to feel angry and upset over a charity Chritsmas Box being sent to kids who are NOT needy...

[PrincessSnowLife]

As some of you may know, I am british and live in Bosnia.

My DS (4) just came home from school today beaming because he'd been given a big box of presents. All the kids had been given one. Lovely thought. On closer inspection though I have found that this is a Christmas box sent out by a certain christian charity in the UK. Now, I have nothing against these boxes, I think they are a very kind of people and a great way of getting kids to think of others in less fortunate positions...

HOWEVER I feel extremely uncomfortable with this gesture for the following reasons:

• the nursery school is a private one, and knowing the parents that send their kids there, the families are far from needy, and are in fact quite well off. These kids definitely don't fit the criteria being described on the charity's website.

• the content was very thoughtful (pens, sweets, soap, craft stuff, a cuddly toy, even a roll of blank paper to draw on) but nothing that kids here, even those with less well-off families, couldn't get hold of cheaply... Kids here, rich or poor, are spolit (in the nicest sense of the word) and don't really lack stuff like this. I know that this is just a matter of someone in the charity not knowing the reality of a country like this, of the availability and pricing of children's things, but it makes me feel very bad for the child that sent it.

• ironically, the label on the box is bilingual (welsh english) suggesting it was sent by a child in wales... which is where I am from... she may even be from the same town for all I know... which would make it ever so sad and ironic. There is a photo of the little girl in the box, with her name and age on the back, and I feel really really upset on her behalf that all the effort she has gone to has been misplaced.

• some of the content was definitely Christmas-ey... and sent to a school where probably 90% are muslim. This is not a country/area where anybody would be angry about this, or even slightly annoyed, but it was a bit careless of the ditributor(s), I think.

I am assuming that there is a communication or corruption problem somewhere along the route between the christmas box drop-off centre and the final destination. There are needy kids in Bosnia, war orphans for example, but it is not a desperately poor country like many others in the world... and the war ended 13 years ago, life is peaceful, normal, and despite the usual everyday whinging about the price of bread or whatever, it is really not a poor or difficult country to live in (scuse the grammar...got to post this quickly before going off to work ).

As an immediate thought, we want to send something nice to the little girl in the photo or offer to help the school send a thank you to all the kids over there that sent these things. Sadly, not sure if the charity will give us the details though since it could highlight a mistake.

We are definitely not going to keep the gifts. We will find a way of passing them on to kids that need them more than our DS, or who at least got fewer presents than he did for Eid/XMas!! (the grandparents visited and he got thoroughly spolit!!).

I also really think the charity should be told where these boxes end up. Hopefully this is the only batch that didn't reach needy children.

Oh, and this is not because my son has received charity (although I can imagine that some of the other parents will be mightily miffed by that!).

Ah. Rant over. Thanks for following. So AIBU? I feel so angry for the little girl.

Reading this with interest - my DD's school also supports this every year and I am appalled at this. The cynic in me assumes that it is easier to 'distribute' to private nurserys (in built up areas?) rather than out in the sticks where the most needy children probably are. . Awful - will pass this onto our headmistress for feedback, is linked via the church as well

Yes it was Operation Christmas Child that we gave to as well - I shall be letting our school know about this before next year so we can research it thoroughly.

Don't feel bad for letting us know, at the end of the day I would rather decline doing the box with a clear conscience next year and make a larger donation to another more trustworthy/ more efficiently run charity.

My children always do a box each thinking that they are helping children their own age who won't be getting anything for Christmas
Please let us know if they reply to your letter Princess

They are notorious but I think they have cleaned up their act over the past few years with regard to the religious side of it.

this was written 5 years ago

Gifts in kind like this do benefit the giver - it's good for children in one country to have giving made 'real' in this way - but I do worry about the principle of shipping a whole load of stuff from one part of the world to another. In terms of value for money, sending cash which could be used to buy goods on the spot is better, and it would support local business and the local economy - you can buy small trinkets, clothing, art materials, toiletries and so on just about anywhere in the world, after all.

It's not something I would ever support for those reasons, but I can see not everyone would agree.

i work for a charity, not one that does anything like these boxes. but we do help people who are in need and kind people are always trying to give us things to pass on. this is very difficult for us, the people we help need things, but our job isn't to broker toiletries etc and we can't store stuff.

it is easier and more cost effective all round to give money so that things can be bought, but of course that isn't what people wnat to do.

I had no idea it was anything to do with Billy Graham (however tenuous the link), I shall be re evaluating things from now on!
thanks for the link tiktok x

Our school also sends via SP, am really saddened by this. I have done a small amount of charity work in rural Romania, and I was imagining it was off somewhere like this, fingers crossed it did make a small difference to someone.

I remember when I was in year 5 and a lady came into my class to talk about people in other countries who didn't have all the lovely things we had and did we have anything to put into a box. Some kids had obviously known this was coming as their parents had sent them in with knitted dolls and the like, but I had nothing, so I opened my desk (old fashioned wooden one) and scraped around to find something. I dug out my sharpener and a used rubber and went and put it thoughtfully in her box! I thought it was a nice gesture at the time, but I now wonder the look of bemusement on the faces of children who received an off-colour used rubber and a faded red sharpener with bits of pencil in it!!! I was 10 and it was 14 years ago so forgive me my ignorance!

I wonder if anyone here remembers the truly terrible 'nappies for Romania' campaign? This collected bazilions of boxes and packs of disposable nappies from kind people, which were then sent in lorry loads to Romania, to the orphanages.

The orphanages had no means of disposing of the nappies hygeinically, and the campaign was wound up eventually, when it was pointed out the serious risks in a country where serious diseases in orphanages were rife....and that money to buy industrial washing machines and washable nappies (bought in situ - not shipped over at huge expense) was a better idea.

I think charity should not be about making the givers feel a warm glow, but about actively helping and supporting people, and at least doing no harm.

yes exactly tiktok, it is awful when donors or charities themselves impose their own 'solutions'. a friend sent me a link to the website of a charity in peru she'd been volunteeering for. they were very pleased with their case study, a woman with twin babies who they'd bought formula milk for because she didn't have enough to eat herself to make breastmilk for them. aaargh.

I agree 100% with TikTok.

fishie, that's awful but not uncommon. It's also really, really stupid. If they thought she was under-nourished, why not give her money to buy food for herself?

i know, it was awful. they had a picture of her in a hut up a mountain with this formula. i cna't see how she could sterilise anything. my friend was really proud of it.

I agree that charity should be about doing something genuinely useful, rather than giving the giver a warm glow. Very interesting thread. Thanks for posting PrincessSL.

tiktok, that article was an eye-opener, thank you

very very interestingly... the town was surprised to have some americans turn up last summer and open a small evangelical church... about a minute's walk away from the nursery school... coincidence?? especially with reference to SP using 'local evangelical partners' as distributors. I am very very suspicious.

some mad stories there, esp the one about the formula

twojags, when you said your dc send boxes to 'children their own age who won't be getting anything for Christmas', that was really . I really hope their boxes got to the right kids.

sigh

I don't know about conditions in any other eastern european countries but I know this country pretty well by now, and am often amazed at the slightly patronising assumptions held by organisations about life here. In a ideal world, all it would take is for one nice normal person to travel around by themselves (without the influence of any third parties), observing on behalf of a group of charities with the same aims, and decide for themselves what it is like here, who is needy and in what way. Then people's generosity could be better directed and make a real difference. ahh if I only ruled the world

I have always been uneasy about this shoeboxes, our school does them and as it is a Christian Charity I am really really not keen (I amjewish and I knew there were leaflets that went in theboxes). However I allowed my kids to do a box this year as they like to do it. But at the same time I made sure I did the MN appeal and donated to other charities.

Please do update when you get a reply as I would be quite interested in what they have to say. I may even bring this up at our shcool, as I would much prefer a different way of donation. They collect approx 300 boxes at our school, each with their £2, plus the value of the contents - say £3 per box = £1500. Wouldn't a donantion of £1500 be better served somewhere else, instead of on paper/pens and mouldy old rubbers!!

Ofcourse money is more practical but not as interesting sometimes. I suppose it might be exciting for a Bosian child to recieve something from a different country. It is a window into a different culture.

Families that need to realise that making up a box is a bit of fun, not a form of serious charity giving. I find it disgusting if the boxes are used to distribute religous propaganda. It would have been nicer if the children had been told to make the boxes genetric so that they could become Eid presents.

Its sad that the box the little girl made did not get to a poor child. It completely defeats the object. Maybe there were distribution problems and the charity felt it was better for well off children to get the boxes than for the boxes to go into landfill.

crunchie, those are huge amounts of money, especially when you multiply it by the number of schools involved in the boxes scheme in the UK alone... and then think how much further an amount like £1500 would go in eastern europe as compared to the UK . And of course on the other hand, reallytired is right, money is less interesting when we are trying to encourage kids to think of others and give something which means something tangible to them, like toys or books. A middle ground would be better. I couldn't say about other countries but here, an ideal solution would be for donations to be spent on school and library resources, which would be available to all kids. Perhaps one bigger box from each UK school wanting to send stuff, with a fun/educational toy/book from each class rather than from each child, which could then go to schools/libraries/theatre groups/ dance groups etc. But then again, something like this would be equally prone to problems and corruption. And then, once more, there's the financial and environmental costs of transporting stuff...

On another note, I saw one of the other mothers from the nursery school last night. Her little boy also got a box. She was finding it funny (in a nice way) that her son had been sent soap in his - 'maybe people in England think we have no soap in Bosnia!'. I decided against telling her what I knew about the scheme since she hadn't realised that it was a charity box, or hadn't seen the label on the box before her ds got to it!! She just thought it was a nice friendly thing that a school in the UK had done. Best to leave it like that.

I did quite a lot of work with charities and NGOs in Romania. I hated the bloody shoe boxes. Lots used to end up in normal schools and were full of stuff that was as cheap as chips out there. I also used to hate people who sent bloody flour, which was cheap and better in Romania than in UK.

If you want to do something like this, go further east - look at places like Moldova (also did some work there), Ukraine and other parts of the FSU.

And find out more about the charity, if possible. Hope and Homes for Children is active in Eastern Europe and does a lot of good work. And there are lots of other good ones which don't involve religious nutters! (But that's the only one I can remember at this time of night.)

There are always massive problems sending anything in kind (ie actual objects). Quite apart from the cost and labour involved in getting the stuff there, you risk offending cultural sensitivities (like sending soap - that could be seen as insulting!). A close family member worked for a long time in a very poor country and he used to get cross at the misguided 'aid' sent independently to his project. A church in the UK sent his project a massive truck load of clothing - some of it was tatty stuff and a lot of it was unsuitable for the climate or for cultural reasons (ladies who wear traditional dress are not about to don second-hand western gear, and what are male rural workers going to do with tweed suits?). Project workers had to sort through it all for quality and wearability, and they felt it was a waste of their time.

In addition, the local economy can suffer when people stop buying stuff from their local traders.

If a family is too poor to buy soap, then give them the money to buy soap, or buy it for them from the local market - at least that way a poor tradesperson can benefit.

Children who want to do something concrete for the poorer parts of the world can link up with schools and find out what they actually need.

send Laos. kid no have. lot country no have money. I no give kid. I no have money. england kid give good.

people no see Laos. lot country poor no have help.

My dd's school does this too. Am going to bring it up with them - would like to suggest an alternative so any suggestions welcome. Really depressing though.