The Road to Hell (28 page)

On average, that comes out to $35.29 per child across the United States. (The Appalachian program, which Save considers to be its best, is also its oldest. One of the reasons the numbers look better is that half of the 6,000 sponsored children have two sponsors.)

“Get this,” Wittsel said as we were finishing lunch. “A couple of months
ago, Save the Children sent us a plaque in a Save the Children tote bag. The plaque read, ‘In Appreciation of Excellence,' or something like that. I don't know what it was for. Maybe they thought it was necessary to do
something.'

Similar stories emerged from Save the Children's overseas programs. One former country director in the Middle East described how, upon starting his new job, he learned that most of the sponsored children in his program were receiving nothing more than Save the Children T-shirts, hats, and invitations to parties. When he eliminated the toys and games, fewer than half the children enrolled in sponsorship programs were receiving anything at all.

“Sponsorship pays for sponsorship,” a former director in the West African country of Cameroon said. “In Cameroon, this included two women in Yaounde [the capital] to run the MIS software to track these kids down and keep track of them. Then there was a similar infrastructure in [the city of] Doukoula, where the best trained and most expensive personnel were involved in finding new kids, and tracking down old ones. None of our sponsorship money ever got used for development.”

When this particular officer complained to Westport, he was told: It is a $24 million industry! You got a better idea?

“The fact that it was a $24 million industry that paid for itself—and itself only—never seemed to bother anyone, except those of us in the field.”

The information for Cameroon was sent to me after I'd published some of my initial findings about Save the Children. It was one of many messages I received beginning with phrases like, “you don't know the half of it.” Of all the letters, however, the most detailed and moving came from a Bolivian:

I am a resident of Provincia Inquisivi, Bolivia where Save the Children has wasted money for about seven years.

When Save the Children inaugurated their program there in 1987 or 1988 [there] were some fairly large parties. I was invited to two of them. Community leaders served meals and cocktails. The U.S. Ambassador, his wife and child came to the inauguration in Quime and gave some blankets to the hospital. In turn, the people gave them locally produced gifts.

Save the Children signed up the next door neighbor kid, Maritza. She has six people in her family. Maritza lives in a falling down one-room adobe hut with a grass roof. There is no potable water, electricity or outhouse near her family's hut. Her grandfather recently died of tuberculosis, and I often hear convulsive
coughing coming from their house. Maritza's older sister, a teenager, practically died from postpartum fever last year. Like Maritza, many of my neighbor's children signed up for sponsorships with Save the Children. Peace Corps volunteers were used to sign the children up, and take their pictures. In 1993, Maritza wrote a letter to her sponsor, copying it from a worn out practically unusable blackboard at the school. Most, if not all, of the Quime school children replied using the same formula. It's easier to translate 300 letters that all say the same thing.

More than three hundred children signed up in the Quime area. Quime children brought an estimated $72,000 of benefits into Save the Children's coffers per year. That amounts to about $576,000 of benefits over an eight year period. In comparison, the annual budget of city of Quime during those same years was about $5-7000. I estimate that, minus salaries and office expenses, Save the Children spent less than $10,000 of the $576,000 in Quime. A half million dollars in a town of four thousand could have gone a long way to solving the real, primary problems of hunger, disease, shelter and education. What happened to Maritza's sponsorship money?

An addition to the elementary school was added, but I understand from conversations with town leaders, Eriko Herguero and David Argollo, that very little of the financial support came from Save the Children. Save the Children does have a sign painted on it, the local joke is that the only thing they paid for was the sign. The elementary school, at present, has broken windows shuttered against the wind, a few bare electric lights in some of the classrooms, stucco and paint falling onto the cold cement floor, three children to a single desk, not a single poster to liven up the walls, one outdoor unisex bathroom without a water supply for six hundred children, and exceedingly dangerous three-story staircases and balconies. I know because my daughter goes to school there. Nothing at all was done with the 6-12th grade school: steel railings hang loosely over the edge of balconies, the stairs could give way at any moment and the same general conditions as the elementary school apply. Save the Children has relatively elaborate signs painted all over the Province, but if they really wanted to help children they could have used some of the $576,000 to provide materials and hire local people to make the schools in Quime a suitable place to learn.

The pesticide death of three children by a mother using Save the Childrensupplied undiluted pesticide to rid her children of head lice is widely believed locally. Early in their program, Save the Children supplied and pushed pesticides. They created a loan program so that farmers could buy imported potato seed, chemical fertilizer and pesticides. For two years afterwards, a blight
killed most of the potato crop in the villages near Quime. I can't prove that the blight was brought in with the imported seeds, or if it was a result of fertilizers, pesticides, or an act of God. Many peasants believe the blight came in with the imported seed. Supplying chemical fertilizer made it more difficult to obtain traditional fertilizers from sheep herders in the highlands.

At first, the people in Quime were very hopeful that Save the Children would do something to really help their children. Representatives combed the town and the hillside villages. Remembering the dolls and small checks from the previous program, parents were happy to sign their children up. They were quickly disillusioned. Practically nothing happened to help the children of Quime. Many of the villagers realize this and complain, but I don't think that anyone realizes how badly they've been ripped off, or how utterly paternalistic the philosophy of the organization is.

Knowing firsthand the grinding poverty in rural Bolivia and some good programs exist, I cry in frustration that Save the Children came to our province. As far as I am concerned I would like to sue Save the Children in the name of Provincia Inquisivi children.

Marko Lewis

W
hen I spoke with Charles MacCormack again, he didn't dispute any of the facts I had, but he insisted that I wasn't telling the whole story. Westport, he said, delivers much more than sponsorship dollars. He offered two examples.

“We are looking at a kind of emergency response, early childhood center kits to jump-start early childhood programs after floods and earthquakes and other natural disasters. And we have learned that what children most need at that time is a reestablishment of continuity, of normalcy. They need to kind of get back into their regular lives. And so we've put a trunk together that has coloring books, crayons, disinfectant, plastic sheets, toys, etc.”

At the time MacCormack was talking, the kits didn't exist yet. And when they were put together, most children weren't able to benefit from them anyway. But, beyond that, the emergency kits are exactly the kinds of programs that Save needs for the pie chart. The materials are donated by companies that are able to write off the full wholesale value of the materials. That value then becomes a donation to Save the Children, which can register it as a donation that goes 100 percent to “program” to counterbalance sponsorship funds used for administration.

MacCormack's other “major example,” was the “Eyes on the Future” program, which provided eyeglasses on Indian reservations. On the phone, MacCormack told me that sponsorship paid for the program, but later his office sent me a fact sheet that contradicted that claim, noting that eye-glass frames were donated by the ClearVision Optical Company, and tools and materials came from the American Optometry Association and Hilsinger Corporation. The total value put on the in-kind contributions was $500,000. Again, that's 100 percent in and 100 percent out, to beef up the pie chart.

“The Eyes on the Future program was dreadful,” said Connie DiLego, who worked for Save the Children as a full-time volunteer on the Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona. “It was just awful. This was a one-time deal, not a commitment to eye care.”

DiLego had moved to Tuba City from Massachusetts to do volunteer work with the Navajo. At first she thought Save the Children was the perfect vehicle, but she soon soured on the organization. For her, Eyes on the Future was typical of Save's programs: “We were informed there was going to be an eye exam plus free eyeglasses. They were also supposed to examine the elderly, which I thought was wonderful. When the day came, hundreds of people showed up. I think they were a bit overwhelmed. People were supposed to get glasses within a month or two. We waited well over a year in some cases, and then some glasses came with the wrong prescriptions. They wouldn't mail them to the people directly, so we had to go to Gallup to pick them up.”

So many people began calling the Tuba City office that DiLego started handing out the 800 number in Gallup. “You've got a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple calling Gallup, and they're told they have to drive four hours to pick up their glasses. Many of these people don't have cars or can't afford the gas if they do. Then Save said they were going to start charging for the glasses. It seemed that they were making up the rules as they were going along.”

DiLego also pointed out that many children had grown or their prescriptions had changed while waiting for their glasses to arrive. And since it wasn't a long-term commitment from Save the Children, there was no telling where the kids were going to get glasses the next year. Children who broke their glasses or outgrew them couldn't count on getting a new pair either.

“It seemed to me that the child didn't matter,” DiLego said. “The children were a means to their end. And the end was their pie chart. It didn't matter if Jeffrey Yazzie had shoes or not.” In response to a question, DiLego
said, “I'm trying to think if there is one kid whose life was changed, who's going to have a better future because of what Save the Children did. No, I honestly can't. I can't name any one person about whom I can say his or her life was changed.”

It is “lasting, positive change in the lives of children worldwide” that Save the Children sells to sponsors in ads placed in newspapers and magazines across the country. Those ads always feature photographs of emaciated or disfigured children in the most extreme conditions, not the children that Save usually works with. Almost everyone I spoke with on the reservations felt stigmatized by the ads. “In earlier times, sponsored families in the United States were not that likely to see Save's advertising, because of the absence of television and magazines,” Shelby Miller wrote. “Now they do, and some are offended.”

Many of the people who have worked with Save, as well as others in the charities community, have been offended as well. Sally Franz, who formerly did fund-raising for Save, was sitting in her office one day in early 1994 when a colleague rushed in to show her the new Save the Children ad from their new advertising agency. The headline read, HELP STOP A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHILD ABUSE. It was printed across the bottom of a photograph of a dying and abandoned Sudanese child being observed by a patient and healthy-looking vulture. The ad copy continued: “This abuse is merciless. It preys on innocent, fragile lives and brutalizes them with utter poverty…with constant hunger…with relentless diseases… with no hope for even a basic education.” Franz looked at the ad and was horrified, not at the photograph but at Save the Children for using it to raise money. To her and other people in the organization, the irony wasn't very subtle; it was Save the Children that was merciless, preying on innocent, fragile lives.

Franz recalls that one of her African colleagues was particularly upset by it, both agreeing, “The message of all our advertising at Save was that Africans are too stupid and ignorant to take care of themselves. And if we don't do it, their parents and their government aren't responsible enough to do it.”

In addition, Save wasn't even working in Sudan, where the photograph was shot. And even if they had been working in Sudan, they wouldn't have been providing famine relief. This was a famine caused by war, nothing that a small Save the Children community development project was going to address in the least. No amount of money donated to Save was going to help that child or the thousands of others in the region.

As word spread around the organization, Franz recalls, most of the staffers had the same overwhelmingly negative reaction. MacCormack and the executives, however, were proud of it. “They were very proud of it because they said it was gonna get a great response and it was hard hitting,” Franz says.

The ad also managed to annoy the community of relief organizations at large, not exactly known, themselves, for their sensitive portrayal of Africans and other dark-skinned people. Jerry Michaud, the executive director of the End Hunger Network, wrote to MacCormack, calling the ad a “cheap shot,” and described it as “hunger porn.” “At first I thought it was a Feed the Children ad,” Michaud wrote, referring to the Oklahoma City-based organization that is universally despised for their lack of ethics in the charity world.

Michaud wrote that he was reminded of an angry African delegate to a conference who said, “The more desperate our conditions are portrayed in the U.S. media, the more money you American organizations seem to raise for your own overhead and projects.” The delegate could have continued and said that the more desperate Africa seems, the less likely it is to get investment and the assistance it really needs to develop.