When Not Knowing How to Help the Poor is Not Helping

For all of those Christians who have replaced the logocenter of the cross for the logocenter of helping the poor (especially in other countries), consider this.

From Nicholas D. Kristof on today's New York Times Op/Ed section,

One of the ugly secrets of global poverty is that a good deal of suffering is caused not only by low incomes but also by bad spending decisions. Research suggests that the world’s poorest families (typically the men in those families) spend about 20 percent of their incomes on a combination of alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution, soft drinks and extravagant festivals......In one village here in Nicaragua where children were having to drop out of elementary school because they couldn’t afford notebooks, a midwife, Andrea Machado Garcia, estimated to me that if a man earned $150 working in the mountains as a day laborer during the coffee harvest, he might spend $50 on alcohol and women and bring back $100 to support his family.


Notice, I didn't say Christians shouldn't help the poor. If you think I did,please re-read the first paragraph of this post. Perhaps we don't know really HOW to help the poor, and maybe are even doing them harm. In this vein, You might wish to read my review of a book on this very subject here.