Smart Aid or Death Aid?
S. Bill Jimenez
18 April 2009
THE BUSINESS of helping people has a ripple effect, like throwing a pebble in a quiet pond. This act of loving and helping people spreads wider and wider in the community.
This attitude and commitment to love and help people starts from asking for God’s help in prayer. We pray for His guidance, direction, purpose and will in our life. He directs us toward a vision and mission in life corresponding to the service He wants us to do in His kingdom.
As American pastor and Bible teacher Warren Wiersbe noted, “Ministry takes place when divine resources meet human needs through loving channels to the glory of God.” And God uses people who are willing and committed, in spite of their imperfections and shortcomings. As He uses them, they are perfected, improved and empowered to become more effective and useful in the service.
We can have great and BIG plans to help people, but we must be willing to take little steps to begin the journey. As Edward Everett Hale, another American author and clergyman, also said, “I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. And what I can do, that I ought to do. And what I ought to do, by the grace of God, I shall do.” Karl Waggerl, a popular author in Austria, also said, “Ask God’s blessing on your work, but do not also ask him to do it.”
How should we help people? In an article (Newsweek, April 30, 2009), Lisa Miller wrote about Dambisa Moyo, the Zambian economist, educated at Harvard and Oxford, who launched her new book, “Death Aid.” Moyo argues that foreign aid keeps Africa in supplicant role when its governments need to become self-sufficient. Instead of aid, Moyo recommends other paths to financial and democratic independence: bond issues, trade, foreign investment.
On the other hand, Jamie Drummond, who together with Bono founded the advocacy group “One”, good aid or “smart aid” helps people build businesses and take care of their own children. Without it, people will die.
Miller concluded her article: “Amid these conflicting perspectives, some clarity emerges. The question for Moyo and for Bono, for governments and for celebrities–is not really about whether to help. It’s how to help better.”
Indeed, how can we help people better? Many times foreign aid gives government leaders of recipient countries opportunities to mismanage or misspent the money given. Other times, it perpetuates the mendicant mentality of poor people as they always expect aid and don’t aspire for self-sufficiency through hard work. It is a futile exercise to help able people who never learn to help themselves.
As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish for a day, and he will have a fish for a day; teach him how to fish, and he will have fish for life.”
It’s tragic for able people who waste their precious time gambling and drinking. Brazilian author Alice Dayrell Brant, who wrote under the pseudonym Helena Morley, had this to say: “I’m not sorry for anyone’s being poor; I’m only sorry when they have no work.” To succeed or to get by in life is a matter of providence and persistence, that is God’s part and man’s part working together. “God loves to help him who strives to help himself,” Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright, said.
Another goal of helping people is to empower them to help other people also. Like in the sharing of the Good News to people, “Freely you have received; freely give” (Matthew 10:8), so does the virtue of helping others after receiving some help. Maybe not in some big ways, but even in little means the ripple effect of loving and helping people continues.
As it continues, the positive effects on people are obvious. Dr. Albert Schweitzer recognized this when he observed: “Many have discovered helping others to be the most enduring therapy, for it’s the burdens you help another to bear that make your own seem light.”
Empowering people by loving and helping them is the winning proposition that everyone should not neglect in order for the force of good to dominate the world. As Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and author, has well said, “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in this world is for enough good men to do nothing.” Surely, good things happen in the world when good people do something good.
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