Doesn’t
the state take care of them?
No. To take care of street kids is up to private and
parochial initiatives. For example the nuns who look after
the kids go round the shops each day and put up plastic
bags at the entrance doors. In the evenings they collect
the bags, and whatever they have been given is used to cook
for the kids the next day.
As
one can imagine both quantity and content of the
donations vary wildly - sometimes there’s nothing in
the bags, most of the time there isn’t enough food to
fill their stomachs, and terms like ‘balanced diet’ or
“nutritional” are just that: words without a meaning.
When Mrs. Winter accompanied Tom to one of the houses
he oversees and saw what was happening there she went
straight to a canteen-kitchen and bought food for the
25 kids. It was a proper meal with chicken meat and
fruits, enough to last another day too … and it was
under €25.
How
many kids are being cared for?
As of November 2010 the projects looks after about 130 kids
in several houses.
How
about donations in kind?
To send goods is quite expensive and is therefore only
worth it for items which cannot be produced in or would
still be expensive in India (glasses are a
good
example).
Transport (and thereby environmental) costs can far
exceed the actual value of the goods being send. An
exception are large scale catastrophes where it is
important that help is being delivered quickly (tents,
blankets, clean water). But in general cash donations
not only help better but they help twice. For one
thing donating money helps to supply food, clothing,
and accommodation to the street kids, but on the other
hand buying locally also helps the small farmers and
merchants which are not rich enough to be able to
help. When Mrs. Winter revisited the kids and heard
that they do not have any school clothing she went out
and bought some rolls of fabric from which the nuns
made the shirts - which did not only benefit the
children …
What
percentage of donations will reach those in need?
That strongly depends on where you donate. Large
organizations have permanent employes, have to pay for
advertising, rent, heating, phone travel retirement plans,
etc - all this comes under the term “administrative
charges” and can consume 20-80% of the donated money. Small
organizations and private initiatives are more cost
effective as they are run by volunteers, often both in the
donor and the recipient countries. On the other hand one
has to take care when donating to private initiatives - far
to many crooks try to take advantage of the helpfulness of
others.
What is special about the relief project “India’s Street
Kids” is that 100% of the donated money
Is
providing relief support always a good thing?
No. It depends on the kind of help you are willing to
give.
This
became painfully obvious during the starvation crises
in the 1980s and 1990s in Africa. Many nations donated
their harvest surplus to help the starving, but
mandated that the grain had to be distributed for
free. What seemed sensible at first glance had two
catastrophic consequences - on the one hand the price
of grain on the World markets stayed high pushing some
of the countries dependent on buying grain deeper into
poverty, on the other hand it ruined the small farmers
who could no longer sell their home grown grain. This
made Africa even more dependent on relief support and
exacerbated the situation in the following years.
