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Domain: mercycorps.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to mercycorps.org.
Comments · 8
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Re:or go vegetarian?
Actually, insect protein is about as close to eating vegetarian, environmentally, as you can get without being a vegetarian.
Of course, you can survive on a vegetarian diet, but it's not always the easiest or lowest impact way of eating. For example, you can buy a goat for a third world family from a non-profit development agency. They graze on things humans (and indeed most animals) can't eat, but they produce milk, wool and eventually meat at very little cost. I've bought some of these. For $175, you can change a family's life.
Pigs used to graze this way too, before the advent of factory farming. Here in New England, we have a kind geological feature called a drumlin; it's basically a low, rounded hill of glacial debris. Where a chain of drumlins reaches into the ocean, you get modest sized islands of a few acres, sometimes separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water and connected at high tide. A number of these islands used to bear the name "Hog Island" (until the developers get their hands on them, after which they get names like "Spinnaker Island"). The reason is that in colonial times people drove their pigs on the island and let them run free until it was time to slaughter.
But insects are by far the most efficient animal when it comes to food conversion, and the quality of that food is, from a nutritional standpoint, outstanding. Unfortunately, insect consumption is fading away in many cultures, as they turn to a more western diet.
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Re:Corruption is part of the culture of Africa
You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.
You need to know the relief organization you are donating to, although naturally there is always some parasitism involved in operating in certain places.
I like Mercy Corps' "Mercy Kit" concept. For a $150, you can buy a poor family a goat, into which the family puts practically any green weed and out of which they get milk from which they can produce cheese or yogurt. It will also (provided access to a ram) provide more goats. It's a clear deal: you aren't putting a small bit of money into a large slush fund, you are paying for one goat for one family. Some of that may be skimmed off to pay off the local officials, but that's overhead. There is a price for a specific result, and you decide whether you want to pay it or not.
If you're feeling rich, you can buy a cow, or even an entire village school.
Now with respect to armed revolution, let me remind you that Sadaam Hussein was a revolutionary. So was Idi Amin. Charles Taylor in Liberia was an armed revolutionary against Samuel Doe, another revolutionary.
Just today, there are reports of a church full of people burned to death in Kenya. Supporters of the opposition leader Raila Odinga had set up checkpoints to catch supporters of the president Mwai Kibaki. Rather than pass the checkpoint, the supporters of the president gathered into "safe" places like churches to wait things out.
How would they know who supported who? Simple. When it gets down to brass tacks in Africa, it gets tribal. Revolution tends to be the passing of the club of government power from one tribal faction to another, and so it accomplishes nothing.
The petty corruption you speak of is nothing. In some places officials aren't paid enough to live upon, so of course they extort money as part of their job. The money is there to pay them, but it is siphoned off by the more respectable big time crooks, who make their money selling resources to "morally superior" western businesses.
And there, in a nutshell, is Africa's problem: too much of its wealth is in extractable resources. You'd think it would be a blessing, but it's not. Resources are a prize to be fought over and monopolized, and the means to do so is revolution and division of spoils. Not enough of Africa's usable wealth is in its people, who are expendable as drill bits.
Humanitarian relief and development aid is the best investment there is for Africa. -
False dichotomy
No question, on the hierachy of priorities, not being dead is greater than software freedom. But it's silly to talk about this as if providing vaccines has an either/or relationship with providing software.
Once those children are alive, then what?
They should educated and made productive citizens of the world economy, otherwise the next generation of children will be vulnerable and dependent. Free software may help them. What we have learned from the Indian example is that there are great reserves of brain power that have heretofore been untapped.
That said, you shouldn't take your vague contribution to a "Linux Community" as the extent of your involvement with the problems of the world. This is the flip side of the coin: providing vaccines has an either/or relationship with providing software.
Bill's foundation work is laudable, but it doesn't fundamentally affect the way he lives. I'm not belittling this, I think it's great, but I'm mentioning this by way of pointing out that if other people, the great mass of less wealthy people, lifted a finger in a similar way, they could have a huge impact without compromising their lifestyle. For example, in my family we've been taking advantage of Mercy Corps' program where you can buy a package of services for a needy area. You can even buy a sheep or a cow for a family, which may be enough in some cases to lift that family out of poverty. I can assure you that once the money was donated, we never missed it.
If every person who is part of the "Linux Community" (especially us folks who are in effect just hangers on) bought just one mercy kit a year, the impact would be stupendous with virtually no impact on our lifestyle. -
False dichotomy
No question, on the hierachy of priorities, not being dead is greater than software freedom. But it's silly to talk about this as if providing vaccines has an either/or relationship with providing software.
Once those children are alive, then what?
They should educated and made productive citizens of the world economy, otherwise the next generation of children will be vulnerable and dependent. Free software may help them. What we have learned from the Indian example is that there are great reserves of brain power that have heretofore been untapped.
That said, you shouldn't take your vague contribution to a "Linux Community" as the extent of your involvement with the problems of the world. This is the flip side of the coin: providing vaccines has an either/or relationship with providing software.
Bill's foundation work is laudable, but it doesn't fundamentally affect the way he lives. I'm not belittling this, I think it's great, but I'm mentioning this by way of pointing out that if other people, the great mass of less wealthy people, lifted a finger in a similar way, they could have a huge impact without compromising their lifestyle. For example, in my family we've been taking advantage of Mercy Corps' program where you can buy a package of services for a needy area. You can even buy a sheep or a cow for a family, which may be enough in some cases to lift that family out of poverty. I can assure you that once the money was donated, we never missed it.
If every person who is part of the "Linux Community" (especially us folks who are in effect just hangers on) bought just one mercy kit a year, the impact would be stupendous with virtually no impact on our lifestyle. -
Donation spam from MercyCorps, NOT!
Last day or so, I got a spam claiming to be from MercyCorp, asking for donations. When I checked their domain, I was suprised to see that they had had the domain since 1996. The spam used a lot of graphics direct from the MercyCorp site, but the payment was via paypal hooked to some Hotmail address. According to MercyCorp's site they don't accept paypal. Email sent to paypal in hopes that they cut off those phishing scum's
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Wikipedia is good and all...
I like Wikipedia, so I sent $10 their way. I'm glad to see they raised over $20,000 in two days. I know I'm going to be marked off-topic for this, but while you're in the giving spirit, consider that tens of thousands of people were killed in Iran from Friday's earthquake, with many tens of thousands more people left without shelter, food, or water. Without blankets or clean water, lots of babies are going to die over the next two weeks from exposure and diarrhea.
I donated to Mercy Corps because they are working in Iran and they have a very high dollar efficiency rating, but you could donate to one of the dozen or so charities listed at the bottom left on this news story.
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why not do something?
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Re:Cynicism
Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?
Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.
Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.
Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?
Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.
best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.