Charity

I was just reading Steve Bell's blog about his trip to Ethiopia. He's got some fantastic ramblings about "Charity". He says "Charity is not a result of do-goodism, it is the offspring of cherishing, that is… love." It's a great little paragraph, which is a nice change from some of the comments that I've been reading about "charity" in another book that I'm reading called "Dark Star Safari" by Paul Theroux.

It's a travelogue about his overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town, and he's constantly running into people who work for NGOs and "charities". He never has anything good to say about development work. And yeah, I agree that there are problems with the way a lot of Western NGOs work in "developing" countries. But I don't think Paul ran into too many folks who were doing charity work as an offspring of cherishing. So if I ever run into a roving journalist on his cross-Africa voyage, I pray that he will see my work as a result of love, and not a result of some duty-bound do-goodism.

I could ramble on about this topic, too... but my brain is a little frozen from driving home in the ice and snow tonight. That hot Juba sun is starting to sound better by the day...