Page 57 - Sirmooree Digital Book

“Indeed.” I said and that I would be happy to bring my own monkey
but I didn't get that part either. Maybe a remake of Waterloo is on the
cards; third time lucky? I shall practise the line.
Editor’s Post Script.
I enjoyed the report of the Gurkha soldier who lost a leg and when it
came to fitting a prosthetic was asked if he wanted any special foot to
aid his life back home in The Hills. He said that apart from a shoed foot
he also wanted a straight forward peg-leg, the better to make a hole to
plant rice.
Colonel Christopher Lavender [1978 – 94] writes on Asian
Development.
‘Give With Care or Not At All’
The Kadoorie Charitable Foundation (KCF) funds projects in China,
Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Andhra Pradesh, as
well as, of course, Nepal. We visit all projects in the field on a regular
basis and have built up a sound knowledge of what works and what
does not– and recognize the difficulties in delivering funding to the
point of need and making a lasting difference to the communities we
try to help.
However, having been actively involved in funding community
projects in the developing world now for 15 years I have become rather
cynical about the claims by such as UN organizations and International
Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) to be ‘lifting people out of
poverty’. You don’t lift people out of poverty; you might provide better
food security, access to water and basic health needs and enhance their
livelihoods, but let’s not fool ourselves - they are still in poverty - by
whatever yardstick you define it.
Andrew Carnegie said that it is more difficult to spend money for
charitable purposes wisely than it is to make it in the first place, and
there are certainly plenty of examples of bad philanthropy around –
some of it perpetrated by such behemoths as the WHO, World Bank
and any organisation beginning with the letters ‘UN..’. This is not to
say that these organizations do no good, in an imperfect world we
have to accept that there are imperfect solutions to many of our
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