My church back home has been affiliated with Heifer International for as long as I can remember. Each year, the kids I taught for Sunday school would make/bake food and other things church members would purchase, and proceeds went towards buying animals for Heifer Project. Countless years, we’ve even raised $5,000, enough to send an entire “ark” to struggling countries—two each of nearly 20 kinds of animals. I’ve been involved with this process for over 10 years now, whether as a child in Sunday school or a teacher. When I was younger, I was so excited that we were sending animals to these countries where people had less than I did. We were shown videos of children in families who received the gift of cows or other animals. If given a cow, for example, the families were able to use the milk to make cheese, and could either keep the food and milk from the cow, or sell it to make some profit. The families agreed in advance to donate offspring from their new animal(s) to other families in need nearby, thus perpetuating the gift. Essentially, from the gift of one animal, a family gains sustenance, income, and the gift is passed on and on to other families, waterfalling the benefits to an entire village.
In theory, it sounds like a perfect system. Eventually though, I began to develop mistrust in the system. What if people were lactose intolerant, what if they don’t have electricity to store the dairy products, what if the animals are stolen or die, what if the people Heifer International professes to help, do no have an enhanced quality of life because of our donations? As well as these practical questions, the motivation behind donations also intrigued me. When we donate to a cause, give money to a homeless person, or return our excess change to the cashier, why do we do it? It could be easily argued that when people do these supposedly “selfless acts”, they are in actuality acting selfishly. When we are philanthropic, the result is that ‘warm fuzzy feeling’, and generally, a lessening of guilt for having more than others, or something of the sort. So do we truly donate to Heifer International, for example, because of a genuine interest in improving the lives of the impoverished? Or do we do so in order to keep up with our fellow do-gooders; make a good impression on our congregation; assuage the guilt our respective wealth’s provide; ensure that we’ve done our good deed for the day, week, month; impress others with our apparent selflessness; or just feel better about ourselves.
While it would be nice to think that the animals from Heifer automatically give families a better life and more opportunities, and all good deeds are done out of the goodness of peoples’ hearts, this is simply a naïve assumption. Although I was at first disgusted with my apparent pessimism, I see it now as a realistic view of how the world works. Every action has a specific motivation, and things do not always work out perfectly. The fact is, we honestly have no control over these occurrences. With the line of work I’m planning to go into through a degree in International studies and an aspiration to work for an NGO, I knew I had to somehow reconcile my admittedly cynical outlook on altruism, or undoubtedly experience cognitive dissonance.
The conclusion I came to, which I suppose was supported by our discussion Thursday, is that although motivations for donation and charitable actions may not be pure, the end result of these actions is really all that matters. Maybe not every donation from Heifer International works out perfectly, but I need to have trust that the organization does everything in their power to ensure a positive outcome from their work. Children receiving a chance at education through money made selling cheese at the market don’t care at all if the person responsible for their schooling was Sally who gave to Heifer International purely to teach her neighbor Patty a lesson after hearing how great it was that Patty’s husband made enough money to donate some.
I suppose the end result of my internal battle about altruism is reconciliation. While I realize that individuals may have impure or selfish motivations, I’ve discovered that doesn’t necessarily matter. I’ll continue giving my spare change to homeless people, donating to Heifer, and volunteering—regardless of whether or not I’m truly making a difference, or if I’m really only doing it to feel better about myself. We desperately need people to give in today’s world, whether it’s truly from their hearts or from their heads.
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