A disturbing weekend.
Monday 21 September 2009
Would you prefer the child death rate in your own country to be lowered rather than in a country poorer than yours?
When I first saw this question I naively thought that, this being Save the Children with its global commitment to all children regardless of nationality or anything else, it was a non-question. Surely there could only be one answer. It was very chastening to discover that I was completely wrong.
I was invited to a meeting of volunteers and the discussion was dominated by the difficulties that two of them experienced collecting door to door in, as one of them put it, their predominantly white middle class neighbourhoods. Apparently they were frequently asked how much of the money collected is spent on British children and why it is so little. As one of them said, she was not being racist but it didn’t help that our promotional literature usually featured brown faces and never white ones. As she put it, she felt like part of a threatened minority in her own country.
I have no idea how widespread this view was in the meeting let alone Save the Children as a whole, since nobody, myself included, made any comment. I did however find it very disturbing and quite incompatible with Eglantine Jebb’s original vision. I have to say also that had this been my first contact with Save the Children it would probably have been my last.
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October 6th, 2009 at 2:45 PM
Hi Barry,
Thanks for talking at the volunteer day and sharing your news and views from Mongolia. I wish I’d been there to see you and Dorothee again…
I think I can very safely say that the views that were expressed that concerned you are not shared by 99% of Save the Children workers or supporters and I hope that George and Celia’s comments at the meeting and afterwards went some way to addressing this.
Incidentally, I heard a really damning statistic yesterday at a staff meeting here at our HQ that made me think about this a bit more:
1 in 2 children born in the UK this year may well live to 100 years old, yet a child born in Afghanistan in 2009 has a 1 in 5 chance of dying before they get to thier fifth birthday.
For me, that answers why so much of our work MUST be focused overseas.