Charities and giving to them

Got another plastic thingy through the door this morning. This time, a plastic sack with a begging note from Marie Curie Cancer Care. I chucked it in the waste paper basket. I seem to get this from them once a month. Same goes for other major charities. They simply bombard you with packages, literature and sometimes quite shitty ball point pens requesting you fill out some direct debit form. I don't need to list the names. You know them quite well because you get the same.

Don't get me wrong; I am in favour of charities even though I would have thought that any decent government could make them redundant. But that's naive and simplistic. No, what pisses me off is that so many of the bigger charities seem to spend so much money on so called fund raising that you wonder just how much money actually gets to the people they say they are helping.

I used to give £50 a month to Save the Children before I retired. Did that stop the garbage coming through my letter box? No! If anything, it only made things worse. They would phone me up once a month begging for more. In this day and age of computer databases, you'd think they could put some tags on me like, 'already donates', 'unwilling to pay more,' 'do not mail,' and so on and stop wasting their bloody time.

So I have scrapped them and, guess what? I don't get the mail shots nor the phone calls. They never even inquired as to my reasons for cancelling my direct debit. Just goes to show how bloody useless their monitoring system is.

So now I have a monthly direct debit payment to WaterAid and at Christmas, I send no cards but bung PumpAid 50 quid. Neither pesters me with letters or other crap so I suspect they use most of my money on doing what they intended to do which is providing clean water and sanitation to the poorer people of our world. And I am not sentimental here. Give them clean water and sanitation and maybe they will have fewer diseases - and then we won't have to send them expensive drugs to treat them.

Not only that but if you give them accessible water, then they might grow a few crops to feed themselves.

My Chinese general manager once told me, paraphrasing some old Chinese proverb, 'Many people who visit me bring me fish, but only you show me how to fish.' I was simultaneously flattered and humbled.