I talked to a friend the other day. He's in the Rotary club, and told me excitedly about a service project that he's going on, somewhere in Central America. A member of his Rotary club makes certain stoves (the material cost is $200) that he and a group of fellow Rotary members will assemble, in the homes of poor villagers, also attaching a stovepipe to take the smoke away.
My friend went on for a long time about the poor women who tend the open fires that they use before getting the stoves, and how much they suffered from the smoke. And how great a service project it was.
I felt like I would if a proud parent is droning on about his kid's science projects, that's complete crap. You can't SAY anything, but you're thinking pretty negatively thoughts about it.
Same with this project. People want all kinds of kudos and pats on the back for doing the projects, but it's inefficient and has potentially negative consequences in so many ways.
- You're making the villagers into "recipients of charity". That has a corroding effect on people's morale.
- It costs about $1500 for one volunteer to go down there. That alone could pay for a bunch of these stoves to be built.
- Does it really need volunteers from the US, building these? If they're indeed necessary, why can't they be built by the villagers themselves, who are probably FAR more accustomed to manual labor?
- If it's just a smokey fire issue, couldn't you just give them a stovepipe, instead of building the whole stove?
And the problem with charity is this...it's always FAR worse than it looks on the surface. Are people really interested in having some unskilled foreigners come and build messy stoves in their homes? Is the smoke such a big problem for them? Are they really not capable (if they want to) of figuring out for themselves some way of getting the smoke out? I'm guessing they're giving the villagers some additional donations, just for them to be willing to accept these volunteers.
I just read the book Hunters of the Great North, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. He commented quite a bit on Eskimo architecture, how it was perfectly suitable to the climate, and they adjusted the air inflow/outflow to get all the smoke out.
Surely people in Central America can do the same. Perhaps they want the smoke, for another reason - preserving food, or whatever.
It's just so clear to me that this service project is a "pat myself on the back" form of tourism. But without even the benefit of the villages of getting a job, that they can be proud of. No, they are now recipients of charity.