HOW NOT TO HELP THE POOR

It appears on page B10 of the Huntsville Forester, Ontario, Canada, a full page "thank you" to local businesses from 17 Christian ladies (their word) for donations to a cause grandiosely branded "Nicaragua 2006." They spent a whole ten days smiling at small children (none of the women speaks Spanish),their fundraising guaranteed one food centre would continue to feed poor kids three times a week , gave out second-hand clothes , distributed medicines, did such good works that the seventeen lives changed "in ways not even we fully comprehend...but our prayer is that the lives we touched will understand just a bit better about the love of Jesus, so freely given." And, oh yeah, they thanked the donors for help in building a church, get this, on a rubbish dump.Wonder what happens when it rains?

So these women feel good about what they have done. So, I guess, do the dozens of local companies who gave money and material. Unfortunately what they have all done is guarantee Nicaragua will remain the region's poorest country.Their patronising, their condescension and the ignorance are breathtaking.

A recent study done by an expert in Honduras, himself a longtime Christian missionary dismissed these short-term missions by well-intentioned insouciant "evangelical tourists" as meaningless and damaging. If you want to help, first learn the language, then commit to spending at least two years in the country, and do not assume you know more than the poor themselves. Listen to them, hear what they want, and working side by side as equals..

The seventeen ladies and their donors could have gone a much easier and infinitely more effective route. They could have simply sent the money to various responsible NGOs that are helping 300,000 Nicaraguans whose lives have disintegrated after the crash of world coffee prices, the main cause of the continuing poverty. They could petition our local Muskoka MP, Cottager Clement, to hound the International Monetary Fund into giving coffee growers in Central America cheap loans without punitive conditions.

If you really want to help Nicaraguans, don't give them Jesus, used clothes and Canadian values. Give them back their coffee trade.