Yesterday was the latest in the Idea Exchange Series put on by St. Benedict’s Table and Aqua Books. This one was titled Images and the Selling of Charity: How the Need of the 2/3 World is Marketed to the Rest of Us with John Longhurst, Director of Communications and Marketing at Canadian Mennonite University.

[John Longhurst] has 25 years experience in communications with non-profit organizations. He has worked as Associate Editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald; directed communications for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Canada and Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA); and as founder and editor of the Dallas (Texas) Peace Times. John is author of the book Making the News: An Essential Guide to Effective Media Relations (Novalis, 2006). He regularly conducts workshops on media relations for non-profit groups. In 1998 he helped organize Canada’s first national conference on how the media covers faith, and helped found Canada’s Centre for Faith and the Media. John is a Faith Page columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press, ChristianWeek (Manitoba) and the Mennonite Weekly Review, and also writes regularly for various church-related publications.

The plan was for him to facilitate

a conversation around how issues of global need and poverty are marketed to the affluent West. In particular, the issue of the use of images and photographs to motivate people to donate becomes an interesting one, particularly if you have the sense that maybe the subjects in the photographs are now being treated as “objects;” in one of his more biting moments, John referred to this as “famine-porn.”

With that setting the stage, the group had a few people along for the ride to take part in the discussion. These included Steve Bell, recently returned from Ethiopia on behalf of the Canadian Food Grains Bank (documentary to follow), Erick Paye (who spent a few weeks in India recently to try and learn practically about photographing with dignity), and Bram Ryan, who has traveled and worked extensively in situations of crisis. By show of hands, a good number of the people attending the discussion had also either worked with other relief agencies or had traveled abroad, including areas of the 2/3 world.

Fitting right into our recent discussion of Hotel Rwanda, these themes are on my mind a fair bit… not wanting to forget. I did manage to pick up a used copy of Shake Hands with the Devil, and I’ve got a hold at the library on Paul Rusesabagina’s autobiography, An Ordinary Man. I suspect it will take me a while to work through the material, as it’s not easy to gloss over, and I’m working myself up to it. In the preface to his book, Dallaire wrote,

In just one hundred days over 800,000 innocent Rwandan men, women and children were brutally murdered while the developed world, impassive and apparently unperturbed, sat back and watched the unfolding apocalypse or simply changed channels. Almost fifty years to the day that my father and father-in-law helped to liberate Europe—when the extermination camps were uncovered and when, in one voice, humanity said, “Never again”—we once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur. We could not find the political will nor the resources to stop it.

The genocide in Rwanda was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again.

Since then, much has been written, discussed, debated, argued and filmed on the subject of Rwanda, yet it is my feeling that this recent catastrophe is being forgotten and its lessons submerged in ignorance and apathy. The genocide in Rwanda was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again.

After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y

This is the quote that made me want to read the book when I first saw it a couple of years ago. In the midst of the absolute worst portrayal of humanity that we can imagine, there’s the faintest glimmer of hope, a single thread: God exists. Still, the depths of depravity, despair, and helplessness are far too evident, making one wonder how to find the thread of hope. And when I say “depravity” in this context, there’s an open question to whom it would best refer… the racial hate of the murderers with guns and sticks and knives, or the passive indifference of the West with remote controls and soccer games and shopping malls. A young child’s yearning for something they can’t have is often “handled” with the strategy, “out of sight, out of mind.” Are we so different with the things we yearn not to face?

The timing of this whole subject for me is somewhat… disturbing. Yesterday while doing my blog-surfing, I happened to find Kiva Chronicles, a blog about microfinance connected to a program of “social entrepreneurs,” a phrase I find exceptionally intriguing. This was just after I found a Scientific American article by Jeffry Sachs, “Rapid Victories Against Extreme Poverty.” But we’ll come back to this.

John Longhurst gave an excellent though-provoking presentation of about 30 minutes to kick off the conversation. He talked about a photo of “Homeless Hank” that seemed to capture people’s imaginations when it came out in the paper as part of a fundraising campaign… though some of the sentiment turned when it was revealed that the image was a stock photo, actually used by several aid agencies in their fundraising efforts. The subject — or should I say “moral question” — of photographing people’s misery, of taking people’s photograph was put forth, along with the observation that it isn’t just the picture that’s taken… along with it goes the person’s dignity, self-respect, the right to tell one’s own story, and the basic ability to determine how and where their photo would be taken.

In 1994, photographer and journalist Kevin Carter was awarded a Pulizter Prize for an image of a vulture in Sudan, waiting for a child to die. The image is shocking and abhorrent. And prizewinning. Nobody knows what happened to the child, including the photographer. But three months later, Kevin Carter committed suicide under an extreme depression.

Little wonder.

The photograph is haunting enough… to have seen it first-hand is evidently disturbing enough to make the trip back to (or away from?) reality is, evidently, exceptionally difficult. Is it more obscene that the photo was widely circulated and awarded one of the highest prizes it could receive… or that as graphic as it is, it still did not have the effect of drawing the aid required?

We look at the photo, and we think about Rwanda, or about World War II, and we say “Never again.” And we mean it, too… we’ll make some effort to remember. For a little while, anyway. Sadly, it’s the present we don’t do so well with. It’s relatively easy to say “Never again” after it’s all over… the far more difficult words are, “Not this time.” Who’s saying those words? The far more difficult words are, “Not this time.”

After John concluded his initial remarks, the discussion remained both thoughtful and insightful. From someone who was on the ground there, we heard about the food crisis in Zambia in 2003 when several networks and news outlets all killed the story because the people “didn’t look hungry enough.” And we heard about how beautiful a country Ethiopia is… but that’s not the story or the pictures that one is supposed to bring home. There’s an expectation that a certain kind of image and story will come back, the kind that will help generate donations. It frankly takes a more sophisticated audience to solicit donations without the graphic famine porn. Since Longhurst coined the phrase “famine pornography,” (go on, Google it) an increased awareness and desire to correct has begun, and some agencies have set specific policies against it. Good on them: it’s actually a form of exploitation that allows the storyteller to craft the story with the words and photos any way he wants. To do so for one’s own purpose and ends is dehumanizing to the people who don’t get to tell their own story… which is itself a very humanizing process.

The truth is that in these areas where relief effort is needed in a dire way, people will smile and laugh. They have cities with cars and buses and office buildings. They have beautiful landscapes. Yes, they’re still hungry, they still need clean water. But they’re people. Like us.

As I pondered this last night, I began to wonder about the drive now to end extreme poverty, to make poverty history. The fight had some good ground in gaining awareness through the One Campaign, and continues now, though I wonder if mindshare is slipping away again. We know how to end it, but we don’t have the will. The concept of microfinance is worthy of a Nobel Prize, but for many people, the idea seems positively daft.

The question in my mind is whether we’re undermining our own efforts. Through years of portraying Africa in particular as a continent of people living in hovels (or less) amid scorched fields and parched lands, after outlining the extreme difficulty in the fight against AIDS, after showing endless images people who apparently can’t fend for themselves and must be handed food and water directly or they’ll starve, with stories of genocide and corruption “over there” lingering in the backs of our minds, we look at our own bootstrapping culture, and we evaluate the seemingly absurd idea that we should lend some of these people a few dollars to run a small business, and we don’t even have a framework for ourselves to consider the idea of forgiving the debt of their nation. The unspoken question lingers in the back of our mind, “What would they do with money, anyway?” The view from our ivory tower suggests to us they would waste it, that they couldn’t handle it, that we would be wasting our money to give it to them. It isn’t reality. The truth is that the developing world is developing, and while the need for food aid and other very basic forms of assistance persist, the images we carry of Africa as a whole are no longer reality — if indeed they ever were, which is rather doubtful. AIDS is in decline in Uganda, though it’s debated as to why that’s so. Maybe we should have the whole story… but can we be trusted with it, or will we only choose to remember the parts that we can use to excuse ourselves?

I’ve never been to Africa, but almost 20 years ago now, in 1987, I was in southeast Asia. The economic station is not consistent there, and one day I found myself standing in a one-room shanty home with a dirt floor. That same day in that area, we found a bunch of kids running and playing in the street, and we gathered them together and talked to them, holding an impromptu evangelistic mini-meeting… we were just barely able to make a dent in the need during the time we were there. Less, really. But I snapped a photo, which a friend I was with on the trip evaluated and named the girl in the middle “Jamie.” Not “famine porn” or “poverty postcards,” but an image of people, of children. They could be anywhere… but they’re not just anywhere to me. The black-and-white image, titled “Jamie” is now framed and hanging in my home.

Normally I just walk past it, forgetting it’s there, forgetting to stop and look… but every once in a while, I pause. It’s important to remember, and to remind one another when we’re in danger of forgetting. I’m glad to note that the session was recorded for podcasting. I’m not sure how long before it’s edited and ready for download, but I’ll try to mention it when I become aware that it’s available.

In the meantime, I’ve got lots to ponder on my plate… Does our marketing of relief needs undermine our own efforts, either through gratuitous nature of some of the graphic depictions, or by telling a story that isn’t true, one designed for a certain response? Is that response the best one? Do we need to reeducate ourselves about what Africa really needs? And what of our treatment of these people, the ones unable to tell their own story for themselves? How do we humanize them — or do they need it? I’ve said enough, what do you think?