Give

PERICLES

Acts of charity let light into the world. This is more obvious when they take place in the dark.

On 12 January 2010, less than an hour after a devastating earthquake hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, night fell. Even before the sun had set beneath the Caribbean horizon, many were already in darkness, trapped and crushed beneath piles of broken concrete and twisted metal. Many died instantly, followed by thousands more during the ensuing days and weeks. Of a total population of 3 million people, around 220,000 lost their lives, another 300,000 people were injured and over 1.5 million were left homeless. The term ‘humanitarian disaster’ is, perhaps, overused but on this occasion it felt like an understatement.

The tremors that devastated Port-au-Prince, which climbs from the dockside area up steep, eroded mountainsides, lasted only 35 seconds. Given that no one had experienced a significant earthquake in Haiti in living memory, very few would have realised what was occurring in those moments, during which ceilings began to fall on their heads and the ground heaved beneath their feet. Even after the strange deep thundering noise had stopped and been replaced by screams and pleading prayer, no clear sense of what had just occurred could have been possible. Certainly no one, from their own limited vantage point, could have had any notion of the scale of it. It would have been catastrophic and life-changing for each individual even if this event had just engulfed their own street or school or hospital, never mind the reality that a large city had just been devastated by this nameless thing.

One scientist later estimated that the force unleashed that afternoon on Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas was the equivalent of thirty-five Hiroshima bombs. However, this disaster didn’t fall from the sky, but emanated from an event 6 miles below the town of Leogane, 16 miles west of the city. The rubbing of two tectonic plates, which had been moving innocuously past each other for a few millimetres each day for many years before the earthquake, and which will probably continue to do so for many years to come, released the energy that so violently shook the relatively soft and crumbly ground to which the city clung.

It is not so easy to be precise about where an act of charity originates in a person. I think most of us would say it begins in the heart; a feeling of compassion which normally precedes any reasoned decision to act. We know that often the journey from our heart to our head (and back again, sometimes) can be a long and complex one. That night in Port-au-Prince the survivors did not have the luxury of having much time to think much about what to do. Amid the agony and mayhem people began to act: fathers and mothers responding to their family’s screams beneath the rubble by digging with their bare hands; bloodstained school children carrying friends who couldn’t walk towards hospitals that no longer existed; a small mother carrying a large broken son to who knows where; everyone all the while covered in a coat of white dust. Around some piles of immovable, contorted concrete slabs people huddled to speak words of comfort to dying loved ones below. Strangers helped wounded strangers, aiding and carrying each other in an exodus towards empty spaces – like a whole throng of Simons of Cyrene.

In the days and weeks after the earthquake, an enormous global outpouring of help and goodness was directed towards Haiti. Thousands rushed to donate to various appeals. A wide assortment of people and organisations from all over the world were drawn to Port-au-Prince in order to try to help – myself among them. While many of those co-ordinated efforts of people from outside Haiti should be lauded (and have been quite often), they should surely seem small when compared to the innumerable heroic acts of charity – most of them forever unrecorded – carried out by the Haitian people themselves in response to this previously unimaginable horror. That local response, though, should probably have been expected. It should be no surprise that an irrepressible people whose forefathers and mothers gloriously defeated Napoleon and slavery, and who have battled tirelessly with every kind of cruel injustice through many generations since, would respond to this latest calamity with such strength and with such love for each other. And perhaps any group of people, even one that hadn’t experienced a history like that of Haiti, would respond heroically to such suffering among their own families and communities, discovering depths of love and strength which had previously gone untapped. We know that human beings are like that, and yet each time such acts prompt in us new feelings of wonder and awe. When a darkness covers the earth, very quickly little lights begin to flicker among the ruins, as they did that unforgettable night in Port-au-Prince, attracting around them close knots of people who can hold each other and wait for dawn.

I wish that the heroism of the Haitian people in the aftermath of the earthquake had been better reported. It would have been good for the world to have learnt more about that rather than hearing messages which reinforced stereotypical generalisations about endemic corruption and lawlessness. Those things do exist in Haiti, and are significant challenges that should be reported on, but not in an exaggerated, lazy way. There are serious consequences to such journalism and political rhetoric. When we portray a country like Haiti in this manner, we suggest it is completely reliant on outsiders to come and solve the problems it faces. Some reporting after the earthquake gave the impression that only foreign aid workers were pulling people from the rubble and that the aid efforts’ biggest challenges were the lawlessness and inefficiency of the country. It is true that some areas of Haiti suffer high levels of violence, and that the capacity of the government and key national institutions is very limited. These realities made it a very difficult place to work effectively long before the earthquake. However, creating an impression that Haiti was at best passively waiting for aid, or at worst actively undermining or obstructing it, would be to tell a terrible lie about that multitude of dust-covered, bloodstained individuals carrying out extraordinary acts of goodness.

Indeed, it would be to slander humanity more generally to suggest that people would wait passively for outside help to arrive rather than engage in spontaneous acts of individual kindness, like those who poured out kindness in the flickering light of candles after that cruel earthquake. While it is certainly necessary, in the face of great human suffering, to move beyond that chaotic phase towards something more organised and cohesive, among those instinctive actions we can sometimes witness the most pure and inspiring examples of charity. And to see the splendour of a truly selfless act is to be reminded of how astonishing and wonderful human beings are. Those glimpses can leave us with a desire to become more fully human ourselves: they can move us from looking inwards to looking outwards; they can transform our world into a place full of hope and possibility. They can leave us, too, with a desire to understand better what it is that inspires people to do these things.

Once, in Malawi, we decided to conduct a survey in an effort to shed light on that very question. We conducted a whole series of meetings in communities across Malawi where tens of thousands of volunteers – without any financial reward – give their time to cook meals each day for the children attending their local school. They are part of a vast army of porridge cooks spread across every district of the country, from Karonga in the north to Nsanje in the south.

We arrived at one village school, perched in the lee of a steep, rocky mountainside, long before the children, but the volunteers had been there for some hours already. As we climbed out of our car, we could see their fires glowing under enormous pots of porridge which some ladies were stirring with huge paddles that looked like oars. They were expecting our arrival and left their simmering porridge to sit with us in the dusty sparse grass of the empty playground. One unwrapped a baby from the cloth that had held him safely on her back and began to feed him.

We wanted to better understand their motives, to avoid the risk of taking them for granted and to ensure we found the right ways to recruit others like them in new villages as our work expanded. What was it that led these woman (and a much smaller number of men) to give up their time in order to cook and serve the free school meals for the children of their communities? What compelled them to arrive here each morning, long before dawn, to light those fires? Why take on that extra responsibility, knowing that the remainder of the day was going to be taken up with the exhausting work of survival? They would be planting, digging, weeding, pounding, carrying and chopping their way through another day, often while hungry and sick, in one of the ten poorest nations on Earth.

As most of the women who sat with us had never had the chance to go to school themselves – unlike the children they were volunteering to cook for – we conducted the surveys in the form of group discussions based on a standard list of questions. During the conversation on this particular morning, as the dawn began to brighten and warm, we posed our core question once again: ‘Why do you do this?’ A thin woman, with a shy smile cleared her throat.

‘Because we have it in our hearts,’ she said quietly, her smile growing like the huge rising sun behind her.

Charity is probably the best word to describe the thing in that woman’s heart. Charity is an Old English word originally meaning ‘Christian love of one’s fellows’ or ‘benevolence for the poor’. It is derived from the Latin word caritas, which in turn is a translation of agape, the Greek word for a particular type of love; God’s love for man and man’s love in turn for God, including that expressed through his love of neighbour.

The earliest English translations of the Bible used the word ‘charity’ when translating caritas or agape, but later versions have tended instead to use the word ‘love’. While it is a wonderful word, ‘love’ has a multitude of meanings – meanings that have their own separate words in many other languages. So when translated into English, the same word that St Paul uses in his famous letter to the Corinthians (‘Love is patient, love is kind …’) is also sung in a thousand pop songs about romance, is spoken by a mother to her child and is used to express a desire for a drink on a hot day (in my case, usually in the form of ‘I would love a beer.’). It is correct to say that charity means love – but only if we mean a particular kind of love.

And the use of the word ‘charity’ today can cause similar confusion. It covers not only that particular type of Christian love but more generally, any activity related to helping those in need, whether it be those of an individual or the organised initiatives that enable groups of people to help other groups of people – sometimes in faraway places. In addition, ‘charity’ can refer to efforts aimed at meeting immediate basic needs, tackling injustice, addressing the underlying causes of suffering or aiding longer-term human development. Charity today also includes helping animals and the planet more generally, although such activities can indirectly improve the lives of people too. To add to the potential confusion, in addition to being the name of a virtue or the activity prompted by it, ‘charity’ can also mean an organisation or body responsible for carrying out such work. It is certainly a hard-working word capable of some impressive multitasking.

Charity, in most of those senses, seems to have existed long before Christians began using the word. Perhaps charity is as old as humanity itself. The philosophies of the Ancient Greeks and Chinese incorporated some philanthropic ideas, while certain aspects of the belief systems of Native Americans and the civilisations of sub-Saharan Africans pointed towards ideas of sharing with those in need long before the colonialists arrived. And certainly beliefs and practices closely related to charity are central tenets of every major world religion.

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the practice of charity is called daana. In sacred texts, daana has been described as ‘any action of relinquishing the ownership of what one considered or identified as one’s own and investing the same in a recipient without expecting anything in return’. Daana encourages the cultivation of generosity and an attitude of detachment, and can take the form of feeding or sharing directly with someone in distress or the support of philanthropic public initiatives aimed at empowering and helping many. The teaching and practice of daana is very ancient indeed and is first mentioned in a sacred text called the Rigveda, probably written between 1200 and 1500 BC.

I once witnessed a remarkable example of daana – a spontaneous outpouring of benevolence similar to the one which met the horror of that Haiti earthquake – in the immediate aftermath of the other colossal natural disaster to afflict humanity in the first ten years of this millennium, the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. Three days after that wave surged out of the Indian Ocean and killed a similar number of people to the Haiti earthquake (the victims on this occasion were spread across fourteen countries rather than one city), I watched local volunteers wearing homemade masks working through the wreckage of a coastal fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. The overwhelming stench of death and the gut-wrenching screams of the bereaved made their job of recovering decomposing bodies even more hideous. Resolutely, hour after hour, and even after they had recovered 100 bodies from the mangled debris, they continued with the utmost dignity and gentleness, covering each corpse respectfully with a sheet before carrying it to the gaping hole on the beach. Some of the remains were of very small children, laid to rest while their parents cried in agony and held each other nearby. How could anyone find the strength to volunteer to do a job like that? They were driven that day not so much by their respect for the dead, but by their love of the living. The first step that had to be taken towards any kind of recovery and healing was this dreadful one, and so somewhere inside them they found the strength to move their feet and do this unavoidable thing.

And later that same day, in the nearby city of Chennai, hundreds of people not directly affected by the horror on the coast turned up at a relief centre bearing gifts of food, among them school children carrying mugs of rice – sharing what they had so that those who had lost everything could eat. It seems that every awful, distressing, human calamity can prompt an amazing, generous human response. And in this part of the world many call it Daana.

For the Jewish people tzedakah means ‘righteousness’, and its central place in the Torah, many centuries before Christ, laid the foundations on which Christian charity would later be built. It represents a religious obligation to behave in a way that is ‘right and just’. Jews give tzedakah by helping the needy through donations of money, time or other resources. The Torah teaches that a tenth of your income should be given to ‘righteous deeds or causes’ (this practice of ‘tithing’ was later embraced by Christians). In the Middle Ages the influential Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides listed eight levels of giving as written in the Mishneh Torah. The list, which has had a huge influence on Jewish charity ever since, extols things such as giving anonymously to a known recipient, giving before being asked and, at the top of the list, a very particular form of charity: ‘giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need, so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others’.

When I first read this centuries-old decree, it made me think of a story I had just heard from a close friend. His brother, having some years earlier emigrated to the USA, had recently fallen on hard times. Having plummeted through a series of personal disasters related to drug and alcohol addictions, he had ended up homeless on the streets of New York. His desperate poverty and psychological state left my friend back home in Scotland fearing greatly for his brother’s life. My friend and his family had tried to help in various ways but to no avail – his brother had reached a point of self-imposed isolation that made it impossible for his family to reach him.

One day, as my friend’s brother sat on a park bench in Central Park, watching the tourists walk by, an elderly lady sat down beside him. After a little while she looked at him and asked him how he had come to be living like this and he began to tell her a little of his story. She invited him to meet her there again, and on their next meeting he poured out his life to the stranger. On their third meeting the little Jewish mother explained that she had had a son of similar age to him who died. She offered him her spare room rent free, with a set of firm rules including total abstinence from drugs and alcohol, until he got his life back on the rails. He accepted the startling offer and when I last heard he was rebuilding a new, better life. Through the ‘partnership’ this elderly lady chose to form with a homeless stranger, she has enabled him to journey towards becoming a ‘person no longer living by relying on others’. I have no idea how deliberate it was on her part, but she was certainly practising tzedakah in a wonderful way.

In some respects zakat, one of the ‘five pillars’ on which Islam is based, is similar to Tzedakah – in fact, some scholars believe the word zakat derives from tzedakah. Zakat also obliges Muslims to give a prescribed amount to good causes – an amount usually set as 2.5 per cent of savings over a certain minimum threshold – and in some Islamic countries this is obligatory in law and collected as a tax. In addition to Zakat, Muslims may also practise sadaqa, that is, voluntary charity, which as well as donating to those in need can even include smiling at people.

Some Muslim doctors who I met one dark frightening night in Somalia were doing more than smiling at people. It was during the terrible famine of 2011. They were from South Africa and were there to volunteer their urgently needed expertise in a health clinic. I was there with a load of food we had flown in from Malawi. We had landed there at a particularly messy moment in a war which had, by then, already inflicted twenty-one years of suffering. At that point Mogadishu was said to be the most dangerous city in the world; it was teeming with men in ragtag uniforms with AK-47s slung over their shoulders and there was uncertainty as to which neighbourhoods were controlled by which faction. My nerves had not been helped on our first evening there when, as we were being shown to our shared sleeping quarters by our host – a teenage Somali man with perfect, gently spoken English – there was a huge explosion close by. It made me jump. Our young host turned to me.

‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry,’ he said, as if soothing a very young child.

‘It was just a bomb.’

The doctors and I laughed a lot about this over our late evening meal together, but the next morning our mirth died when we began to encounter those we had come to try to help. Hundreds of thousands of people had recently arrived in the capital in a desperate search for food. We began hearing the stories of women who had walked over 150 kilometres – some of them had seen their children die on the way. Others were caring for children not their own, the children’s parents having died in a famine that had already taken the lives of tens of thousands.

Fartune was one of the mothers who told us her desperate story as she stood in a long queue for food holding her sick child, Pinte. His head looked grotesquely large compared to his tiny body and his swollen eyes could no longer see. He was three years old and had been sick for six weeks. Until now Fartune had never had the chance to take Pinte to a doctor or receive any medical help for her child. She told us she had another three children at ‘home’ (a hastily erected hut made of sticks and plastic, surrounded by thousands of other similar temporary abodes). We asked her how those other children at home were.

‘Yes, they are fine,’ she said, before adding. ‘Apart from the malnutrition. We never have enough to eat.’

I didn’t get much more time to talk with the doctors during those days, absorbed as we were in our respective missions to feed and treat so many sick people. But late at night, back at our base, our conversation turned to matters of faith, as is the case sometimes when in extreme situations. We talked about our different religious beliefs and about why our young people seemed to be losing their faith; about secularism, materialism, social media, the need for fellowship and community. We talked about how our faith, if it is sincere, must impel us to do works of charity. We talked too about our devotion to a Jewish woman, Mary the Mother of Jesus (who they call Miriam) – mother of the Christ, mother of the Prophet. They loved the fact I worked for an organisation who held her as their patron. Once again it seemed to me that in each of our hearts something similar had been etched despite our very disparate backgrounds and beliefs. And each morning, as my friends assembled outside on their prayer mats for their morning devotion, I said my rosary and pondered some things in a new way, grateful for fresh perspectives.

Even louder than the call to prayer, echoing across the war-weary city, and the thunderous blast that had made my heart leap on the night of our arrival, the clarion call of charity had summoned each of us here from our different corners of the Earth. It is a very beautiful thing when sadaqa or charity or tzedakah or daana – or whatever we wish to call that thing we have in our hearts – brings us together like that, in the service of strangers. I watched a particularly dramatic example of this on one occasion while visiting a little Mary’s Meals project in a slum near New Delhi.

There I met Angela, a high-caste Hindu, who was volunteering her time to teach a group of dalit children. For the largest part of each day, these children search in rubbish heaps for things they can sell to help support their families. There were about ninety of them gathered around Angela’s little blackboard, on which were written letters of the Hindi alphabet that they were taking turns to name. They had been drawn from their all-consuming work by the daily meals that were being cooked in the adjacent courtyard and by Angela’s smile, which seemed to illuminate the gloomy little room in which they sat. The room itself was a gift. A Muslim gentleman, whose little house it was part of, was the free giver of that gift, allowing the raggedy group to make it their classroom for a short time each day while his adjoining courtyard became their kitchen and dining room. Meanwhile the delivery of the food and its cooking was being overseen by the project’s administrator, a stubby nun adorned in the black habit of her order.

Did you hear about the Muslim, the Hindu and the Catholic? That has to be the opening line of a great joke – and maybe it is – but it is also a question I like to answer by telling the story of that little trinity of goodness, meeting in a country deeply wounded by sectarian hatred, where the caste system condemns millions to spend their childhood working instead of learning. The need of those dishevelled little ones – so often an object of scorn and derision – was drawing together representatives of three world religions.

What is striking, from even a cursory glance at the place of ‘charity’ across very different cultures and religions, are the very strong common threads. The idea that charity improves life for the giver, on Earth and beyond, as well as for the receiver, is one that seems to transcend creeds. That everything we have is a gift from God to be shared is another. There are also key differences, however, that become even more obvious as we explore further the practice of charity – especially the distinct nature of Christian charity, which smashes the boundaries and obligations of giving by proclaiming every person in need as deserving of our charity, not just those sharing our faith or ethnic group or political view, but in fact even our enemies.