Handout Mentality

I’m writing this blog in response to some distressing news from fellow PCVs discussed during an HIV/AIDS Committee Meeting in the capital last week. The World Food Programme, or WFP, in Lesotho is responsible for handing out free food (mostly maize meal and oil) to impoverished Basotho. Recently however, WFP has altered their guidelines—food is now only given to Basotho who are HIV positive, TB positive, and/or malnourished. While I don’t disagree with the new policy, reactions to it need to be considered. Volunteers are now seeing mothers purposefully starving their children or friends coughing on each other so they can be on the WFP list. This sort of thinking , the “handout mentality” in some third world countries, is incomprehensible to the Western world. (Although I have heard comparisons to the welfare junky, I refuse to place them on the same level.) Nurses are seeing healthy babies’ nutrition dramatically drop after the new WFP policy was introduced. There’s little they can do, though, without hard proof or contact with WFP Headquarters (who get their orders from an office far away in Europe).

WFP is an organization that I thought could do no wrong as far as services and mission. They aim to feed the hungry—what could possibly be wrong with that? I don’t mean to solely attack WFP, but I want to use this situation in Lesotho to support a theory that throwing money at problems (including hunger and poverty) DOES NOT WORK. Basotho don’t need handouts, they need skills and knowledge that will empower them to help themselves. I am witnessing a country’s dependency on foreign aid. In my mind, it is worse to make a poor country dependent on a rich country’s aid than to do nothing at all. I urge people to rethink the way they view charity. Is it really beneficial to give people free food when they are hungry? Will a people stop spreading HIV if they are given the treatment for free? These are tough questions that do not have simple answers, if any. These are the kinds of questions I ask myself every day.