when helping hurts -- and helps

What we know, we do not often do.

That is a lesson I keep learning. I most likely will until one exotic cause or another cuts me down permanently.

I have started to write this essay several times over the past week, and each time I delete the draft. It deals with showing charity to one another. And it is a topic I find deeply personal -- something not to be discussed publicly. I always wince when I see my name posted on a donor list.

Yesterday evening, I entered the final phase Faux Best Picture Film Festival. Gladiator was the choice of the day -- with The King's Speech, The Artist, Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, and Parasite warming up in the director's box.

Gladiator, with its story arc of revenge, battle scenes, and Hans Zimmer kleptomaniac score, is not a quiet film. Once or twice, I thought I heard a slight tapping at my gate, but I stuck with the film. During a lag in the skirted mayhem, I heard it again. There was someone definitely at the door. Barely tapping. But insistent.

During normal times, I almost never answer the door in the daylight -- and never at night. But these are different times, and different responses are called for.

When I opened the door, I discovered a woman and her young daughter. She smiled knowingly and explained she needed food for her family. At first, I did not recognize her. I thought she was the woman across the street.

Then, it hit me. I have written about her and her family before (hawking the hawker). She and her husband make a living selling souvenirs on the beach. For a couple of years, they lived in the apartment next to my house with their three children -- two boys and a girl. She could tell when the penny had finally dropped in my memory.

Theirs is a hard life -- made even more difficult by the government edict that has shut down their business. They never had much income. They now have none.

I told her to wait a moment and packed up some soup and salad -- the meal that I had served that day to the people I feed out of my house directly. She smiled appreciatively and walked off. She felt good. And I felt good.

That is, I felt good until I sat down to watch my movie and realized what I had just done. I had been given an opportunity to truly help a family I know, and I responded in a way that required absolutely no sacrifice on my part.

A couple of years ago, the community services committee of our church reviewed what it was doing to meet the needs of the community. A lot of that review was based on When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.

The book is filled with practical templates to improve poverty-alleviation programs, and describes just how donors can actually make bad situations worse.

The situation this area of Mexico is going through right now made me think of the first question Corbett and Fikkert posed. It is necessary to know the nature of the need to be able to customize a response to it.

The immediate need here is that the lifeblood of most businesses (tourists -- Mexican and northern) has dried up. Partly by personal action, but primarily by government orders. No income means no food. During some economic downturns, one or two family members can carry the economic load if they are working. But not this time.

Corbett and Fikkert point out that all aid can be categorized as one of three categories, and the response to each will be quite different: relief, rehabilitation, or development.

"Relief" is the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis. The aid should be designed to halt the economic free fall. Because the recipient is incapable of helping himself, it is the donors who take most of the action. We often think of the model of the Good Samaritan in supplying relief.

"Rehabilitation" starts when relief stops. It attempts to restore the community to its pre-crisis conditions. Aid in this stage involves donors and recipients working together to restore the status quo ante.

"Development" is a process of ongoing change where the community improves its economic status. That change is driven primarily by members of the community, and not by outsiders.

With the almost-immediate loss of jobs starting last month, this community required relief. And it has come. The local government and private groups have been accepting donations to distribute food bags to people without jobs. Other groups have started serving hot meals -- some out of private homes.

Yesterday, I was reading in The Economist that governments around the world have been responding to the loss of jobs in their countries with different programs. Most are doing what the local community is doing here -- providing food.

But some of the better programs are providing money to people who have lost their income stream. After all, food is only part of the problem people without work face. I learned that lesson from my neighbors who have been bartering or selling some of the contents of their food bags. They need money.

All of that was fresh in my mind when I sent my friend and her daughter away with the soup and salad. That donation would feed her family that night. What she needed was money, and I failed in practically applying a lesson I had committed to my brain.

Her family no longer lives next door. The last time I saw her, she said they were living in a different neighborhood in Barra. So, today I drove around for an hour hoping to see her, her husband, or one of the children. I didn't. But I will keep looking. I hope she returns with the empty containers for more soup. I can then set things right.

There are many ways to respond to the relief this community needs. People here and people up north have been generous in their donations. All of that has helped feed hundreds of hungry bellies. But there are thousands of hungry here.

Those of us who live here and have established relationships with neighbors have the privilege of actually helping people we know with their financial needs. And the best way to do that is with direct payments applied wisely.

We know a lot of people here. Mexican neighbors. Waiters. Cooks. Small business operators. We throw around the word "amigo" rather blithely. It is not often that we are given an opportunity to show that friendship in tangible ways.

If you are one of the people who will be fortunate enough to receive a taxpayer-funded stimulus check from your respective government, you might want to consider divying it up with your neighbors in need.

We can then start thinking about working in partnership with our neighbors in the recovery stage, and then encourage them in the development stage.

Mexico has given each of us a lot. We should be able to help pay back a bit of that gratitude.