Rath said:
|
I would love to hear that answer myself as well.
As I said about Canada I'm sure the US is fairly similiar now that the Government is introducing Universal Health Care. The majority of homeless in Canada and probably the US are homeless by choice. Doesn't the US have a good welfare system? What about low income housing? Drug rehab programs? I don't know that much about the US's social services so I can't say for sure.
But Thailand and many other countries have virtually no social services. Those living in the slums are legitimatly poor they don't have a Government helping them. Many of the people I met work all day for less then a dollar.
So what makes an American any more valuable then a poor starving person in Uganda for example? Now Kasz used perhaps the best example he could "Somalia". However even Somalia is beginning to turn around the Government is gaining more control and ten years from now for all we know it could be a self sufficient democracy.
Also how did this convo go from humanitarian missions to aid. Unlike just dropping a pile of rice into a country humanitarian mission usually lasts months to years. My aid team and most of the ones I know go out and teach farming skills, english and reading and writing and how to purify water for drinking. Most of the teams send kids to schools and educate them so that they can make better lives for themselves.
Somalia is a bad example because to my knowledge no sane organisation is sending teams, the last one I heard of got kidnapped. You can't really use a country with no teams as a good example of not needing humanitarian teams.
Many aid organisations like World Vision and YWAM train the locals and in turn bring them out of poverty. I watched a documentary about it happening in Thailand right before I left, so I could get to know the country a bit better. Their was a hill tribe with lots of land but they had no knowledge of farming and the hilltribe was brutally poor. A Canadian realized that this hilltribe was suffering so he went in and taught the tribe how to grow coffee beans. He threw his money behind starting of their first crop. He then helped the tribe by hooking them up with a coffee importer here in Canada. Now the tribe is thriving they are exporting coffee at amazing rates and the man who helped them is doing it all non-profit so almost all of the income goes straight to the tribe. Now they have those cat like animals eating the beans and shitting them out and the tribe is making insaine amounts of money. The kids are now in schools and the outcome for the tribe that was almost starving to death is now one of the wealthiest in Thailand.
Now I don't know if that man was Christian or not the documentary didn't say. But when someone cares and trains the people in a humanitarian mission they can change the lives of hundreds, thousands even millions. Now that guy did not do it with donations he used his own money and went in himself to help the people.
In almost every country on earth their are resources that the people if properly educated can use to generate income. Even in countries like Afghanistan one of the poorest countries on earth. Afghanistan is sitting on huge mineral deposits and if/when the war is over the people could be trained to mine those minerals and lift them out of poverty. Or crops the country is desperatly in need of food, all it will take is to teach the farmers to stop growing Opium (Which is very difficult) and to grow food and whoola.
Even in Africa their are several countries that could produce massive amounts of food, but the people are often uneducated and not capable of farming the land themselves. But if humanitarian teams teach them they could become self sufficient!
Unlike blindly dropping aid dollars into helping a humanitarian mission lets you help people hands on and see where your dollar is going.
-JC7
"In God We Trust - In Games We Play " - Joel Reimer
