Americans are great people, and they want to help the rest of the world. Indeed, they want to make things right, even when they are beyond their control. There is something about an American that makes them different, and more caring. We hate to see people in severe hardship, and we want to help them in some way, but often we do the wrong thing, it happens way too often in fact.
Not long ago, I talked to the committee head of a major project going on in a very poor part of the world in conjunction with one of the major NGOs. He explained to me the problems they had with delivering food to the poor. He said that often the government would stop shipments, and demand that they were the ones who could distribute the food. They did this so that people would see them as almighty and important, thus allowing them to continue to rule.
Other times he told me of guerrillas and anti-government militia factions, which would hijack the food shipments, and then sell that food to the very people that his group was supposed to deliver the shipment to. The bad guys would then take all the money and profits from the food that they sold, (which they paid nothing for, because they stole it) and then they would go and buy machine guns, AK-47s to arm their group.
Then these bad guy groups would use those guns to terrorize the people who were poor and needed the food. They would often slaughter them in their villages. Of course, the guerrillas would’ve never have been able to do this, had they not had the money from hijacking the food shipments. In a way his NGO and group that wanted to feed the poor were enabling the bad guys to create a humanitarian disaster.
As I talked to him his voice got shaky and a tear came from his eye, and I could sell that we need a discussion on the honesty in humanities, and the cause and effect of our Third World humanitarian efforts. Please consider all this.