Everyone wants to make a difference in some way, and do this by perhaps having children (or not having children) and trying to raise them well, or perhaps having a job that makes a positive difference in the world, although most people have to work to make money rather than for altruistic purposes. I think most people do have these altruistic leanings, but it’s just doing good where we can, occasional handouts to people who ask (if you believe in that), planting a tree, perhaps volunteering.

Sometimes it goes beyond that and someone is more committed. Perhaps they’re going to travel around and many destinations are impoverished and so they want to stop and do something. Perhaps they were touched by something, an event in life (like my experience), or they could just be part of a forgotten social group and have money and time but no connections.

So what can you do? The ways that I know are all so flawed. When I first came to Cambodia I was so lucky to find an NGO that was so unique, and life-changing for me and for all the people whom it contacted and touched. Of course, nothing lasts forever. One things is that Cambodia changed itself and so the actual premise of it didn’t work anymore, but also greed took over, it was moved into private hands. But I am forever grateful that I have three years full time service there and I can say that I received as much as I gave.

I had no idea what the volunteering scene was like, I was just very, very lucky. Now I know a lot more and how unique this, now defunct, place was. The usual set up is that people pay to volunteer, which seemed insane to me when I first heard it, but sometimes it’s justified in certain circumstances when the payment of these volunteering fees is pretty much the only revenue an organization gets, and so it exists at all because it’s voluntourism.

This kind of giving isn’t really sustainable for an individual; it is something one does for a set period of time and is generally part of a larger holiday. There’s the expectation that someone is getting something for their money, the feeling of making a difference, but also their time to be structured, good memories of themselves doing new things, a new circle of friends and possibly an improved CV. There’s nothing wrong with wanting things from giving as it’s always transactional.

After I worked for the NGO I worked another three years in a community movie theatre to support the arts in Cambodia. The altruistic setup wasn’t quite as good as where I came from (the NGO I mean), but I got accommodation, occasional food, a strong sense of being a part of a community, which is something I’m really missing now and trying to recreate. It was sustainable for a long-time because the enterprise paid for itself (and enriched my Western boss) but I was still getting what I wanted and giving what I wanted until Covid closed it down.

A friend’s positive experience of voluntourism

While I was there one of the volunteers joined a voluntourism project to help endangered elephants, and loved it. She knew she was paying for the project with her fees, and salaries of local people, made new friends, got good pictures for social media and built good memories. So she had experiences of both types of volunteering. She did a shorter time with the elephants as they were basically giving her an experience in exchange for a fee, and then at the cinema she did a longer period because it was self-sustaining, but it was still a part of a holiday. She went back to another life that didn’t involve a central purpose of altruism… and why wouldn’t she? She’s young, white, middle-class, Western educated. Her travel was essentially taking time off from (or before) her main life of being employed and enriching herself. This is good, because she was a really nice person and I hope all her dreams are coming true. I remember she was into modern calligraphy. She’d done some workshop and the tutor told her she was really good and so she’d started a little side business doing wedding stationary. Maybe she’s a successful artist by now. She taught me how to use Instagram, I recall that also. I wish her well.

My own motivation to try and make a positive diference around me, as an antidote to my own marginalization

Of course, as an older, physically unattractive, lightly disabled old male, I’m not only unemployable, but a complete abomination to most human beings. Oh, I’m dark-skinned also, forgot to say that. Many people aren’t going onto something else in life but want this to be it.

So one way to contribute would be to just make money, and contribute it to a large charity that is doing good work. So one motivation for me is that I can give my time and skills, I can’t give money because I can’t make any. Businesses I start don’t make anything, and people won’t employ me in a way that would leave any extra money left over as significant. Then I am spending my time doing something meaningless, plus the money will go to an organised (read centralized) entity, paying directors large salaries and they will hand the money out on my behalf as they see fit.

So presumably there are some rules around this, but they still are going to do things that I don’t really believe in. I don’t believe in sending children to prison for example, prison being any place where you don’t have the right to walk out or freedom of movement, and so that includes most formal education. I choose not to believe in the social constructs of nation states or gender, but they will carve up the generosity (money) along those lines.

I want to give money to people whom are my equals and I want to know who they are and I want to give each one an amount that will be permanently life transforming if possible, and if not then solve some significant problem and I want to do it as an act of solidarity to a friend. Not fake kinship. I don’t want to be like the average white middle class western Nazi either looking for a way to give to the same demographic as me, a kind of insane thinking. For an example of such cancerous thinking, I could say that I am male and older – and homelessness rates and suicide rates are higher among this demographic so I will support other people with male gender in this situation… presumably because it is more likely to affect me and so I am then actually protecting myself in some sick and evil and roundabout way.

Or maybe pick a demographic that is not me, so that I can be patronisingly above it. People who are disabled (more disabled than me) or poor (poorer than me) and I can support them through my superiority.

When I’m sitting with my friends in, what is essentially a slum, I am in a better situation than them, somewhat. Although my accommodation is six dollars a night and I sleep on the floor, it is more than many of them have. I choose to live simply to a degree. I won’t use all my time and talents to enrich myself and buy possessions. I always felt like this and I’ve always felt bad about it but now I’m realizing that it was actually a valid choice. I don’t want anything for me but I want to use my time to help other people.

So at this point I can’t set up some large, organized project, and don’t want to. What I did in the past was just give people money. I don’t really have money, but what I did was, after covid, when the stranded foreigners I’d met and who had become a part of the community went home, then they wanted to forward money to the people they were wanting to support, their friends/equals, as an act of solidarity, and I was happy to facilitate that for free (they are unbanked).

So this is a kind of direct giving where you just give people money and they solve their own problems, and there is a large body of evidence that this is actually effective. There are already charities that do this, basically putting people’s stories online and people choose to fund them, to just give them money. I want to spend some time looking at the main ones.

An evaluation of direct giving charities, and the weakness of centralisation

One of the best established direct giving charities is Kiva.org. I remember when it came out what a good press it was getting, although it went somewhat downhill from there. The main issue is that it’s a lending platform, it doesn’t direct give but kind of direct lends. That isn’t bad per se. In the slum that I’m now connected to, people tend to go to informal money lenders, who charge impossible rates of interest. Although most of the lenders are older women, I have seen extreme violence around this practice many times. I mean a ferocious woman beating younger women unconscious in the street (honestly), somebody knocked unconscious from behind with a piece of building rubble, gangs beating someone on a street corner. Hopefully Kiva has better collection practices than this!

Joking apart, I don’t love the kiva model. It could kind of work. Firstly, people’s stories are shared online, so you have an idea of who you are lending to, but it’s all fictitious. The money has already been lent out. The biography posted online is to give someone the false feeling that they have a connection to a person they do not actually have.

The other issue is that, it’s a centralized charity. It’s not really peer-to-peer. There are employees. Combined, Kiva’s top 10 executives made nearly $3.5 million in 2020. In 2021, nearly half of Kiva’s revenue went to staff salaries. On top of all the western staff they are employing, to put the biographies online and maintain the website, they also had a fellowship program, where western volunteers could get involved (www.cgdev.org), go and look at the project, audit the books etc – so it sounds like a kind of voluntourism where you don’t actually have to pay. They also have local people on the ground who would source potential recipients, do follow up to check that jealousy wasn’t causing problems.

The issue here is, how the HELL would they know? I ask it like that because I am connected to this slum now, in fact it is my life and my only friends live there and it is pretty much my existence, and I sit around there, we talk, doss basically , and there are NGO’s and occasionally police involved, the latter usually to dish out random violence, but the local NGO’s are at a distance. They have places to give emergency shelter and vocational training, but away from the slum itself. There is a distance, literally and metaphorically. They do not come here. They are the main voice of the slum residents, but they do not stay here. They report a story they are told, not that they live.

So with this direct lending, outsiders who do not come from within a situation of equals choose the worthy, and follow up and confirm they were told by the lucky ones that it did not cause resentments of in-fighting, which is such middle-class arrogance it makes me want to vomit. But the western saviours reading all this think, ‘Oh, local this and local that, it’s a microfinance institution staffed by locals who went in and spoke to these other poor locals’ – and it’s just a joke. I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site the attitude of the average local to slums and poor people and it is not positive (although well documented) and foreign donors don’t really understand this fact. It would even be better if they were NOT locals doing this job… or perhaps no one doing this job but people needing solidarity to write their own stories (god forbid).

Another thing is that, the lending is not direct. The lenders receive no interest, but Kiva use microfinance partners who lend money out and do charge interests to cover their costs, and although an estimation of what a borrower will pay is published, the actual amount is unclear. (blog.givewell.org).

The whole thing seems off to me. Some outsider goes into a situation, finds suitable people and gets their story – so how are they chosen or excluded? The lending is genderised. People lending money can choose the gender they want to lend to (but not the race presumably) and the site brags that it’s 81% women. If I was starving and a dark skinned Asian man who was prematurely bald gave me some money and told me it was because I was a dark skinned Asian man who was prematurely bald just like me I’d vomit and walk away, who the F&&& thinks like that?

Lastly, as I understand, Kiva started charging the for-profit microfinance companies a fee to finance themselves (kiva) which actually caused a revolt among many of their donors (www.technologyreview.com), and to me it just makes me think that it’s an issue of centralisation. As soon as you make an organisation (as opposed to a real peer-to-peer network) then it starts to rotten from the core, whether it’s a charity, NGO, government, cult or church. It’s like a universal law.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/reflections-kiva-story/

There are other charities that give, rather than lend, as the evidence that is works is very strong. One of the best is www.givedirect.org. There is a lot to like about this. One thing is that they say they look for where there is strong need and the chance to make a significant difference, rather than a compelling narrative, and from the stories and narratives on the site, it does seem quite open like that. My observation is that people favour obvious victims or (elephant in the room) the attractive. It isn’t nice to observe that although it might be an evolutionary adaptation of our species, i.e. we favour those with strong genes (sucks to be me!) – unless good spiritual people make an effort not to.

There are still issues. Again, they choose the recipients, presumably using local people and as I explained, just because you are the same race as the people in a needy situation, that does not mean you know them. How do they find them? How do they choose? I’m thinking now of Kresar, the little boy who went missing, who actually started this whole thing for me. No one really knew he was missing except me (and the mother, obviously). I only knew myself because she was my friend and I see them everyday. She not only didn’t report it thinking (somewhat correctly) that no one would care, but is so marginalized she didn’t even mention this to her friends around her. So here, I noticed my friend’s son was missing. How will these outsiders know the strivers from the addicts, the workers from the thieves? They listen to… what? Everything is self-reported, from them choosing the narratives to doing the followups.

Again, this charity is centralized and it has the weaknesses of centralisation, losing control from the centre. in 2023, 900,000 embezzled from several hundred families in South Kido. Now on their website there is a section for whistleblowers, for people who know of embezzlement and/or corruption of charity funds to report it. Another thing I notice is again, the division of race and gender. One project is helping black women in Georgia in some project or other, and it seemed strange to me, but then remembered it’s mostly black men being murdered by police in USA, perhaps there aren’t any black men left alive now (and there is no such thing as third gender )… and whites don’t have feelings/capacity to suffer)). Wait, where’s my credit card!

As a side note, they are largely centred in Africa because of the strong development of banking through mobile phones makes it easy for them to transfer cash directly but they are not actually operating in Cambodia for this reason.

So why do I think I can do better?

I don’t, necessarily. Right now, I’m just writing up some of the stories of my friends. When Kresar went missing, and it was just me that knew and did something, that forged this bond and somehow went on to become a supernatural event for me, it touched me. But I look back now to the times that I acted as a bank for people, forwarding money and donations and the feeling that I get from it. I feel really touched. I feel old and unwell and I don’t know how much time I have and I decided to give up on me, happily. I have enough. I want to spend my time doing this. It’s not just the feeling of being connected to a community and helping, it’s the amazing people I met who didn’t make it; they died right before me in total obscurity, as though they never existed, and no one knows or misses them. We’re all just shadows here.

We all know it to. When I talk to people about my idea, many are keen to open up and be a part of it. Initially, I want to just write up some of these stories, peoples’ situations, shadow voices, with an emphasis on finding their plan, the transformation they hope for and what it would take. If I can put this out there. Follow people’s struggles as ongoing stories, and if they get traction, people ‘out there’ are interested and want to help, perhaps try and fund some of their plans and write on and film the ongoing updates as they update their own new lifestories. I can post evidence, receipts of money spent etc on their pages.

If this works out, after time, and people see the transparency, transformations, that it’s working, the stretch goal is to lease the hostel the study recommended. No ID required, ideally with an addiction program that is Buddhist/aethiest centred.

I don’t want to jump ahead. Right now, I’m giving up on me and writing up these shadow voices and I happily let go and surrender to the life energy and will allow things to unfold as they will.