Poverty Camp Shows Leftist Emphasis on Feelings Over Impact

"Poverty Camp" Shows Leftist Emphasis on Feelings over Impact

by: Michael Medved Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Why would any well-meaning citizen deride the widely-acclaimed “Poverty Camp” program in Ceres, California that allows privileged American teenagers to experience some of the hardship and destitution of the developing world?

On my radio show today I made dismissive comments about this enterprise in order to expand on the same point featured in yesterday’s blog (about the recent SUICIDE FOR PEACE by a lefty activist in Chicago): that contemporary liberalism often exalts feelings above results, intentions above impact. While conservatives will try to measure a private action or public initiative based on the way it affects other people or changes the world at large, leftists emphasize the sincerity or emotion that motivated the behavior – regardless of its consequences broader, long-term consequences..

“Poverty Camp” takes teens and pre-teens from middle class and upper middle class backgrounds and gives them an immersion experience in a sort of Third World Disneyland. By chance, the kids are assigned to try to survive for a weekend in an African round house, a Cambodian bamboo shack on stilts, a Latin American urban slum, or an Appalachian cabin. The least fortunate campers are those who are designated “refugees” with no assigned home, no food rations, no possessions – forced to seek shelter and nourishment by imploring for mercy from the others. The food is meager and the means of preparation are primitive – in order to convey the sense of developing nation authenticity. The aim of the program is to underscore our absurdly privileged status in the United States, and to inspire young people to feel compassion and comprehension regarding the plight of the wretched of the earth.

That’s a worthy goal, but the weekend experience itself does nothing – absolutely nothing – to improve the lives of suffering masses. Instead of using precious resources to provide a memorable “slumming it” experience for pampered punks, that money could go directly to unfortunates in Africa, Asia, Latin America, even Appalachia (though equating America’s poor to the impoverished billions of the Third World is a misleading obscenity).

Even better, parents who want their kids to come into contact with poverty and suffering could actually encourage those children to volunteer at homeless shelters, feeding programs, battered women homes, senior citizen centers, day care centers, you name it. With no shortage of hurting and hopeless human beings (especially worthy of sympathetic attention in Christmas season) why not introduce youngsters to real poor people rather than getting them involved in an elaborate, lavish game of poverty-let’s-pretend? If the kids volunteered they’d not only learn about their unfortunate neighbors but might also get some satisfaction from making attempts, at least, to ameliorate their pain.

Many Christian organizations send kids out to do international mission work precisely for this purpose: to gain a new appreciation of our own blessings and the desperation of others, while simultaneously engaged in a real effort to help transform the victims by providing new values and new faith that can deliver them from their misery.

And that’s my other problem with the “Poverty Camp” concept. Apparently, the organizers treat hardship and deprivation as facts of life – some kids are randomly assigned to bamboo huts, others live in cardboard boxes in urban slums, still others are homeless refugees. But there’s no explanation of the fact that poverty in real life is hardly random: it’s the product of bad decisions by individuals, or bad values and bad governance by their societies. The conditions in the African round house may be appalling, but they reflect long-standing, dysfunctional elements in local cultures – very much including the sexual mores that have hugely facilitated the spread of AIDS. This doesn’t mean that poor people in developing nations deserve to die or to suffer: all human beings should, ideally, get some opportunity to escape the squalid circumstances that still afflict nearly one-third of humanity. But to pretend that those circumstances have no connection to the cultures, economic systems or political leadership that produced them is to ignore history and current reality.

In short, when teaching kids about poverty it’s important to stress the relationship of values and ideas to real-world consequences – rather than encouraging feelings of guilt and empathy as an end in itself. “Poverty Camp” is undoubtedly well-meaning, but ultimately masturbatory—producing pleasurable reactions of righteous and empathy among participants, but signifying nothing at all to anyone else. The kids may feel idealistic and pure and determined at the end of the experience, but those noble emotions (like all the good vibes produced by Hollywood celebs when they participate in some wildly hyped benefit concert) count for nothing without practical actions to change benighted, backward and unproductive societies.

A Rebuttal to “Poverty Camp” By Grace Tranfield

I realize I’m getting into this conversation a bit late, but this question of how the rich countries should respond to the needs of the world’s poor is still timely, I believe. As a former volunteer at Heifer International’s education center at Ceres, the “poverty camp” that Mr. Medved’s article criticizes, I would like to address some of the inaccuracies and injustices of that ill-informed article.

First, does Heifer’s global village experience actually help the poor? Mr. Medved agrees that trying to make privileged teens understand and care about world poverty is “a worthy goal,” but he complains that “the weekend

experience itself does nothing – absolutely nothing – to improve the lives of suffering masses.” Actually, the “poverty camp” does raise money that supports Heifer’s main work: providing livestock and training to impoverished families around the world. The groups that come for the global village experience must raise money in advance for the privilege—and it is not cheap. However, because the camp is staffed primarily by volunteers, it is a very cost-effective arrangement for Heifer. There is nothing “lavish” about this operation. (I know this, having lived on the farm in their very modest volunteer housing for two months this spring.)

Furthermore, the sleep-over experience is just the most sensational part of the program. The kids are also exposed to other educational methods—games, group exercises, informative lectures, and age-appropriate but hard-hitting documentaries designed to teach them about the underlying causes and most effective solutions to world hunger. The kids also have to do actual farm work—mucking out the barn, hauling wheelbarrows of manure to the compost piles, weeding in the organic garden, building levees, painting fences, pruning trees, and even cleaning out the buffalo wallow (a bovine septic tank, basically.) And they do this on short rations, without showers, in the Central Valley heat. In what way does any of this resemble Disneyland? What’s more, the crops these kids plant, weed, and harvest go to a local food bank, where it does, in fact, directly help “to improve the lives of suffering” people here in our own state.

I would also like to address Mr. Medved’s more general attack of those he calls “leftists.” (Notice he doesn’t call his own group “rightists”?) Mr. Medved claims that “While conservatives will try to measure a private action or public initiative based on the way it affects other people or changes the world at large, leftists emphasize the sincerity or emotion that motivated the behavior – regardless of its consequences broader, long-term consequences.”

Like most generalities about “conservatives” and “leftists,” this is an absurd distortion. Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool “leftist,” I can say that the primary reason I support Heifer International is that it has one of the most effective programs operating today. You attack only one of its educational programs, perhaps because you don’t know about the other work it does. Well, granted, the outcomes of educational programs are hard to measure, though I would bet that the accountants at Heifer’s headquarters could tell you exactly how much money school children raise each year through the popular Read to Feed program, which combines education about world hunger with fundraising.

But Heifer’s main work consists of making impoverished families throughout the world self-supporting by giving them livestock and training, and in that work it has been praised again and again for its effectiveness by pragmatic people of all political stripes—farmers, church-goers, economists, and leftist yuppies alike. Here is one testament to Heifer’s simple efficiency offered by George B. N. Ayittey, a prominent African economist and professor, in his book Africa Unchained: “Occam’s Razor states that for every complicated solution to a problem, there is a much simpler one. In 1999, Heifer International donated a goat, named Mugisa, to Beatrice Biira’s family in a Uganda village. By selling Mugisa’s milk and offspring, Miss Biira’s family was able to send her, and later her seven brothers and sisters, to school.”

Ayittey finishes the story about how Beatrice’s hard work and intelligence eventually won her scholarships that made her college education in America possible (a story also profiled on Sixty Minutes). Then Ayittey contrasts Heifer’s simple, pragmatic, effective approach to one more common in the developing world: “African elites would never consider giving a goat to Beatrice’s family; they would prefer a more complicated solution involving a shiny fleet of air-conditioned tractors with global positioning systems.” Which of these two approaches would appeal more to the conservatives you know, Mr. Medved?

It’s easy to take cheap shots at idealistic people, be they conservative church groups who brave the malestrom in war-torn Sudan to buy enslaved Africans their liberty, or tie-dye clad college students at peace rallies, or those who those who get involved with Heifer’s global village experience. But Mr. Medved, at least we’re doing something to help. Are you? Why don’t you buy a goat for someone today—not because it feels good (though it does), but because it will help someone who might otherwise die.