Chapter Four (continued)
Interesting, Amusing, Depressing and Gross Conversation Over Another Long Lunch Break

(To recap: Near the end of the previous page, the students discuss how a lot of charities do really valuable work, but some pester people for money.)

One Student Has Some Thoughts About People's Motives for Giving to Chairty

Then one of the students said, "Sometimes I've wondered about people's motives for giving to charity, since I've heard that some people reckon a lot of it's to do with people wanting to make themselves feel like good people so it puts them in a better mood. Hearing this stuff though, it seems that maybe it's a lot to do with people being pestered till they give something! ... Well, I'm sure that not all charities do that kind of stuff! There might be quite a few different reasons why people give really. I'm sure a lot of it must be to do with people genuinely caring!

"I heard that some economists decided to do a few studies to see if they could find out more about people's motives for giving to charity. They had a theory that a lot of people give money because they want to impress other people or make themselves look nicer so they'll be more popular, or because they get a nice feel-good glow when they do, because they feel better about themselves. I don't know how true that is. Maybe it is for some people, who knows! But they did these studies to try to prove it, which I don't think proved it at all!

"In one of them, they sent some people round to knock on doors and ask people if they'd give them some money for a certain charity, and sent others round to other people to ask them if they'd give some money to be entered into a lottery that was raising money for the same cause. The people raised twice as much money when they asked people to give money to be entered into the lottery as they did when they just asked them to donate to the charity. But the economists also found that attractive-looking women who knocked on doors got more money than other people, especially when the door was opened by a man. So they decided that must mean that a lot of people really were just giving money because they wanted to look like nice people to make people like them more, or because they wanted to benefit in other ways, like to get the chance of winning something in the lottery, and not just because they cared.

"Well, that might have been true. But what if the real reason attractive women got more money was because when the men knocked on doors asking for money, more people were suspicious that they might just be crooks trying to get money for themselves, deceiving them into believing the money was for charity? It might have been better if they'd got some ugly women to knock on doors asking for money for the charity, to see if the attractive ones got more than they did.

"But maybe part of the reason they got more money when they asked if people would like to join the lottery was because the thought of winning some money stirred up a bit of a greedy emotion that put thoughts about whether the person at the door might be a scammer right to the back of some of their minds or something. I dunno. It's just a theory. But it seems a bit daft not to think of possible alternative reasons why you've got the results you've got, and to try to think of more things you can do that'll make you more certain about your theory. Mind you, I don't know if they did try to do that.

"And the economists did another study, to try to find out how true their theory about people giving to charity because it gives them a feel-good glow is. They sent some people who'd donated to the charity before a letter with an emotion-stirring appeal in it about the story of a woman who'd known nothing but poverty all her life and needed help; and they sent other donors a letter with the same story in it, but at the end, it said, 'Rigorous scientific methodologies have been used to attest to the impact of this charity's work'. Or something like that.

"It seems they thought, 'If people really care about how effectively the charity uses its money, if anything, they'll give more when they find out that scientific studies have found that it is effective; but if they give because they get a feel-good glow when they think of donating to the charity, the thought of cold hard science might dampen it down a bit so they don't feel like giving so much.'

"Well, I don't really know what they were thinking; but it seems it was something like that.

"People who were already donating big amounts to the charity gave more after they read the message about science, but a lot of people who'd only donated small amounts before gave less. And it seems that the economists took the fact that they gave less to mean that what they thought would happen about the thought of science spoiling their feel-good emotion really had.

"But I think that something completely different might have happened. Maybe when a lot of people got the letters with the message about science, they thought, 'Why has this charity been spending the money we give it on doing scientific studies to reassure itself that its money's actually doing some good, when you'd have thought that if it was a good charity, it should already know that. Surely a good charity would be pretty sure its money was going to do some good before they spent it in the first place! Otherwise, what's the point! And if some of my money's going to be spent on scientific studies that tell the charity what it should already know, or what it should be able to work out just by asking the people who work for it what they've achieved, it'll be a waste of money giving to it!' So maybe that's why they gave less.

"You know, if economists are going to do studies, you'd have thought they'd try to do them well enough to eliminate the possibility of completely misinterpreting the results, ... unless it doesn't occur to them that that might happen, of course.

"... Well, I don't know if there was more to the story, like them not being quite sure that what happened really did mean what they thought it did; but that was the impression I got from what I heard."

Another student said, "I gave a few donations to a charity, one that's quite well-known, I think, and which has had some government support in the past; and then they started sending me emails every so often asking for more money. I got one about how there was a woman who went into hospital to have a baby in an African country, who had to bring her own bedding and other basic things, because they weren't available at the hospital because it was too poor to afford them, and she was suffering because she couldn't afford to bring enough of the supplies they wanted her to bring. Something like that. A couple of weeks later they sent me an email about the same woman, still having problems; and then a couple of weeks later, they sent me another one about the same woman, supposedly still having the same problems she'd had at first.

"I thought, 'If you've known about this woman for all this time, surely you could have done something to help her! If you haven't even helped this one woman in all that time, why should we trust that you're going to use our money to help anyone! So why should I give you any!' That was probably the completely opposite effect than the one the email was intended to have! It might have made me feel like giving more if it had been about what people's money was actually achieving!"

The Conversation Turns Humorous Again

Just then, some of them noticed the snow outside was settling. One said gloomily, "The snow's getting thicker! Yuck!"

One joked, "What we need is a charity to come and put a conveyor belt in a nice heated tunnel that goes from here to our lecture theatre. Then we could just step on and arrive in a couple of minutes after a nice warm fun journey!"

"Or just an indoor corridor would do," said one with a grin.

The one who'd come up with the idea of a conveyor belt said, "True, but that wouldn't be so much fun! Imagine zooming along! And there could be seats on it so we could ride in comfort!"

Another student grinned and joked, "If you're feeling that lazy, how about having beds that steer themselves around? You could just wake up in the morning, press a button that said, 'Lecture Theatre', or one that said, 'Student Bar', and it would just zoom off there!"

"Wow, it could be good if we all had those," said another student. "But I don't suppose the lecturers would like it; they'd be worried it would be way too easy for us to fall asleep in their lectures!"

One student grinned and said, "Maybe they'd have a special button they could press if they thought no one was paying attention to them, and all the beds would tip everyone out!"

They all laughed.

Then one grinned and said, "Somehow I can't see a charity funding all that!"

They giggled again.

But then one said seriously, "You know, I read an article on the Internet by someone who doesn't believe in giving to charity. He said he thought governments ought to be the ones to care for everyone in need, since they can raise regular taxes to do it, and they can always have the same amount of money coming in from them so they'll always have a reliable source of money to spend on people, whereas the amount of charity donations from ordinary people will go up and down depending on things like whether unemployment rises so more people have less money to spend."

"Hang on!" said another student, smiling. "If unemployment rises, there'll be fewer people paying income tax, so if the government doesn't want to raise it, there'll Still be less money coming in."

"True," said the person who'd mentioned it."

"Besides," said the one who'd criticised the idea, "If the government tried to pay for everything charities pay for now, imagine how high taxes would have to be! Everyone would be trying to evade them!"

"What, you mean we'd all be jetting off to some tropical tax haven?" asked one student, grinning. "Actually, that sounds like a fun thing to do anyway, especially in this weather! Never mind the tax haven bit; the tropical bit would do!"

The other students smiled.

The Discussion Turns to Problems With Foreign Aid Again, Before Becoming Humorous Once More

Then the one criticising the idea of governments paying for things charities pay for now got serious and said, "Yeah, it could be. But anyway, besides what it would cost, governments don't always do a good job of helping people! Well, that could probably be said about almost everyone.

"But for one thing, like I was saying before, I heard there are some problems with the way they give foreign aid. I know a lot of good gets done, but I heard a programme on the radio where someone said a lot of aid money gets wasted, because the World Bank set some pretty ambitious targets for the amount of foreign aid rich countries ought to spend some years ago, but governments couldn't find projects they thought would actually succeed within the time it had been decreed that it was supposed to take for them to spend the money, so they just spent the money anyway, regardless of whether they were spending it on projects that were really going to work. Or they handed the money directly to foreign governments, and a lot of it got spent by an elite of rich people who wanted to live it up, because some of those governments were corrupt. It was estimated that as much as two thirds has been spent on things other than the welfare of the people.

"And the programme said that the more aid governments in developing countries get, the less some of them are motivated to develop industries and things in their countries, because they don't need to make the countries pay for themselves, so a lot of people there can't develop the skills they might otherwise, so they stay poor and remain dependent on foreign aid.

"Mind you, things aren't that clear-cut; another programme I heard was about a country in Africa that's been flooded with second-hand clothes from abroad that lots of people from the country sell, and the government wants to stop it happening so they can develop their own clothing industries and sell clothes made there instead; but if they do, it'll mean loads and loads of the people who sell these second-hand clothes at the moment will be thrown out of work; and some people worry as well that ordinary people won't be able to afford the clothes that will be made in their country. Who knows how things will really go! But it does seem that it'll be better for their government not to ban the sale of second-hand clothes from abroad altogether, and for them to help a lot of the people who sell them at the moment find other work, since I think unemployment's high there, so it might not be easy for them to find other work themselves.

"But anyway, about foreign aid, another thing I heard on one programme is that problems with it are less likely to be investigated than they should be, partly because people who organise aid projects are given bonuses in their pay if they're successful, so it's in their interests to try to make the projects out to be more successful than they really are. Something like that anyway."

One student said, "That's bad! You expect these things to be well-organised! It makes you wonder what else might be going wrong! But there's something I've sometimes wondered about, which is that you hear about these militants who come here and spend years in this country, only for them to go on about how much they hate us! I think we probably give aid to the countries where they come from. What if a lot of the people we're giving aid to are people who hate us, and instead of being grateful, it just gives them a better standard of living so they can more easily get hold of things they could use to harm us, like buying weapons with money they'd otherwise have to have spent on food or something."

Another student replied, "Well, I suppose that might have happened sometimes, but don't forget that if there's ever something like that on the news, the news will often be just reporting some of the most sensational things that can be found at the time, so if there's, say, a march of a few hundred people proclaiming they all hate us, that might be reported, when there might be millions of people in the country the marchers come from who all disagree with them, but their points of view don't get a mention. Maybe some of the people who benefit from foreign aid are people the world would be a much better place without; but I suppose it would be very difficult to vet millions and millions of people to make sure only the decent ones got it, and even if that was done, since a lot of the people who were considered worthy of it would live in the same families as people who weren't, they'd benefit anyway. Maybe the best governments can do is to do their best to make sure aid does a lot more good than harm. Anyway though, it might sometimes happen that some people who were brought up to hate this country change their minds and decide it must be good after all after they benefit from foreign aid they get from us, so it does us good as well as them."

The student who'd raised the objection said, "Maybe. I just wonder about it sometimes. Actually, I know this sounds a bit daft, but I started thinking about it after I heard a song in a foreign language on the radio, and I thought, 'What if some artists who sing pop songs in foreign languages are singing rude things about Britain? Maybe no one would know, and some people might really enjoy a song, having no idea it's insulting them!"

Another student laughed, and said, "A person would have to be brave to want to sell a record like that in the country they were singing about! Imagine how much they'd be criticised when people found out what the lyrics were really about! And if they were hoping to make a lot of money from their song, they might be disappointed!

"And imagine what their record company would say, if they said something like, 'I've written this song that I'm hoping you're going to help me sell all over America and Europe so I get famous and make a lot of money! It's called, 'America is the Great Satan, and Britain is the Junior Satan!' I can just imagine how a conversation like that would go, at least in one of the big mainstream record companies! Imagine it: a manager at the record company might say, 'How could you do this to us? When we signed you up, we thought you were going to write love songs! How do you expect us to make money from a song like that? And if you want to sing songs about that kind of thing, why did you want to go under the name Fruity Cutie? Somehow I think that might be a bit misleading!'

"I think record companies like people to write love songs, because they know they're likely to make them more money than say, songs about the hidden meanings found by looking deeply into the fluff on someone's carpet, and that kind of thing."

The students giggled, and one said, "I don't know about that! Songs like that would have a lot of novelty value!"

Another one said, "Actually, it can't always be true about record companies wanting people to sing love songs, because certain kinds of music like rap often have nasty lyrics, probably meant to just appeal to certain sections of the community, you know, where they say things like, 'I wanna slap yo' ass, bitch!'"

One student grinned and jokingly asked, "And do any of them have the 'bitch' replying, 'What's my poor little donkey ever done to deserve that?'"

They giggled.

Another student said, "Anyway, even if there was a record around that said insulting things about people from another country, and it was meant seriously, - well, apart from rap songs I mean, that you just expect to be rude about people - but I mean if you just happened to hear a song that was sung by someone from another country and it was rude about people from this country or something, it wouldn't mean that everyone in the country the artist who sang it came from had those opinions. There might only be a small minority of people in the country with opinions like that; and you know what they say about opinions anyway - not everyone's opinion's worth taking seriously. ... Well, some of them say something quite a bit ruder than that, but that's something like what they mean anyway!"

The student who'd raised the objection in the first place said, "I suppose so. I remember watching the Eurovision Song Contest and wondering if some of the contestants might be singing rude things about other countries, and people from those countries might be voting for them without realising; but I suppose the same kinds of things would apply."

One student laughed and said, "Don't forget that the contestants who win have to sing their song in English at the end. Just think what a scandal it would be, and how much angry criticism the singers would get, if that happened!"

Someone else said with a grin, "I wonder if they'd be disqualified! Or maybe the organisers of the Contest would secretly be pleased, because of all the publicity the Contest would get because of the scandal!"

One of the others chuckled and said, "Yeah, just think! I think the Contest's advertised as promoting harmony or something; but just imagine if the organisers were secretly pleased when one country started insulting another one!"

They giggled. Then Becky said, "When you think about it though, loads and loads of songs are about people being upset by other people, like people they've been in relationships with; and bearing in mind that most people will probably get together with people who are easily available to them, who will probably be people from their own communities, most people are probably singing about scumbags from their own countries, not being rude about other countries' scumbags. Hey, just imagine if so many songs in the Eurovision Song Contest got to be about people being upset because of what other people had done to them that its name was changed to the Commiserate With Everyone Over Each Other's Countries' Scumbags Show, and people would just tune in to sympathise with everyone else about their countries' scumbags!"

They giggled, and one said, "And just imagine if the organisers introduced a feature called the Swap Songs About Each Other's Countries' Scumbags Section, that they said was to promote understanding and openness and reconciliation and harmony, thinking that since people just tuned in out of sympathy, they'd be bound to be sympathetic if singers from other countries complained about their own ones. So it was a feature where one country's contestants would sing a song complaining about people from another country in Europe, and that country's song would be a complaint about people from theirs. So one year, Spain's entry might be called, 'I hate it When British Tourists Get Drunk and Rowdy and Vandalise the Town Centre', and the British entry that year might be called, 'Last Year a Spanish Taxi Driver Tried to Rip me Off When I Was on Holiday by Massively Over-Charging Me, Probably Thinking I Wouldn't Realise'. Maybe some years, every single song would be a complaint about people from another country. And imagine if it was against the rules to say anything nice about the countries that were being criticised in those songs, and anyone who was discovered to be singing something nice during the contest would get disqualified.

"So imagine if people started singing worse and worse things, because they thought it would mean there was less risk of them being disqualified, and because it turned out that the nastier a song was, the more likely it was to win."

The students laughed, and one said, "Yeah! And just imagine if the worse the songs got, the angrier it made the people from the countries the singers were singing about, so some of the audience started booing songs, while other people would be cheering them, and the Eurovision Song Contest got to sound like a football match! And just imagine if audiences sometimes got even angrier! You might have posh people who spent loads of money to go and watch the show, thinking it was going to be a bit of cultured civilised light entertainment, fighting while it was being broadcast like football hooligans!"

One student grinned and said, "The Eurovision Fight Contest!"

They laughed.

Then one said, "I'm not sure that all that many people would normally want to sing rude songs about this country though. I think most people in the world must think well of Britain - after all, more than half the world would probably like to come to live here!"

Another student said, "Wow, just imagine if they all did, so there were over three billion people living here! The place would have to be full of massive super-skyscrapers, maybe all over five hundred storeys high or something!"

Another one said with a chuckle, "Yeah, and there might not be any room for roads and things in between them! Maybe the whole country would just have to be wall-to-wall super-skyscrapers - in fact, maybe it would just be one great big building full of flats, and all the flats on the inside would have to have bright artificial light instead of sunshine, because they wouldn't have any windows; and anyone who came to this country would have to step off the boat straight into the entrance of the building!

"Just imagine it: I bet The super-massive skyscraper called Britain would have to have a flat roof, and all the roads and railways and airports would have to be on top of it. Imagine how noisy it would be to live in the flats just underneath!

"And the fields and orchards would have to be on top of the roof too, where they grew crops and things."

Another student laughed and said, "Just imagine if you lived just underneath one of those, and you got tree roots coming down through the roof and through your ceiling! People must think it's bad enough when they have to phone their landlords complaining about a leaking roof, but just imagine if they had to phone up and say things like, 'I've got tree roots growing down through my ceiling, and they're making earth fall down on our heads! Soon we might be accidentally banging our heads on the roots as we walk around the house! It was bad enough when they grew a field of wheat up there and we had wheat roots coming through all over our ceiling! When they tried growing carrots up there it wasn't so bad, because at least we could reach up and pick the carrots that came through the ceiling and eat them, once we'd washed the bits of ceiling off them! But apple tree roots are a bit much!'"

One of the group smiled and said, "Wow, you could understand people hating this country if their living conditions were as bad as that!"

They grinned and agreed.

Then the conversation began to turn serious again, as one of them said, "Mind you, I think some people do live in pretty bad conditions here, like with cockroaches running around their homes, and dry rot that the landlord never gets around to getting rid of.

"Anyway, thinking about masses of people wanting to come and live here - perhaps not knowing they might be in for a life where they have to live in houses full of cockroaches and dry rot ... well, obviously not literally 'full' of cockroaches, or they'd never be able to fit in them themselves; but anyway, I've heard that one reason governments like to give poorer countries aid is in the hope that lots of people's living standards will be increased, so they won't feel the need to come to other countries like theirs in search of a decent standard of living. Apparently they call it 'enlightened self-interest', as opposed to nasty self-interest, presumably."

More Problems With Giving Foreign Aid are Brought Up

One of the group reflected, "Wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to give countries so much aid that the standard of living of everyone in the world increased, so everyone felt contented enough in their own countries so they didn't feel as if they had to go elsewhere in search of a better life and put themselves in harm's way trying to get there."

The others agreed, although one said, "Increasing living standards isn't just to do with money though. There are other things that make a big difference too, such as the policies the governments in the countries that get the aid have got."

The one who'd been criticising the way foreign aid was sometimes handled in the past before the joking about people singing rude things about other countries broke out said, "Yes. I heard a radio programme where it talked about some of the things that can go wrong with foreign aid. It said a lot of countries that are thought of as poor and get foreign aid could really be rich, because their countries have a lot of minerals in the ground that would be in demand if they were sold, or they have valuable farmland that could be used in far more efficient and useful ways than it is, and what people there really need is education, training and investment in employment opportunities so the people can become more skilled, not handouts of aid. Mind you, it's difficult in some countries because they're war zones, and no one wants to set up factories and things there if they think they might just get bombed or people might be killed on the way to work!

"Another thing is that I've heard that there have been huge improvements in the amount of education that a lot of the children in some countries get, and you'd have thought that would be a good thing, and it must be really, but it's had some unforeseen bad consequences. Apparently it's made people ambitious to get into better kinds of jobs than their parents had to do, but there aren't nearly enough of those kinds of jobs around for them to do, so a lot of them are tempted to travel to other countries to find work, putting themselves in harm's way making hazardous journeys through deserts and other dangerous places where they might be killed, or exploited by criminal human trafficking gangs, or who knows what! I don't suppose the answer's to stop people being educated; but maybe whenever countries increase the amount of education their children get, they ought to also set up lots of training schemes to teach people how to start their own businesses, and to do other kinds of work they'll be able to make a decent living from in their own countries when they've finished their education, if that's possible.

"But also, I've heard that a lot of people in some countries are producing a lot of things, but trade agreements made by richer countries to protect their own industries by putting taxes on products from poorer countries to make them more expensive so people from the rich countries won't be more likely to buy them than they are to buy things produced nearer home mean a lot of people can't make as much of a living as they'd like to, so they stay poor.

"And I've read that sometimes foreign aid is only given on the condition that a lot of the things bought with the money are things manufactured by people in the country the aid is coming from. That'll mean the country gets something out of giving the aid; but sometimes it means a great opportunity for increasing employment in the countries receiving the aid is lost, because businesses there could be making the things that get bought from the countries giving the aid instead, and sometimes buying them in their own countries would be a lot cheaper.

"And another thing I've heard is that some governments of countries that get foreign aid think it means they don't have to spend their own money on whatever the foreign aid money's being spent on, so they go and spend it on weapons instead. And even worse things have happened, since some governments have actually sold food aid that was meant to feed hungry people and used the money to buy weapons!"

Some Humour Breaks Out Again

Some of the students began to feel a bit angry or gloomy. But one said, "That's terrible! So people's taxes have sometimes gone to buy food that starving people were supposed to get free but just got sold, to pay for things to help fight lousy wars! I wonder what kind of weapons they bought though. Hey imagine if a government decided they wanted to use big animals like lions as weapons, sending them into battle instead of tanks. They might spend aid money on those too, telling the people who supplied it that they wanted them so they could set up a safari park to attract tourists to make money and give people employment. ... Sorry, I'd hate to give anyone ideas, ... supposing any of you are planning to become an African dictator one day. I don't suppose a lion's any match for an enemy tank anyway!"

The students giggled.

The one who'd been joking said, "Actually, some countries have emblems, don't they, like lions. I suppose a lion emblem would be meant to signify the announcement, 'We're a fierce all-conquering nation, so don't mess with Us!' But I think trying to send that message with a lion image is a bit old-fashioned now; I mean, imagine if some countries updated their emblems to have modern ones, like nuclear bombs! A lion would look pretty pitiful in comparison to that, wouldn't it!"

The others laughed. One of them said with a grin, "Oh what kind of mad government would change its country's emblem to a nuclear bomb!"

One student said, "I dunno. Maybe when nuclear bombs were all the rage after the 2nd world war, because quite a few countries wanted to get them, one or two might have done."

Then the student who'd started the joking said, "Sorry, I shouldn't be joking around when this is such a serious subject, should I. I suppose it's easy to laugh when you're miles and miles away from the tragedies going on. I mean, kids are really suffering out there, as well as other civilians!"

The one he'd interrupted said, "Oh don't worry. I don't mind you having a bit of a joke; I was depressing myself with all the things I was saying, and I could do with being cheered up! I can always finish what I wanted to say in a minute. And anyway, I expect those people suffering would really welcome a break from it to laugh themselves if they could get one! It's not as if us laughing means we don't care about them."

Another student said, "In that case, that stuff about countries' emblems reminds me of something funny I read once: Some sports teams like to name themselves after dangerous animals too, don't they. I vaguely remember reading about a school in America where they decided to have some kind of sporting competition, and the kids were split up into teams, and they were allowed to choose their own team names. Most teams named themselves after powerful animals and impressive things; but it was cute because one team named themselves something like, 'the Clumsy Grasshoppers'."

The students laughed.

"Did any of those teams name themselves after cheetahs?" asked one with a grin.

They giggled, and one said, "That would have been funny, wouldn't it, if they were trying to give the impression they were like very fast animals, but didn't realise how it would sound to other people!"

One student said, "I've heard of some funny names sports teams have given themselves! Mostly in America. I don't think there are many top teams with funny ones, but lots of high school teams that compete with other high schools, and minor league teams have them:

"Apparently there's a team called Utah Jazz, as if they come out and play music instead of sport. And there's one called the Central Catholic Buttons! There's another called the Saint Hubert Bambies, and one called the Fisher Bunnies, as if they want people to think they're cute little things, not a scary powerful opposition!

"There's one called the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, and one called the Kansas City Kangaroos, and one called the Mount Clemens Battling Bathers! There's even one called the Teutopolis Wooden Shoes! There's one called the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, and one called the TCU Horned Frogs. There's even one called the Kaukauna High School Galloping Ghosts.

"There's one called the Yuma High School Criminals. I'm not sure I'd want to play for a team called that! Apparently they got their name because years and years ago, they spent a couple of years having to have their classes in an abandoned prison. And there's one called the Blooming Prairie High School Awesome Blossoms. Apparently a lot of the boys playing in that one haven't liked it and have tried to get it change, but it never has been, apart from the fact that it used to just be called the Blossoms!

"There's even a team called the Montgomery Biscuits! And there's one called the Indiana State Sycamores. It would be spooky if real trees ran about a sports pitch scoring goals and things, wouldn't it!"

They laughed.

The Conversation Turns to Mistaken Government Policies

Then one student got a bit gloomy and said, "It's funny to hear about this stuff. But it does make me angry to think that there must be loads of kids who never had the opportunity to get to be teenagers who play sport, or to be students who have a laugh like us, getting the chance of a decent education so they can have more chance of a good life, because they died so young, when if more foreign aid had gone towards helping their communities instead of being misspent by people who didn't care enough, they might not have done."

Then the one who'd been talking about aid said, "I agree. Mind you, it's not always as simple as people not caring. Sometimes projects do do good, but they do harm to others at the same time.

"And a lot of African governments have ended up making things worse even when they meant policies for good. I read that a lot of them made it the law that farmers couldn't sell their grain for more than a certain amount. You would have thought that would have helped a lot of poor people, and it seems those governments thought that too, but unfortunately, it led to the opposite happening, because farmers thought, 'I'm not slogging my guts out producing all this grain if I'm hardly going to get any money from it to help me improve my life!' So a lot of them stopped producing any grain at all, so poor people ended up worse off! And then rich countries provided them with food aid, but that meant even more farmers couldn't make money from their grain because so many people were getting it free, so they went out of business.

"So I think any government that wants to help poor people ought to look into the history of what's worked and what hasn't in the past so they can learn from other people's mistakes. I think they might be beginning to do that now, so hopefully things will improve."

"That's good," said one student.

Joking Breaks Out Again

One of the students said, "I think there can be problems with making it too easy for businesses to make lots of money though, at least where it means allowing unscrupulous bosses to get away with things they shouldn't, like making people work in unsafe conditions, because they put profit before safety, or where they destroy parts of the environment that the world actually needs, like rainforests, so they can raise cattle for burgers there, and things like that.

"Mind you, that reminds me: I turned the radio on the other day, and I heard someone talking with a foreign accent, who must have been from another part of the world; I think it was a kind of news programme, and I wasn't listening properly to what he said, but then I thought I heard him say, 'Our forests are being deflated'. Then I realised he must have said 'depleted'. I started imagining what it would be like if it really was possible to deflate forests, as if the trees were all inflatable, and the problem being talked about on this news programme was that someone kept going around and letting all the air out of them!

"Actually, it reminds me a bit of a news broadcast I heard, where the newsreader said something about Tunisia, and they said something was going on in Tunis, and at first I thought, 'Can't you be bothered to say the last two syllables of the country's name?' before I remembered that the capital of Tunisia is called Tunis.

"It made me start imagining what it would be like if a newsreader kept missing the last syllables off place names, so there might be a thing on the news about California, and they'd call it Californ; and they'd call London Lond.

"Or imagine if they did that with all kinds of words, so they might say things like, 'The Americ pres is in Mexic today to negoti a new trade deal with the govern there. One thing under discush will be plans for a big Americ comp to set up a huge car fact in Mexic Cit, expect to employ thous of peop.'

"And imagine if the newsreader didn't realise he was talking like that, and he kept on doing it after he'd read the news, so he might say to a work colleague of his at lunchtime, 'Are you coming for a cup of coff? I want to tell you my latest news! I'm plan to go out with my girlf to a posh rest tonight to celebrate her birth.'"

The students giggled.

Then one smiled and said, "You know, I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day, and someone said something in a foreign language, and it took ages for someone to start interpreting it, and I thought, 'Have they forgotten this is radio? Maybe they've stuck the interpretation up in writing in the studio, thinking people can see it. Or maybe they've forgotten that people can't see programmes on radio, and are thinking that radios have screens that people can look through and see what's going on in the studio, so they're making sure their hair looks nice and that the studio looks tidy and all kinds of things like that, and they're not going to tell us what this person's actually saying!'"

The students giggled.

Then Becky said, "My grandma told me that when my auntie Joan was little, when she used to hear someone talking on the radio at breakfast time, she thought there was a little man in there, and tried to feed him cornflakes through the speaker."

One said, "I wonder what most people in developing countries eat for breakfast. I don't suppose they eat cornflakes. Hey I wonder if any foreign aid money gets spent on anything like cornflakes. Imagine if someone thought it would be a good idea for some aid consignments to consist of nothing but plane-loads of boxes of cornflakes!"

They giggled again.

Then one half-joked, "If they're going to send them stuff like that, I bet I know what else would help! Maybe they could send them plane-loads and plane-loads of packs of chewing gum, to make life more enjoyable; they could chew it while they worked and it might seem like less of a slog. It helps Me anyway!"

Becky said, "Yeah, but they might not be so grateful once people started dropping used bits on the ground like they do here, and some people started treading on it with bare feet, or getting some on their clothes!

"Hey imagine if someone got some stuck on one of their feet while they were walking along a river bank, but they were in too much of a hurry to stop. It might stick to a long reed or something that was lying on the ground, so the reed would get stuck on their foot, and they might walk along with a long reed or whatever it was trailing behind their foot everywhere they went all day. Or maybe several."

The others grinned. Then one said, "Someone at my school realised she'd got chewing gum on her skirt once, and she wasn't sure what to do because she knew if she pulled it it wouldn't all come off, and our science teacher told her to put her skirt in the freezer overnight, and then the chewing gum would have gone hard, and she could just pull it off and it would come off in one piece. I think it worked as well."

One student joked, "Well, since a lot of people don't have freezers in Africa, if they got used chewing gum on their clothes, it might be harder to get it off, so I suppose it could be said that that was one way foreign aid that was meant to do good was doing harm."

The Students Talk About More Bad and Good Things Some Charities Do

There were titters from some of the other students. But then the one who'd been talking about drawbacks of foreign aid said, "This is serious stuff though. Some Real harm's been done in the past."

Some of the students looked embarrassed at the thought that they'd given the impression they were making light of something that serious, and they said apologetically, "Yeah, we know."

One said, "Tell us more about it."

The conversation turned very serious for a while as the student who'd been talking about it said, "Well, another thing I've heard is that charities can do harm when they mean to do good too.

"There was one programme on the radio I heard where a woman said there are problems with people going abroad to volunteer to do things, problems like people from the countries they go to holding off on doing building projects even though they could do a good job of them, because they know foreigners are going to come in and do them, or the same school being painted over and over again because teenagers from schools in developed countries are being taken over to poor countries by teachers who want them to feel as if they've achieved something by being able to do projects from start to finish within the few days they're there, or even orphanage owners depriving the children in them of things, because people from rich countries like to come and look around and give donations, and they wouldn't donate money to those orphanages any more if they thought all the problems were solved because the children all looked as if they had everything they could want, so their owners wouldn't make so much money from them.

"Kids are being taken out of school every time people from rich countries visit as well so they can put on shows for them and things; but that disrupts their education, since some orphanages get visited a lot.

"The woman talking about those things even said that in Cambodia, the number of orphans has gone down but the number of orphanages has gone up, probably because some people want to cash in on the number of tourists who go to look at them, so they take kids to live there who aren't really orphans. Most children in a lot of those places actually have at least one living parent. They can end up being separated from them because the owner will promise the parents that they can get the kids a good education and lots of nice food if they send them to their orphanage because rich foreigners want to do things for them. So the parents let them go.

"She said she thinks that people who want to volunteer to do things abroad ought to learn about what the locals really want, and then learn the skills needed to help them in the ways that'll be most useful, before they go.

"So I'm not saying that all foreign aid is bad or that people shouldn't do charity work abroad or anything like that; after all, there have been some really important achievements. A lot more people are being cured of nasty diseases than they used to be because of it, and things are being done to prevent them in the first place, like vaccination programmes and mosquito nets sprayed with insecticide that people can put over their beds at night when mosquitos are most active, that either stop them wanting to go near people or kill them. Malaria's a horrendous problem that kills hundreds of thousands of kids every year, besides other people. So some really good work's being done to stop it, and millions of people are being cured of TB who would have died once too. And far fewer children are dying of infectious diseases than they used to, because of very successful vaccination programmes. There are some diseases that used to cause a lot of suffering that have been almost eradicated because of what charitable work and foreign aid have done.

"And a lot of people have been taught new skills that have helped them start new businesses and make money so they've been helped out of poverty. And the thing is that if most people in a country are poor at the moment, even if it's got a good government, it might not be able to raise enough taxes to create a good public health system for its people, so aid comes in really useful in reducing suffering.

"I'm just saying anyone who wants to give to charities or go abroad to help them or anything like that really ought to do a lot of research into whether they're really doing good before they do, because things aren't all they seem sometimes.

"I've heard that a lot of things are getting better though. That's not all to do with foreign aid or what charities have done; some countries have better governments now than they used to that have policies that are really benefiting some people. And some people from Africa who lived here for years have learned business skills here and gone back home and set up businesses or other organisations and employed quite a few people, so people are climbing out of poverty that way too. And I've read that lots of organisations have been set up by local people in some developing countries, where communities help themselves to improve their lives in various ways."

The Students Start Thinking Up Amusing Ideas Again

Some of the students had started feeling a bit depressed at the bad things they'd heard. But then another one grinned and said, "Hey, you know there are some people who say that if you've got mice in your house it's best to trap them in a humane way and take them outside and release them in the fields, instead of buying traps that kill them or poisoning them? I wonder if there's anyone in the world who'd say you shouldn't kill mosquitos or parasites and things to stop them causing diseases, but instead you should trap them all humanely and take them to a deserted place and release them all into the wild so they can all live happily ever after."

Some of the students giggled, and one of them said, "I doubt it! It would be a daft idea, partly because they could all fly or crawl back. But if there is anyone like that, I wonder if they'd think that germs ought to all be treated humanely too. Maybe they'd say that special humane germ traps ought to be invented, with germ bait in them, whatever that would be, and little suction pump-type things on them that people could use to suck them off their hands and off all their things into a germ-holding box full of germ food, and then they'd have to take them to a special germ sanctuary somewhere where germs were all put to live and thrive happily together."

Another student grinned and said, "Yeah, it would have to be a Top-security place with the amount of disease-causing germs that would end up in it. Maybe it would have a germ-posting box like a letterbox that people would put all the germs they'd collected through, that would have some kind of one-way filter on it so the germs could go in but not come back out."

Another student chuckled and said, "People would never get anything done, they'd be so busy collecting germs all the time! After all, aren't there billions all around us, but we just don't realise because most of them are harmless so they don't give us infections? Imagine if the government passed a law that said they all had to be taken to germ sanctuaries. The effort to get rid of them would be so huge the world would grind to a halt!"

The students giggled. Then one said, "And after all that, the germs in the germ sanctuary might not even be all that happy! That's if germs even get emotions like happiness and sadness! But don't germs fight each other for food and things sometimes, the way humans can?"

One of the group said, "Wow! Imagine watching a germ war under a big microscope! I wonder what kind of tactics they use! And I wonder if germs have different personalities, so there might be warrior germs, and peacemaker germs that try to stop the wars!"

One student asked, "Does that mean there could be germ wars going on all over our hands without us realising? Yikes!"

"Yes," said another student. "And in our stomachs, I think, and all over us!"

Some of the students made faces, and began to feel uncomfortable. "Oh yuck!" said one. "I don't know if I'll be able to concentrate on my work this afternoon, thinking about all the germs that might be fighting in my stomach!"

"Oh they might not be having a war in Yours," said one student with a mischievous grin. "They might be at peace in yours, playing friendly sports instead, you know, like, 'Let's see which germ team can create the largest amount of gas!'"

The students laughed.

Then one said, "Have you ever heard that song, 'There's a Ghost In My House'? I think it was a hit in the 1960s by R Dean Taylor. Last winter, my mum had a really bad cold, and I made up my own words to the tune for fun. I'll sing it. They went:

"'Sitting here in this chair
I feel germs running through my hair!
Threatening to give me the flu
And I know they came from you!
I'm going to take some vitamin C
Before you give them to me!
There are germs in this house
And I can't hide
From the germs that you're spreading inside!
They just keep hounding me!
Your germs keep hounding me!
I just keep feeling your germs run across my knees
Every time you cough and sneeze!
Your germs keep hounding me!
They just keep hounding me!'

"I sang the song to my mum, and she said that if I felt that way I could go and live in the garden."

The students laughed.

Then one looked at the time and told the others what it was, and suddenly they realised it was about time they went to lectures. They hadn't realised how late it was getting.

One said, "Eek! We're going to be late if we don't go soon!"

Another one said, "Maybe there ought to be a bell for lectures like there's a bell for lessons at school. Or how about a lecture alarm. Imagine if a really loud alarm went off every hour or two, and it meant it was time to go to a new lecture. And imagine if it went off everywhere except in the lecture theatres for about ten minutes, because the idea wasn't just to get people to realise it was time for a lecture, but it was to make it so uncomfortable to be lazing around eating food in the bars and things like that being tempted to skip lectures that people would want to leave them and run to the lecture theatres to get away from the noise."

They laughed, but another student said, "That wouldn't be fair on the people who work here, would it! ... I don't mean the Students who actually manage to get around to working; I mean people like the ones who serve us food and things. You'd have all those people running to the lecture theatres too to get away from the noise!"

Another student laughed and said, "Yeah, just imagine! Lecturers would come into the lecture theatres to give their lectures and see loads of people there, and think, 'Wow, my lecture must be popular! There's hardly any room for anyone else in here!' And they'd feel really pleased and think they must be really good at lecturing. But then when it was time for the alarm to stop, all the university staff would think they'd better get back to their jobs, and they'd leave. And the lecturers would think, 'Oh no, what did I just say that was so offensive that all those people decided to walk out at once?' And they'd try and work it out.

"If one lecturer had just said something like, 'Technology's developing so fast that I predict that manned space flight to Mars might be achievable by 2030', he might think, 'Oh no, maybe lots of people thought, "What a stupid prediction! There's no way manned space travel to Mars will ever be achieved before about 2060! This man's obviously an idiot! There's no point hanging around to listen to anything else he says; his opinions obviously aren't reliable!"'"

The students giggled. Then they got up to go.