We are the world/ We are the children... So let's start giving/

First came Band Aid, the charity band of Irish and British musicians who in 1984 raised funds for famine relief in Ethiopia with the multimillion sale of their song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” We bought the single. It was criminal not to help save a country “where nothing ever grows nor rain or rivers flow…”

Following the success in the UK, an American benefit single for African famine relief was born. The charity single “We Are the World” was a worldwide commercial success, instantly becoming not only the fastest-selling American pop single in history but also the biggest selling single of all time. Who did not sing along? Who did not slowly sway the arms above the heads, lighter in hand? Who did not take part in the circles of love, hold hands with strangers, and sang off tune …we are the world, we are the people…who did not feel that cozy jitter of satisfaction buying the track, knowing that the money was going to stop hunger in that far-away continent? The song went on to raise about $70 million for humanitarian aid in Africa.

Then in 1985 came Live Aid, a multi-venue rock concert watched by 400 million viewers across the globe. Throughout the 16-hour long concerts, we the viewers were constantly urged to donate money to the Live Aid cause. At the launch of Live Aid, Bob Geldof, argued: "Doing nothing for Ethiopia would mean you were complicit in murder." So when Queen opened the concert with Bohemian Rhapsody, we reached for our wallets—we didn’t want blood in our hands-- and when they played We Will Rock You, we prompted those around us to look into their pockets, and by the time we were finished singing along We Are The Champions, we’ve called everyone we knew urging them to donate. Three hundred phone lines were set up so that we could make donations using our credit cards and every twenty minutes the phone number and an address where we could send our donations to stop hunger were repeated.

Seven hours into the concert in London, the British had donated only 2 million dollars. The organizer took the microphone and dropped the F bomb on those who hadn’t donated yet as well as those who had donated too little. The abuse must have been persuasive enough, because after it, giving increased to US350 per second.

Everybody gave. The arts again were put to good use and in the spirit of music and charity; the world sang and donated in unison. But all words and no pictures can be misleading. So a video was shown in London and Philadelphia, as well as on televisions around the world, with images of starving and diseased Ethiopian children. The song "Drive" by The Cars, playing in the background. And the giving increased at a furious pace. This charity fundraiser/ concert raised approximately $285 million dollars.

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Fast forward ten years. It’s the mid 90’s and nothing has changed in Ethiopia. Where did the money go?

Overall GDP (US$89 per year) is lower than it was at the beginning of the nineties.
The country ranks is 169th out of 175 in the human development league of the UNDP
Life expectancy at birth is 42 years
Infant mortality is as high as 116 per thousand compared to 6.7 per thousand in the US
47 per cent of children under five suffer from malnutrition
Ethiopia has the third largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS of any country in the world.
Only 24 per cent of Ethiopians have access to water sources

Ethiopia has been repaying its national debt to the G7 creditors, meaning us (you and me and Canada, Italy, UK, Germany, Japan and France), at a rate of US$35 million a year. This means that every penny collected through the fund-raising concerts of the 80’s that should have been used to end hunger ended up back in our pockets.

Fast forward 20 years after Live Aid, G7 creditors have stalled our annual commitment to alleviate the situation in Ethiopia and are doing nothing. Not anymore. And in the coming years, we’ll have several new causes, all noble…Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Indonesia, and now Haiti.

And how about Haiti? How much money did the telethon Hope for Haiti raise? Reports indicate the telethon pulled in more than $57 million. And more money is likely to come in because the songs performed during the telethon are being sold through iTunes with proceeds going to the Haitian cause. And guess what is Haiti’s annual debt repayment to us? Between $50-80 million per year. You do the math.

Haitians in South Florida

In November 2005 while doing fieldwork in Immokalee I came across a Haitian community. It was in the wake of hurricane Wilma and Immokalee’s streets were littered with uprooted trees, branches, garbage, rooftops and material remnants of human existence.

When I arrived at the Relief Center where I was to interview a couple of social scientists about the human cost of the hurricane, I found a long line of black parishioners forming a queue all the way to the parking lot and out of the center grounds.

“What’s this line for?” I asked the last woman in the line. She was ashy black with yellow eyes like she had never left her mother continent.

“For free stuff,” she said.

“What’s free?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and inverted her mouth stretching its corners as far low as she could.

“How would I know? Go find out yourself!”

I walked a few feet towards the door and stopped again to ask another woman what the line was for.

“Free stuff,” she said. This time, I pressed with a more specific question.

“Food?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet,” she said before she switched back to Creole and resumed her chitchat with the women around her.

A few minutes later when the door opened, I waved at Sister Mary. She waved back and let me in.

“What’s going on?”

“Haiti. That’s what’s going on.” It’d been just a couple of months since last time I sat with her, but she looked older. Like the hurricanes had crossed paths right on her white face. Sister Mary had been a relentless advocate for the rights of immigrant farm workers in South Florida and had spent the last twenty years, since she left her motherland Belgium, feeding, clothing and counseling Central American and Caribbean migrants.

“I already made peace with God and, I’m sure, He’s forgiven me,” she said as she looked at the women queuing outside in the sun. “Look at them. Did you see any Mexican?” Before I replied she said, “No, no Mexicans. Do you know why?” I said no.

“Because they’re working out in the fields. For god’s sake. Working.”

Before the hurricane season hit, homeland security pickup trucks could be seen everywhere in South Florida. Sometimes they raided the fields and packaging warehouses looking for undocumented laborers, but other than forcing them to run, scatter and hide like scared animals, “la migra” didn’t do much. The white and green trucks were the government loud speakers. They were there to remind farmers and workers that immigration laws were about to get tougher and undocumented workers would be deported on the spot. At least that was the message heard across the groves. And that same message forced thousands of fieldworkers into a Diaspora of sorts towards post-Katrina New Orleans where anyone willing to work was hired, no questions asked.

Strawberry -planting crews disappeared; orange groves were severely short-handed, tomato-field laborers overworked. This forced migration of workers left South Florida farmers scrambling for manual labor. And now hurricane Wilma had exacerbated the need for able bodies. Two days after hurricane Wilma, the Mexicans who had braved the winds in their dilapidated trailers and waited out the storm, returned to work.

“You saw them this morning, right?” Sister Mary asked as she fanned her rosy face with a fax that has just come in from FEMA. “These Mexicans are out there, stooped over, some of them with their babies on their backs. Did you see that?” I nodded. “And don’t you think it’s odd that now with this huge demand for manual labor, we have Mexicans working and Haitians begging? I mean, doesn’t that tell you something?”

We were standing by the window, looking out on the line of women through the shutters. The Center had been distributing food, toiletries, clothes, diapers, baby formula, toys, etc. The storage room was bursting with donations. The only way to stop people from begging was to stop giving them free stuff. And to stop the arrival of donations, was to the Center, the equivalent of asking people to stop caring.

“I love them, Haitians. I do just because they are God’s children,” Sister Mary said, loudly enough for the rest of the staff to listen. They stopped momentarily and paid attention. “But God knows, I don’t like them.” People nodded in agreement and I heard, “me neither,” from a desk and “nor me,” from another.

“Show her the men,” the pastor/social worker/counselor/fund raiser whispered as he moved bags of groceries from one room to another. Sister Mary took me to the back of the office and opened a door to the Center backyard. There, under the trees, sprawled on straw mats, lay the Haitian men, waiting for the BBQ the Center was about to cook.

“See what generosity does?” The pastor shouted from across the office. “You don’t see parasites in Haiti. There? If you don’t work, you die. But here? Look at them. A thing of beauty!”

As I got in my car, I noticed a Haitian woman sitting on the curb with her baby. She had just collected a couple of plastic bags with donations and a 24-can box of baby formula, which must have seemed a redundancy to her as she tossed over her shoulder half of the cans. She noticed me, and as she disposed the last of the of the baby formula, she said, “la même merde”, the same shit.