You might want to read this book

I seldom recommend books for others to read. There are just too many of them out there for me to ever say “this is the best book ever”, or “you have to read this book!” Books are almost always a matter of personal taste both in terms of style and content. There are a few authors that I would occasionally recommend to a friend but generally speaking I avoid any suggestion that my personal taste in anything is sufficiently well enough developed that someone else should listen to me. But today I am making an exception to this rule …..

I have just finished reading Dr. Suzanne Nutt’s book entitled Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid. It is a stunning and compelling discussion on the failure of aid from the developed world to the developing world. Dr. Nutt has a M.Sc in Public Health as well as being a doctor of medicine. As an advocate for children’s’ right she has, for the past 15 years, been to all of those places that are on the 10:00 news so often because of what seems like an endless cycle of natural disasters and war. Dr. Nutt’s concern and outrage at the ineffectiveness of many of the most visible aid agencies is supported by both well researched facts and personal stories. In her far too short book she talks about the women that she has met, and of how some of them have been killed for speaking out and of the extraordinary courage of those women who have survived and continue to fight. Dr. Nutt’s message is powerful and depressingly clear. Both individuals and as a government Canadians are not only not doing enough, but what we are doing may be ineffective.

While I knew some of the information and in fact talk about it in one of my classes, there was much that I did not know or understand. I think what was most depressing was the fact that many of the aid agencies are not listening to, or engaging as equal colleagues the people who live in the affected areas. It would appear as if we are still performing charitable acts; that is we are doing something that we think will help someone because it makes us feel righteous, kind and noble. That has to be the wrong reason to help someone. And sometimes I think, that when you do things for the wrong reasons – no matter how right the act seems – it is fated to go wrong.

Read the book. Perhaps a few people will change how they give support and to whom. Perhaps some of us will work harder at trying to convince our government to think about why they give money to countries and how. Perhaps they, rather than decreasing the amount that we give (in terms of the GDP), they will work on giving something close to what such countries as Demark, Sweden and Norway give. Perhaps by helping others, we will rediscover what the word aid means.