Arlean, thanks for the kudos. I try to do what I can and sometimes it seems like it will never be enough even for my wife's family, much less expanding something beyond that. I don't talk about this much because it often seems to be, even for expats living here, a distant kind of thing to them. They look at me when I do talk about it, amazed that I would tilt at windmills, and then tell me it's admirable (all the while I can see them thinking "thank god I'm not like that!" Heh).
But every once in a while you have to spread the memes that do some good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Tom, you're extremely spot on with the nutrition as well. Cleft palete is very common, as an physical example and something I'm fmailiar with. My wife's younger brother, now 11, has a cleft palete. He was a fraternal twin. His sister got some of the scarce nutrition available in the womb that he needed. He's very intelligent, fortunately not affected mentally. Due to my wife's persistence, he finally got a couple of surgeries, with a couple of more to come, to close up his sinus passages, which were open to his mouth inside. When he was a baby, they only bothered to close the exterior, his lip and part of his nose on the side.
Kudos to Smile International. American (North and South!), British, European, Paraguayan, etc. (I don't know the whole list of countries, just the ones my wife told me about), doctors donating their time to come to places like Paraguay and give these kids closure in many senses of the word. My wife went to Asuncion and met her mother and brother there to help them talk to the doctors and figure things out. There were people there as old as their early twenties who were looking to get horribly disfiguring cleft paletes closed up.
My wife was extremely impressed with the whole organization. The doctors were nice, helpful and had great bedside manners. They did a great job all around.
But the ignorance in the poor places in the world can be astounding and extremely painful to experience.
I have a few stories of needless death, witchcraft cures (and curses!), poverty and ignorance so extreme that it's really unbelievable that it goes on in this day and age. Thus my comments about sending money via something some one has seen on TV. There is no understanding and no changing of the problem without seeing it firsthand.
Tom, my hat is indeed off to you, dude. Not many people give enough thought or care to much more than their own lives. I don't blame them, I was certainly that way once. I just would like it to be different.
My hat's off to everyone that bothers to do more than just give handouts to bums they see on the street.
Arlean is very correct about the kids looking for money and how they are coached. Anywhere you see a kid begging in the streets, there's a more than good chance that the kid's older brother, sister, or parents are somewhere close.
A month or two ago, I was out driving around 9 pm or so, and was stopped at Callao and Santa Fe at a light. A family, fairly well dressed (not ragged), with a few store bags that looked brand new, crossed the street in front of me. A man and a woman, and four kids. I had my window open. The two youngest kids looked over, broke off from the family and came over and asked me for money. The father looked back, the family had finished crossing the street, and never said anything. I told the kids no and they ran back to the family.
Then there are the kind of beggars like the early twenty-year old guy that accosted a friend and I about six months ago while sitting outside TGI Friday at Alto Palermo. Healthy looking guy carrying a baby. He's not skinny, somewhat muscular. He's with a "partner in crime" guy, about same age and condition, also with a baby. The first guy comes up and asks us for money over the fence between the eating area and the public walkway along Colonel Diaz. My buddy and I are in the middle of a conversation. The beggar interrupts us asking for money. My buddy tells him no and tries to continue what he was saying. The bum becomes insistent, going on about how he needs money to feed his poor baby (as healthy looking as the father). Now I tell him no and tell him he's being rude interrupting a conversation. He walks off mumbling "la puta madre blah blah blah."
I know there are jobs available (for now - I don't know what things are going to look like in months). My wife has gotten a job for every single one of her family members that have come here, including cousins. They may not be jobs that people would particularly like to do, but they are honest means of support. The thing is, for some people it's easier to beg than to work hard. That's just the way the world is and I have a real problem seeing it, but there's not a damned thing you can do to help those people unless they want to help themselves.
BTW - I'm not completely indifferent to beggars on the street. But I assess their condition before I think about contributing anything.
But the best way to do help people, as Tom very astutely points out, is to give them opportunity not just money.
To me, the best way to provide opportunity is to provide knowledge, money and example. Leadership. It's something people in poor countries sorely lack. The memes need to be changed. The only way to do that is by getting into things locally and start spreading ideas.
I think you have to do it in a manner that the people you are trying to help can understand. Culture is a tricky thing, I'm beginning to understand more and more as I live here and travel to Paraguay and experience life there. There are times when I believe something like a benevolent monarchy is required, to an extent.
I can speak best to Paraguayan culture when I say this, but I have seen signs of it in Argentina as well: the culture rings strongly of feudalism. Twisted and lacking such concepts as
noblesse oblige, to be sure.
In Paraguay, the method I'm considering may well resemble a lord and his people. Keep in mind, I'm talking about a very poor part of Paraguay and not all of the rest of this may pertain to other situations. I'm sure I'm going to get all kinds of comments about pomposity and such
You have to understand that to connect with people so poor that some of their parents either never went to school or many often didn't make it out of grammar school, and see people with money and education as lords (I'm serious), you can't just go in there like a happy-go-lucky foreigner and start throwing money and ideas around hoping they stick.
I want to buy an estancia. I want to make it a going concern, with cattle and probably horses, pasture for my animals and also to rent at a cheap price to those who need land to graze cattle - that's a big problem for some, to provide not only the land, but also the water and grass needed to feed the animals.
I also want to plant some hectares and provide work for people around the area who have no opportunites. Depending on how much money I have, I can see also doing things like buying a couple of tractors for plowing, a couple of harvesters maybe. Those can be rented out at cheap prices for those who are currently using oxen (I kid you not) to plow their fields. The harvesters may detract a bit from employment opportunites - that has to be looked at at first at least.
I won't be looking to make money for myself, just enough to support the operations. Including organizing the work force I'd hire into a company-like environment. Teaching hard workers how to make sure supplies are purchased and tracked and accounted for and moving them into positions of authority. Making the workers partners with profit-sharing to provide incentives. Paying them a decent salary.
But having no mercy on those who try to take advantage, steal or don't work.
In the meantime, we'd be making contacts among the local population, with the help of my wife's family. We'd be looking for good opportunities for people that have land but are in need of infrastructure. Simple stuff like wells, pumps and simple irrigation systems. We'd offer them loans, but with conditions. They would have to partner with us to accomplish their goals. We'd sit down with them, help them figure out the best way to proceed, and then go through the process with them of implementing the work, offering (requiring in many conditions before the loans are made) classes in basic money handling, agricultural and business subjects such as what crops to plant when and how to take care of them, free market concepts, etc.
It would be slow-going, for sure. I don't want the operation to get too big too fast, to make sure that the best opportunities are given a chance and the most efficient use is made of what will be a limited supply of money that must be marshalled.
But one thing I see coming from loaning money to farmers that can increase their yields and bring in more valuable crops is employment. It will start with the family themselves who own the farm. At first they may just employ all of their own family, which is a good start. The more successful they are, the more people they will need to hire. Maybe at first just during planting and harvesting, but eventually maybe to help maintain and work the crops as well.
Each farmer that I can help in that manner will hopefully become a little engine of (relative) wealth production. Enough of those and things will begin to rise in the area.
I'll never forget a trip I made with my father-in-law and one of my brothers-in-law. I forgot to mention that another thing my wife's family has managed to buy was a Ford pickup, about 15 years old, 2 1/2-ton capacity. It barely operates at times due to lack of maintenance, but it gives them an advantage when used properly.
We were going to collect harvested sesame from people. This was one of the times he was trying to do wholesale buying and sell it to the sesame company. I wasn't familiar with enough of what was going on at the time to have questioned the profitability of what he was doing.
Anyway, we stopped at various little farms throughout the area weighing big bags of harvested sesame. They would pull out a couple of metal rods, tie one of them vertically to a tree branch, attach the other one horizontally to a point on the vertical rod, and use lead weights to weigh the bags. We'd load the bags in the pickup, pay off the farmer and go on to the next farm.
One of these was very, very poor. They had about a third of a hectare that they were cultivating. We stopped in front of a small wooden shack with a grass roof, about 40 sq mts in size, looking like it might fall over if I huffed and puffed. The señor was in his mid-thirties but looked like he was at least 50. His wife had died a couple of years ago. He had three kids, one of them a teenaged girl dressed in almost nothing, and that barely hanging on her it was so ratty. She was filthy, her hair uncombed. She was holding a baby - it was hers. A boy and a girl, don't remember precisely their ages but they were under ten, were running around buck naked and grimy.
The guy had three bags to sell and received about 500,000 guarani for his crop. That's about $120 USD today.
