Leave OXFAM alone!

One of the world’s great charities is under attack. It seems some of their workers procured the services of child prostitutes while working in earthquake-torn Haiti. If true, this is certainly despicable behaviour on their part. To exploit children in a zone already riven by extreme poverty and then the shattering effects of a large earthquake is inexcusable. But let’s not trash the whole of OXFAM because of it.

Since it was founded after WW2, it has done the most wonderful work in alleviating the worst effects of poverty around the world. There’s an old expression:
If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give that man a fishing-rod and you feed him for life.
That adage has been taken to heart by OXFAM in its work. Digging wells rather than handing out bottles of water (though they do that as well, sometimes), advising about crop rotation and other simple methods of increasing yield, they have transformed the lives of millions of the world’s poorest  people. And they’ve worked harder than most international charities to make sure a minimum of their donations are spent on administration, enabling the largest proportion to go to where it’s needed.

But as usual, the right wing rags have used OXFAM’S current embarrassment to call for the end of international aid generally. “Why donate 0.7% of our GDP to corrupt countries who hate us when the money could be better deployed at home?” etc etc. They ignore the fact that we do ourselves a great deal of good around the world by our largesse, even if some of that aid ends up in the wrong hands. We shouldn’t be placing political strictures on our aid; just as we shouldn’t expect gratitude from a homeless junkie when we lob them a pound coin. We do it because we are wealthy and they are not.

To summarise, it’s good for us, spiritually, to give away a tiny proportion of our wealth to those less fortunate than ourselves.