In 1994 I was at a conference in Philadelphia. Since it was the 90s, I was planning to wear a pastel-floral jacket and a matching ivory skirt for the conference. When I got dressed, though, I discovered to my horror that you could SEE MY BRA THROUGH MY JACKET. (I was 19 and I’d never been to Russia; I was very modest.) Staring in the mirror at the damning outline of my bra, I was near tears. You’re not allowed to wear a t-shirt to a Model UN Conference and I hadn’t packed any other business clothes.
One of my roommates, a red-haired girl named Amy, noticed my situation, and offered to loan me her own beige bra. I had no other options beside sitting out a conference I was looking forward to (and had already paid for). I borrowed her bra. It didn’t fit quite right, and wearing it was icky. But it got me through the day.
I am telling you about my underwear because it’s an example of an appropriate donation (or in this case, micro-loan) of an in-kind good. Amy knew me personally, knew my situation in detail, and I had an expressed need for the item in question. We were from similar cultures, so she knew how to make the offer in a way that was comfortable for me. Her one-time loan sustained me until I could return to using my own resources (underwear drawer in my dorm room).
Those previous three paragraphs were a long way of getting to this point: used underwear is icky and donating it is hard to do in a non-icky way. In-kind donations in general are very hard to do well, and undergarments are a whole new level of challenge.
Maybe this group from Huffington Post has a fantastic plan for distributing used bras in an effective and culturally sensitive manner and the plan just didn’t get mentioned in the blog post. But before you donate anything to them – ask.
That’s my bigger point: if you’re not clear on what a charity wants to do with your donation, ask for details. It’s not rude. It’s being a good donor. If their plan is well-thought-out, it will be easy for them to answer your questions. And if they aren’t ready for questions from donors, they are certainly not ready to run an effective aid project. (If you don’t know what questions to ask, The Charity Rater is one good way to find some.)
—–
I am not sure about the backgroun of your post, so I am just adding my experience
In Burkina Faso women but second hand bras from street sellers all the time. Very few women can afford new bras and often second hand ones, if you are lucky to pick one out of the pile before the others get to it, can be better than some of the crappy chinese new ones that are sold in the market. As an anthropologist with 10 years of working and living experience in Burkina Faso, I can safely say that my friends and informants would have no trouble taking a donation of underwear, both bras and panties. They simply give them a good wash before (with tons of OMO powder, which makes the greyest undies look white again).
And I don’t think borrowing my friends bra would be an icky thing, unless it was a friend had seriously poor bodily hygene, in which case I wouldn’t really want her as a friend.
I think there is a problem with donating second hand clothes to Africa, if the money used for the transport can be better used, but when I travel to BF and Air France allows for 2 bags of 23 kg, I always pack one bag of second hand clothes I collect from friends back home, which I give to my host family and friends and they love it. It makes no difference to me, it doesn’t destroy the local economy and my friends are happy to have new clothes, which they would otherwise have to buy from a used clothes vendor down the street. And since some of my friends are street vendors, they get their clothes aswell. Everyone’s happy.
Fatou – I agree with you. I give all my used clothes to a local organization that distributes it to the elderly. There are ways to make donations of used clothes work. I just takes a lot of knowledge and care.
What rubs me the wrong way is how the tonnes of items intended as donations to the developing world, and more often to refugees living in squalid camp conditions, end up getting onto the market, being sold to a middle-class while the intended recipients go on with next-to-nothing. When I’m in Europe and drop into one of the big charity collection points, very few, if any of the other people that walk in with items to give away to charity have the faintest idea that by the time these make it to the streets in Burma or Uganda, it’ll be in highly priced bales and with an equally matched line of middlemen demanding their own pay-offs for their services along the way. The politics!
In our early days in Afghanistan (1999-2004 or so), there were used clothes markets in the big cities: reject clothes from the Western second hand shops, some of it still new, most used, mostly good quality: Gap, Esprit, Jeans West, all brand names. And you could get everything – fancy knickers, cashmere jackets, stockings, ski pants. It seemed to me a good way of free market economics: the quality was mostly very good, having been sorted back in London, or where ever; it was recycling at its best, and it was all managed by local entrepreneurs who bought the stuff, shipped it at their own cost and sold it at very reasonable price. Better than it going to landfill. But with the opening up of Afghanistan, now the markets are full of the cheapest synthetics made in sweat shops. The quality is terrible and the material awful. But Afghans buy it. Partly, I guess because it is new, and nicely packaged. Also because of the Afghan preference for ‘dirishi’ – shiny materials. The prices are about the same as the old second hand stuff, but it seems a step in the wrong direction.
Anyway, the larger point is that while not absolutely everyone can afford clothes, even in the second hand bazaar, in a place like Afghanistan, the market worked it out. It didn’t need anyone setting up a charity to funnel clothes from Cleveland or Paris. Setting up local means for Afghans to recycle clothes, or helping Afghans develop their own ways to clothe the most vulnerable is a better solution.
Great post Alanna. This reminded me of what happened in my office shortly after the earthquake in Haiti this past January. People decided to gather huge bags of used clothing and soon filled up an entire empty office of the stuff. I wondered how effective this would be at the time, since it was just after the disaster and the docks were disabled and the airport was having trouble with incoming flights, and this was for emergency medical assistance, etc., as we all remember. I knew the gesture was coming from a compassionate need to help, but I still felt that all the effort should have gone in another direction. Now I always make sure that a donation of used clothing is needed and if it’s the smartest type of donations I can make.