(photo from Enough blog)
Updated on July 13 – Enough has issued an apology for this poorly handled distribution, and committed to doing better in the future. You can see their apology here. I was impressed; it was like a case study in how to take criticism with grace.
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The Enough project works in advocacy against genocide, particularly on Darfur. All well and good. I don’t know much about the intricacies of Darfur, or the intricacies of advocacy. I know some people think Enough is too heavy on the celebrities, and others think they do good work. That’s not what this post is about.
This post is about the idiotic, dehumanizing, tacky stunt they pulled in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad. They brought a limited number of New York Knicks jerseys on a visit to the camp, and made the kids fight for them. You don’t believe me? I will quote the blog:
“(We) separated the children into groups based on which blocks in the camp they lived. Then we began to hand the jerseys out as evenly as possible. The scramble began, and within minutes the jerseys were devoured. Though we informed them that we had no more to give, the children still scrambled up to us to peer into the empty bag to ensure a jersey had not escaped our notice.”
Okay, not fight – scramble. And note the dehumanizing language – devoured – like the kids are starving animals. This makes me mad. Refugee children are human beings with human dignity who should be treated as such. Enough just came and taught the kids that there isn’t enough for everyone and the good stuff goes to the strong and fast.
Now you ask – what would I have wanted them to do? Well, first of all, I would posit that there is no reason to bring New York Knicks jerseys to a refugee camp except to feel good about yourself. If you are determined to bring the jerseys I still have three suggestions:
- Bring enough jerseys for all the kids (a lesson many of us learned in kindergarten)
- Give the jerseys to schools to use as prizes or rewards for high-performing students
- Use a transparent lottery system to select parents to be given jerseys for their kids
All of these would take more time and effort than just carrying basketball jerseys to a refugee camp and throwing them at kids. It’s worth it.
At this point, I would like Enough to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I’d like them to develop guidelines on appropriate donations and methods of donations for visitors to camps. They should refuse to visit camps with any group or individual who does not follow those guidelines. And they should publish those guidelines on their blog for public review and comment.
PS – If you don’t want my advice on how to handle a distribution to refugee children, may I recommend the Sphere standards?
I’d appreciate it if anyone who reads this post would go over to the Enough post, tell them what you think of this dumb stunt, and leave a link to this post.
Last note: Before you post a comment telling me that Enough means well and we shouldn’t criticize them, read this post.
You could also replace ‘jerseys’ with pencils or sweets. You wouldn’t believe the number of times on my travels that I’ve seen these items thrown into crowds of schoolchildren, only for them to fight like crazy scrambling on the ground to get hold of one. Many of the people doing this were well-intentioned individuals who didn’t know better, but an NGO certainly should
Couldn’t agree more and I want to know where we get the idea of the scramble as a good thing. I can persuade corporate donors to buy gifts locally rather than ship from the UK, but when I diss the scramble, I’m just a killjoy who doesn’t appreciate how much fun the kids find it and how grateful they are. They can’t resist trying it once, even if it’s on the road from the airport. Is there a story or character deep in our culture that exemplifies this type of ‘generosity’, which we copy and who I could point to and say ‘this is not that’? I don’t think the loaves and fishes were distributed by a scramble… Which misleading model has to be toppled?
What a self-righteous post.
If you gave the Enough people the benefit of the doubt, you’d have to admit that it’s possible, just possible, they didn’t bring enough jerseys on purpose, but simply because they didn’t expect them to be that popular with the children. They write that they tried “to hand the jerseys out as evenly as possible” and the children “scrambled”. Not quite the same as making them fight, don’t you think? Why do you interpret what the Enough people did in the worst possible way?
They would probably agree that what happened at that camp was far from ideal – but does that really justify your accusing them of pulling off a “idiotic, dehumanizing, tacky stunt”? And don’t you think it’s condescending to lecture them on the fact that “refugee kids are people”?
If they had thought of the kids as people, they wouldn’t have treated them that way, so it seems to me that Enough does need to be reminded. Telling someone something they don’t know is not condescending.
The Enough Project is committed to advocating for these very kids. Why didn’t they stop and think about how to do this as well as possible? I want them to have a defined policy on how to handle these kinds of gifts. That seems like a totally reasonable think to ask for.
“Telling someone something they don’t know is not condescending.” But your implying they don’t know is.
“That seems like a totally reasonable think to ask for.” Yes, but “asking for” really isn’t what you’re doing in this post. You’re accusing them, lecturing them, using judgemental and offensive terms to describe what they did.
I’ve seen a bunch of aid groups come in with a limited number of goodies, hand them out, then stand dumbfounded as the rest of the kids/ families/ whoever get disappointed, get angry and sometimes get violent when they realise there are no more goodies trucks coming. And the aid groups scratch their heads and wonder aloud, ‘gee, we didnt think x would be so popular’. OF COURSE whatever x is, is going to be popular. In camps, anything you can get is currency to use to get something else (well, almost anything – this is not an endorsement to send any kind of crap into camps). But I wish aid groups would hand over their goodies to the camp managers, who usually have worked out equitable, reasonable and organised ways to distribute goods, either to the most vulnerable, or to everyone, if there happens to be enough. Usually though they want to get the photo op: ‘Aid group efforts benefit poor kids’, etc.
They deserve to be judged. If they had taken the time to consider how popular those shirts were likely to be, and how the children who didn’t get them were likely to be affected, then this would not have happened. That would require approximately ten minutes of reflection and empathy.No one took those ten minutes. They deserve my judgment and my lectures.
I completely agree on the absurdity of this event, the language used, and the fact that jerseys were chosen as the item to pass out.
However, there are never enough commodities to pass out in a camp, whether it be food items or other material goods. Methodologies for distribution are tricky and all the more difficult given these constraints and how usually desperate refugees tend to be.
It would be better to give jerseys to every child, however given constraints, is it better to not give them to anybody? Then, would the same logic follow for all other commodities?
The Enough project seems ridiculous, but the contention at its base is non-unique and speaks to a larger problem of distribution and dignity with constrained resources that shouldn’t be written off by knicks jerseys.
Grant, I think that luxury items like sports jerseys should have different rules applied to them than necessities like commodities. I don’t think you can generalize from one to the other.
Wow. Just … wow. I mean, I generally need approval from a human subjects review board in order to send people “scrambling” for anything.
To me this sounds like a system for distribution that was very poorly planned and that then got out of control. Distributing jerseys by blocks? As though the children in a block who didn’t get a jersey would get to share the jerseys of the other children in their blocks? Handing out an item that has only an individual benefit to a group is a terrible idea. Kids aren’t stupid, especially kids who’ve endured the things those children have.
Yes, you’re never going to have enough of anything in a refugee camp. But anyone who’s ever even visited a village with candy for children knows that you have to have a plan that ensures that every child gets a piece. Same thing should go for all projects.
Doing this type of thing (organizing a ‘scramble’) can generate lasting conflicts among people even if it seems like no big deal to those who are giving out the goods. It can also have unforseen negative consequences in terms of people’s participation in general in the future, eg., it damages the efforts of the organization itself (if we’re going to be self-centered about it). I think anyone who has ever worked in a situation where resources are scarce should know full well the problems that can be generated when goods are not fairly managed (by the people themselves if possible). I am not making a judgment call on Enough as I don’t know the full story, but this stuff really needs to be considered by organizations and those who take people around to visit projects, etc..
The paragraph you quote doesn’t bother me as much as their last paragraph:
“The mad dash for the jerseys is emblematic of the constant struggle refugees have for food, education, and basic supplies…The Sister Schools Program brings together a diverse coalition — students, professional athletes, and international, private, and non-profit organizations — to address this need by providing school supplies and teacher training and by linking U.S. schools with sister schools in the 12 refugee camps in Chad.”
I don’t find the language of your example offensive, simply because I think you could use that language to describe any group of kids fighting for something, like candy from a pinata or beanie babies from santa’s bag. But this concluding statement, however, bothers me because it appears that they use – maybe create – this instance to illustrate refugee life to the reader. Furthermore, they go on to describe the work they do for schools, which seems to have nothing to do with these jerseys. It definitely feels like a publicity stunt, and I appreciate your post about it.
I’ll make a judgment on their work, it’s repulsive – having worked in similar settings for the under-privileged, I’ve seen these types of ill-thought out stunts entirely too often. If the Enough Project didn’t trust in the Camp managers, they could have worked with another organization to hand out the jerseys in a positive manner. Most organizations are quite happy to assist.
and Oliver, if they didn’t think that the jerseys would be so popular, then they should’ve asked. There are better, more humane, ways to do it. They can illustrate refugee life in another way.
This type of distribution further reinforces that life is unfair and decreases the kids motivation to work hard. They end up thinking that, “Success depends on either chance or connections, not hard work or education.” Perhaps there is a grain of truth in that but shouldn’t the aid organizations, at the very least, promote the opposite?
Thank you for writing about this.
It just makes me sick to my stomach thinking about how they treated those children.
This post feels like brow beating!
Yes this was a stupid stunt, perhaps their blog writer just chose the wrong journalistic expression to describe what happened. Whatever they did does seem wrong by everyone’s standard, including my own.
They’ve issued an apology. Leave them be. We can still learn from this and have discussions about it, but the language and tone towards them is unprofessional to say the least.
“Give the jerseys to schools to use as prizes or rewards for high-performing students.”
Am I the only one that doesn’t see any level of difference in this and the “race for it” version?
At least in the scramble, a slower kid might have happened to be closer, or by chance gotten the drop on a faster one. With school grades, assuming they are conducted fairly, well, sorry, kid, you’re just too stupid to wear a Knicks jersey. Might as well learn that now.
How about this, if there aren’t enough, make the kids work for it, at something that everyone is capable, if not everyone willing, to do. You’ll discover who really desires it the most by who is willing to put in the effort to get it. The ones that really want to have it seem like the ones who should get it.
Had my own experience with this in an IDP camp. Someone had collected (bags and bags of) Mardi Gras beads to pass out to kids, and while we tried to distribute them evenly, there was definitely a fair bit of pushing and shoving. I felt bad that the smaller kids were losing out. In retrospect, it could have used a bit more planning.
Maybe someone could suggest to Magette Wade or Bill Easterly that is–or so it seemed to me, as an observer with no dog in the fight–precisely the idea behind the rules of visiting the Millennium Village that caused such a bru-ha-ha about a month ago. Number one, as Wade trumpeted all over HuffPo, was don’t give things to the kids. This conundrum is precisely why, or at least as it was explained to me. And then there’s that bigger issue of dependency…but that’s for another time.
It’s awesome that you actually got them to apologize, but note that ENOUGH’s adventures in inappropriateness are far from over. For example, they have a video about Congo on their YouTube channel that features two women essentially fellating popsicles.
http://savedarfuraccountabilityproject.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/celebrity-activism-blows/
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