be better off without all this charity? 

My suspicion so far (after just over 3 weeks) is that there is not a huge amount of waste at but that the dependency culture is a problem, and also the western derived culture that tells them that a government office job moving paper (or its modern equivalent ) about is the ultimate aim of all education. But it is also clear that in a society which is based on manual labour based agriculture - there is no way they can afford many of what we would regard as absolute necessities - and the conditions of life are still pretty brutal for most people despite the largesse of the west. Small contributions which would make no difference to our quality of life can really help here.  For  example charities such as Project Luangwa http://www.projectluangwa.org/