When do you know that your charity efforts have been successful?
You have not succeeded when a stream of the same hungry people eat from your hand day after day for years… though you will think so because you’ll tell yourself that this is better than having them die.
Is it possible, however, that your well-intended actions actually strip away the necessary pressures that humans need to overcome the challenges of life? Pain and pressure are the great teachers, the wonder drugs for indolence, the disciplining disciplers of the ignorant… preparing hearts for labor & learning when opportunity knocks. Necessity isn’t called “the mother of all invention” without reason, after all.
If other nations need you to “adopt” their children so that they can afford to raise them long enough for those same children to have more kids that you need to “adopt” so they can raise them long enough for them to have yet more children that you need to “adopt”….then your charity is misguided at best and down right destructive at worst.
Your charity is a success when your help creates self-sustaining people, who use your charity as a platform for surviving long enough to learn paths to “prosperity.” You only become useful human capital to others when you establish systems that promote self-sufficiency in community.
Truly successful charity educates, reforms, empowers, directs, transforms.
Anything less is abject failure.
