When you give your money to an aid agency, don’t you want to know how it is being spent? My latest audioblog asks when are aid agencies going to start being more upfront about their work. Transcript below…

There is no question in my mind what the most affecting story of the past week was. It was Sean Penn’s erudite, thoughtful, really powerful interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!  

Sean has become the manager of an intentional refugee camp in Haiti that currently houses 55,000 people, and he is bringing his not inconsiderable intelligence, strength of will, his enviable network of contacts, and the organisational skills honed by years of working in the unpredictable world of making movies to bear to provide security and access to healthcare and other services. It’s absolutely worth taking an hour out, perhaps over your lunch break, to listen to what he has to say.

The report was made all the more poignant because it has been six months since the earthquake devastated one of the poorest countries in the world. With the hurricane season bearing down on the displaced Haitians, you’d expect to see some progress in helping them to rebuild their lives, maybe some permanent structures to help them weather the coming storm. But that just hasn’t happened.

Let’s put aside for the moment the $5.3 billion in relief aid pledged by world governments. Less than 2 per cent of this, by the way, has actually been paid and most rich nations continue to drag their heels on the issue of when they are actually going to pay up. I think most of us have become cynical enough not to expect governments to deliver on the promises they make to those most in need. But aid agencies – that is a whole different kettle of fish.

The world’s aid agencies are our interface with this crisis and indeed with crises anywhere else in the world. They are the networks through which we as citizens of one country show that we care about what is happening in another country. They are our way of reaching out to strangers.

So it’s a reasonable question to ask: just how well are these agencies representing our human compassion and concern to these beleaguered, bedraggled fellow citizens.

And the answer is we really don’t know. And worse than that, the big aid agencies like Red Cross, Save the Children and World vision really don’t like us asking.

 Last week a report from the Disaster Accountability Project turned up some disturbing facts about the Haitian relief effort. For instance of the 197 organizations identified as soliciting money for their activities in Haiti following the earthquake:

• Only 6 had publicly available, regularly updated, factual situation reports detailing their activities in that country.
• The vast majority, 128, did not have such reports available on their websites.
• Only around ten percent, 21, were responsive to the Project’s request for more information, and of those that did respond, many provided only incomplete information which made judging their progress almost impossible

In the wake of the disaster hundreds, if not thousands, of relief organisations sprung up asking for money and the public has given generously. As of this month some $1.3 billion has been donated by private citizens. And mostly we never asked the big questions or demanded the facts about how many people were being served by this money, or where and how was it being spent? The relief agencies, it appears, didn’t ask themselves that either and this, as Sean Penn notes in his interview, has really hindered basic coordination of efforts in Haiti.

This raises a lot of questions for me. For a very long time, certainly for my lifetime, we have been conditioned to believe that our aid agencies are forces for good. It is taboo question this assumption. I can still hear the very vocal affront of Bob Geldof  when 25 years on he is still being  questioned about Live Aid and where the money actually went.  Admittedly he can be a pretty easy target.

The fact is our larger, more long established aid agencies are not just kindly do-gooders. They are major corporations with premises, and financial investments, and staff, and overheads and all the same frustrating hierarchies that you find in any large organisation. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

Our global aid agencies are also brands and each of them works hard to reinforce, to really sell, their image in the public mind. Again this was something that the Disaster Accountability Project found. When it asked for facts, what it got was links to facebook pages and blogs full of purely anecdotal accounts, heart wrenching pictures of children and other emotional appeals to tug at our heart strings and our wallets and make us feel that the agency was this force for good. Some even claimed that if you wanted to know what they were doing, you should log onto their Twitter pages. I mean, seriously, how much factual information can you give in 140 characters?

This is absolutely unacceptable, and really it’s a disgrace. And while there is no doubt that the job in Haiti is difficult and chaotic, and there is also no doubt that independent groups like Sean Penn’s are leaner, more fluid and more able, sometimes through sheer force of will, to cut across the wasteful bureaucracies that have become such a part of the aid agency functioning, there is a dark side to the international aid business which may be contributing to the lack of focused response. In part it is schadenfreude, the often unexamined but exquisite pleasure in the misfortune of others, but it’s also the continual back biting and dick measuring and competition to be the hero of the piece, that needs to be dragged out into the light of day. Environmentalists take note – since we can sometimes suffer from the same lack of awareness of our motives.

Six months on the reality is that only 28,000 of the 1.5 million refugees have been rehoused. Spontaneous camps have become lawless, frightening places where. Looting and rape are daily occurrences and disease is rife. Whatever the difficulties, it is absolutely not good enough

And you have to ask yourself, is this what you intended when you donated your money to help?

My own evolving view is that aid agencies must be subject to the same accountability as any other corporations and we as a concerned and compassionate public should be much more demanding of these groups that rely on our donations to keep them going. Perhaps it really is time to come up with an accountability checklist that all aid agencies must adhere to and to have an overall international authority that demands accountability of our aid agencies so those of us who want to help but who cannot abandon our day jobs or families to do so, can be assured that when we offer what we can in the form of a donation the people most in need will benefit immediately and fully from that gift.

This article is a transcript from the audioblog ecoreflections360, which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week. You can listen here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

I’d been looking for stories that made me feel something other than just plain angry… not so easy these days. And then I had an idea.

The result was my audioblog, ecoreflections360, the text of which appears below, and which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting and uplifting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week. You can listen here.

Being  (Fully) Human

It’s really, really difficult to know how to begin, how to pick out the best stories in the news, especially when we are so bombarded with information on a daily basis. I think the journalist in me always wants to pick the biggest story or the brightest angle, to be seen to be staying on top of the news.

But the human being in me tends to look for those stories that connect either literally or symbolically with what’s going on in my own world in my own inner life. And because of that I was immensely grateful for an essay [Struggling to be ‘Fully Alive’] by Robert Jensen at the University of Texas at Austin, which was trying to get to the bottom of the feelings that accompany our intellectual understanding that we live in a world in collapse.

It was a fascinating collection of responses to his request that people write to him and tell him what they are feeling. Not just what they think, not just the facts about how enormous the national debt is, or much CO2 is in the atmosphere, or how much oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from that giant hole in the earth, but what they feel when confronted with these things. And it renewed my faith in humanity that we are not, as we are sometimes portrayed, a race of desensitised individuals. I mean there’s always going to be someone who tells you that we need to be rational – whatever that is – that a feeling response to events is not practical, and there will always be people who are so out of touch with their own feeling response that they actively resent yours.

But what I was reading here were the sensitive thoughtful, complex responses to the grief that so many of us feel as we watch the world basically go down the toilet: hopelessness, sadness, a sense of amusement at the absurdity of it all, pressure, rage, guilt, a sense of being trapped and an enormous amount of anger at what Jensen called the ‘elites’; the politicians the multinationals and the media propagandists who promote, continue to promote, in spite of all the evidence, the same arrogant and greedy and ethically and morally deficient behaviour which is hastening this collapse.

And although there has been a lot in the press lately about how environmentalists need to stop being doom mongers, how we need to be more positive, more upbeat I tend to believe that we could be more effective if we could not just learn to communicate more effectively the urgency of our situation, but also help people embrace the emotional reality of it, to have faith that strong emotions don’t need to be paralysing. That they can be inspiring and motivating.

In fact, the more we deny or repress essential parts of ourselves the more havoc those parts can cause. The natural flow of human life is towards self expression and if the self can’t for whatever reason express itself positively it will express itself in destruction and chaos and envy and prejudice.

This was summed up better than I could have done it in an essay, a 2002 essay, by Thomas Moore posted on the Planet Waves website – a little more than a week ago. This wasn’t an essay about the environment – far from it. It was called The Temple of the Body: Sex in an Anti-erotic Age.  And if that sounds provocative well it was, in part. It was certainly about what happens when we deny the instincts of the body, when make some sort of sterile purity and perfection in ourselves and those around us the main goal. But in a larger sense it was also about the felt experience, about what happens when we hack off bits of our common humanity, our spirituality, our deepest desires and the trouble that that causes; the havoc that a population of fragmented, partial people can cause. In the final paragraph Moore says:

“Every day we could choose to be intimate rather than distant, bodily rather than mental, acting thoughtfully from desire instead of from discipline, seeking deep pleasures rather than superficial entertainments, getting in touch with the world rather than analyzing it at a distance, making a culture that gives us pleasure rather than one that merely works, allowing plenty of room in our own and others’ lives for the eccentricities of sexual desire, and generally taking the role of lovers rather than doers and judges”

Well, amen to that.

The more I look at this issue the more I think that we humans have taken a rather strange path in our development. You know we are always striving for more, trying to push past our boundaries and somewhere along the line that message, that natural impulse has become distorted.

The self has an infinite, almost heroic capacity to give more, even when we think we are empty. But instead of pushing past our own personal boundaries to become smarter, more involved, more sensitive, more honest and more loving, we turn our attention outward, and exploit the finite resources of the earth instead.

And look at the damage that it’s done.

What is more creating a broken world to reflect our broken selves actually plays into the hands of those ‘elites’ that Robert Jensen was talking about, because when we are so broken, we are so much easier to lie to, so much easier to manipulate. I know that sounds like a challenging thing to say word but can there be any doubt that this is what we have allowed ourselves to become?

The evidence isn’t much fun at the moment, it’s scary and it’s complex, overwhelming really, and it’s the stuff I struggle with every day. You probably struggle with this stuff too.

The facts of our lives are challenging. But the answer, I think, is to strive, not to create the next technofix, but to become our whole selves again, to be fully human with all that that entails. I’m thinking now of Duane Elgin author of Voluntary Simplicity and his belief that simplifying our outer lives, living more lightly on the earth, has a knock on effect of creating much  more space for a complex and fulfilling inner life.

And with that thought I’m going to leave you until the next time. I’m Pat Thomas. Thanks for listening.

You can find my previous AlterNet post here.