Click photo to enlarge
Hands full ... Aid volunteer Alistair Craig with two members of a Cambodian family, Boo and Jakrya, in the Basac slums, Phnom Penh.Photo by Alistair Craig.
At the risk of appearing the Grinch this Christmas, here are a few words to contemplate: "Stuff doesn't buy you happiness".
And here are a few more: "It's not that we don't care about the poor; it's that we don't know the poor".
At first glance, the quotes might seem unrelated.
Talk to the man who uttered them, however, and a clearer picture emerges.
Alistair Craig, a 47-year-old father of three is, like thousands of others in this country, a Christian volunteer.
For the Dunedin graphic designer, the spirit of Christmas, of generosity, is not limited to one day a year.
In fact, he has been involved in the (unpaid) business of helping others for a quarter of a century.
Just over a month ago, Mr Craig returned from a four-week stint in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he lived in a slum, sharing a small shack with nine others; a grandmother, mum and dad, their two teenage sons and two daughters, including one with a husband and a child.
Still, he's used to roughing it.
At least once every second year he pays his own airfare and heads off to a place where the air is clammy, where food and clean water are as scarce as sanitary sewerage systems.
Tonga, Thailand, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, India (a number of times) Tanzania, Solomon Islands, the rare air of Bolivia ... the list goes on.
"As a younger person, part of it was the adventure," Mr Craig recalls. "I never owned much, was flatting on Castle St, so comfort was never a significant issue.
"I have found the hospitality among those living in poverty is huge, as is the sense of community.
"Because some of these people don't have a lot, they value family and have a strong community. The family unit lives together ... It tends to be something we lack in the West.
"Stuff doesn't buy you happiness."
In Cambodia, Mr Craig worked with Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, a Christian group established 25 years ago to help those suffering from the effects of poverty, injustice and exploitation, a lack of health and education services, prostitution, HIV/Aids and other diseases.
The group now has teams in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and India, as well as offices in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
"A group like Servants is saying, 'look, people have different skills and talents that can be utilised on behalf of people'. I guess the traditional concept of overseas missions has been doctors and nurses. Now it is a lot more full-spectrum - from doctors to graphic designers, like myself," explains Mr Craig, one of four Dunedin people involved in the Phnom Penh visit.
"It sounds a bit colonialist - that we can go and sort their problems out. The experience is a symbiotic relationship. You stay with people in those situations and learn a lot about yourself and your own values. You tend to come back with your eyes a bit wider open, with a broader paradigm of the way the world is."
The slum in which Mr Craig lived backs on to an industrial estate where thousands of Cambodians, many of them girls, produce a range of garments for labels likely to be found in Western shops.
One day he witnessed a large group protesting against conditions and pay.
Some earn NZ40 cents an hour and work more than 60 hours a week, he says.
"We enjoy cheap stuff, but it comes from somewhere. Fair trade is something to consider at Christmas. A lot of rural parents send their kids to the cities to find work, but many of them don't and end up prone to prostitution, gambling and/or drug and alcohol abuse.
"The global recession is having a flow-on effect in these communities. It's not that there is a lack of desire or work ethic."
Each day, Mr Craig would wake at 4.30am-5am, have breakfast then visit a variety of projects run by Cambodians, from drug rehabilitation programmes to HIV/Aids care to orphanages.
"Being stuck in an orphanage doesn't produce the best result for the kids, because they are institutionalised. So we look at funding extended families to feed them," Mr Craig says, recalling an 80-year-old woman who offered to look after two teenage boys whose parents had died from Aids.
"Servants supplied rice and checked to see if the kids were doing OK, were going to school. She lived in a shack, which was by the river and prone to flooding. It flooded every year.
"The previous year she was stuck in her hut for three months because of floodwaters. She is a bit of a character."
Mr Craig has met his fair share of characters over the years.
In the early 1980s, while attending art school in Dunedin, he was inspired by a former gang member who had become a Christian and changed his life.
"I could see the deep reality of that and how he had become a remarkably different person. I became a Christian and began to do a lot of work with young people in drug education, in schools and things. I then got an invitation to go to Tonga, spent a few weeks over there in a poor village.
"That was in 1986. I enjoy being involved in the work."
From 1989 to 1997, as a member of an organisation called Drug Arm, Mr Craig walked Auckland streets talking to "at-risk guys and girls, letting them know they could get help or talk to someone"; a couple of years back, he set up a trust for a group in South India to help build a 100-bed orphanage; next year, he plans to return to India; in 2011, he hopes to take his family to the Philippines for an extended stay.
Others, too, are keen to help.
Indeed, volunteering has become a business for some.
A recent guidebook, Frommer's 500 Places Where You Can Make A Difference, lists a wide range of excursions, from caring for baby elephants in Sri Lanka, living with Masaai tribespeople in Kenya, to teaching Fijian children how to swim.
Some of the visits come at a hefty price: a 14-day Amazon conservation project costs upwards of $3000 (not including airfares).
"Certainly, America is leading the charge on that," Mr Craig says.
"It has become an industry. To be fair, a lot is done with good intent, but a lot is not done well. Having said that, it is easy to be the cynic. The value of the experience can alter someone's paradigm.
"There are other groups. Gospel for Asia has a guy who advocates, 'don't go - send the money you would spend going and they will spend it more effectively'.
That is a smart move in a lot of ways, but at the end of the day there is a huge amount people can offer by going, just things like teaching English. It is a coin-toss.
"Even big charitable groups make mistakes. After spending a lot of time in an area you build up what I call cultural intelligence; you see beyond the obvious judgements that people make when they have short-term trips," Mr Craig says.
He points to the example of a village 25km from Phnom Penh.
Relocated from a city slum, 1000 families lived without water or drainage; in fact, with no facilities whatsoever.
"Two different NGOs put up their hands to help. One of the NGOs had listed its budget and was told it needed to spend a certain amount before the end of the financial year if it wanted to receive funding for the following year.
"It went out there and saw there was no drainage so asked if the people wanted some; of course, they said `yes', so it brought in truckloads of huge concrete pipes and dropped them by the side of the road. A year later, they are still sitting there.
"In another example, at the same place, another organisation had gone in and built a house that was uninhabited. Why was no-one living in this house? Basically, because it wasn't the style of house Cambodians live in. They hadn't done their research. They weren't culturally aware enough."
Why we give aid to poor countries and how effective it is are two of the most pertinent questions faced by the international aid sector, according to the Wellington-based Council for International Development.
Indeed, even the term "aid" comes with its own baggage.
At an international aid conference in Ottawa last year, officials noted the focus should be on development rather than aid, that the concept of aid could be considered anachronistic. The relationship between donors and recipients should be more equal, it decided.
However, at some point those in rich nations have to give to those in the poor ones.
New Zealand is one of 189 signatories to the 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets aimed at significantly reducing extreme poverty by 2015.
The goals are: to halve the proportion of people living on US$1 a day; to provide universal primary education; to ensure women's equal rights and opportunities; to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds; to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters; to halt the spread of HIV/Aids and other diseases; to ensure environmental sustainability; to establish a global partnership for development.
To achieve these goals, it was agreed that developed countries would need to give 0.7 % of GDP in aid by 2015.
The New Zealand Government has promised to increase aid to 0.35% by 2010.
That will get us halfway to the internationally agreed goal.
In a 2007 survey, 76% of New Zealanders approved of New Zealand giving international aid and more than half of New Zealanders believed that New Zealand had a responsibility to provide what help it can to people living in poverty overseas.
In New Zealand, the two main channels of aid are government funding (Official Development Assistance) and private (non-official).
New Zealand's ODA level in 2007-2008 was $429 million, some of which was provided directly to other governments through bilateral agreements. Other money is sent to institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank, which then use the funding for projects or programmes through grants or loans.
Private aid comprises donations, made by individuals and businesses and trusts, usually to non-government organisations (NGOs), which include Christian charities such as World Vision, the Christchurch-based Christian World Service and Catholic group Caritas.
New Zealand's largest Christian aid agency is World Vision, which currently supports more than 70 projects in more than 25 countries.
Founded in 1950 by Dr Bob Pierce, an American serviceman during the Korean War, to provide emergency care for war orphans in Korea, World Vision focuses on emergency relief, community development and advocacy.
Over the past five years, World Vision's New Zealand operation has increased its income from $53.1 million in 2005 to $61.8 million in 2009.
This includes "development" income, which is predominantly child sponsorship.
The number of sponsored children has risen from 68,037 in 2004 to 79,983 in 2009.
Expenses (as a percentage of total income and cash income), including administration, fundraising and public relations, have hovered around 20% for the past five years.
Other Christian aid groups in New Zealand include the Catholic-based Caritas, which last year spent $3.37 million supporting development and humanitarian relief and rehabilitation work in the Pacific, Asia, Africa and Latin America; Mahitahi, which places Catholic volunteers overseas for anywhere from three weeks to years; and the Christian World Service, New Zealand's oldest aid agency.
The Christian World Service was founded on December 14, 1945.
Based in Christchurch, the multidenominational group tackles poverty, helps people build livelihoods in their own communities, responds to humanitarian emergencies and campaigns against the causes of global poverty and injustice, "regardless of race or religion", its website states.
Like other NGOs, it receives financial support via government grants, individual donors, bequests, trusts, and church groups including the Association of Presbyterian Women, the Christchurch Anglican Diocese, Methodist Church of New Zealand, Methodist Women's Fellowship, the World Day of Prayer, as well as various parishes, church schools and youth groups.
The group's total income for 2008-2009 was $4.43 million, its expenditure $4.35 million, with 83% of expenditure spent on community development programmes and emergency aid, and 12% on internal costs such as administration, promotion and fundraising.
Such figures pale in comparison with those of Action by Churches Together (ACT) International, a global agency which has about 160 member groups and an annual income of $US1.8 billion.
Last week a New Zealander, Jill Hawkey, was appointed deputy general secretary of ACT.
Established in 1995 as a result of the genocide in Rwanda, when churches and their related agencies around the world responded to the disaster through ACT's precursor, Church Action Aid, the group is the largest Christian aid agency in the world.
"Churches and church organisations are at the forefront of emergency relief and development assistance but are often never recognised, so by bringing this alliance together it is hoped to lift the profile to increase its advocacy potential," Ms Hawkey says.
A director of Christian World Service from 1993-2003, Ms Hawkey says the current global economic crisis is hurting the world's poor.
"In many ways, people needing aid last year were sheltered from the crisis because many governments had allocated their aid budgets before the crash came.
I think 2010 is a big worry ... there are cutbacks from governments; fewer people are giving to appeals on the street.
"It is difficult to give that little bit more when you've been made redundant or your investments have dropped back. But we do need to remember that there are people whose very survival depends on this money," Ms Hawkey says.
"I was in Malawi and Mozambique a couple of weeks ago, working with church leaders as well as the developed countries who fund aid to them. For a country like Malawi, food security is a huge issue, not being able to grow enough food, which has been greatly impacted by climate change.
"Then, of course, you have got HIV and Aids. In a country like Swaziland, 27% of adults are HIV-positive ... there are huge implications, both in terms of health and medication but also in terms of getting food on tables.
"Now is certainly not the time to be cutting back on our giving. We've got to look at political will. Governments have the will to bail out banks but do we have the same political will to overcome poverty?
"I think that is a real test for us."
And here are a few more: "It's not that we don't care about the poor; it's that we don't know the poor".
At first glance, the quotes might seem unrelated.
Talk to the man who uttered them, however, and a clearer picture emerges.
Alistair Craig, a 47-year-old father of three is, like thousands of others in this country, a Christian volunteer.
For the Dunedin graphic designer, the spirit of Christmas, of generosity, is not limited to one day a year.
In fact, he has been involved in the (unpaid) business of helping others for a quarter of a century.
Just over a month ago, Mr Craig returned from a four-week stint in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he lived in a slum, sharing a small shack with nine others; a grandmother, mum and dad, their two teenage sons and two daughters, including one with a husband and a child.
Still, he's used to roughing it.
At least once every second year he pays his own airfare and heads off to a place where the air is clammy, where food and clean water are as scarce as sanitary sewerage systems.
Tonga, Thailand, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, India (a number of times) Tanzania, Solomon Islands, the rare air of Bolivia ... the list goes on.
"As a younger person, part of it was the adventure," Mr Craig recalls. "I never owned much, was flatting on Castle St, so comfort was never a significant issue.
"I have found the hospitality among those living in poverty is huge, as is the sense of community.
"Because some of these people don't have a lot, they value family and have a strong community. The family unit lives together ... It tends to be something we lack in the West.
"Stuff doesn't buy you happiness."
In Cambodia, Mr Craig worked with Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, a Christian group established 25 years ago to help those suffering from the effects of poverty, injustice and exploitation, a lack of health and education services, prostitution, HIV/Aids and other diseases.
The group now has teams in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and India, as well as offices in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
"A group like Servants is saying, 'look, people have different skills and talents that can be utilised on behalf of people'. I guess the traditional concept of overseas missions has been doctors and nurses. Now it is a lot more full-spectrum - from doctors to graphic designers, like myself," explains Mr Craig, one of four Dunedin people involved in the Phnom Penh visit.
"It sounds a bit colonialist - that we can go and sort their problems out. The experience is a symbiotic relationship. You stay with people in those situations and learn a lot about yourself and your own values. You tend to come back with your eyes a bit wider open, with a broader paradigm of the way the world is."
The slum in which Mr Craig lived backs on to an industrial estate where thousands of Cambodians, many of them girls, produce a range of garments for labels likely to be found in Western shops.
One day he witnessed a large group protesting against conditions and pay.
Some earn NZ40 cents an hour and work more than 60 hours a week, he says.
"We enjoy cheap stuff, but it comes from somewhere. Fair trade is something to consider at Christmas. A lot of rural parents send their kids to the cities to find work, but many of them don't and end up prone to prostitution, gambling and/or drug and alcohol abuse.
"The global recession is having a flow-on effect in these communities. It's not that there is a lack of desire or work ethic."
Each day, Mr Craig would wake at 4.30am-5am, have breakfast then visit a variety of projects run by Cambodians, from drug rehabilitation programmes to HIV/Aids care to orphanages.
"Being stuck in an orphanage doesn't produce the best result for the kids, because they are institutionalised. So we look at funding extended families to feed them," Mr Craig says, recalling an 80-year-old woman who offered to look after two teenage boys whose parents had died from Aids.
"Servants supplied rice and checked to see if the kids were doing OK, were going to school. She lived in a shack, which was by the river and prone to flooding. It flooded every year.
"The previous year she was stuck in her hut for three months because of floodwaters. She is a bit of a character."
Mr Craig has met his fair share of characters over the years.
In the early 1980s, while attending art school in Dunedin, he was inspired by a former gang member who had become a Christian and changed his life.
"I could see the deep reality of that and how he had become a remarkably different person. I became a Christian and began to do a lot of work with young people in drug education, in schools and things. I then got an invitation to go to Tonga, spent a few weeks over there in a poor village.
"That was in 1986. I enjoy being involved in the work."
From 1989 to 1997, as a member of an organisation called Drug Arm, Mr Craig walked Auckland streets talking to "at-risk guys and girls, letting them know they could get help or talk to someone"; a couple of years back, he set up a trust for a group in South India to help build a 100-bed orphanage; next year, he plans to return to India; in 2011, he hopes to take his family to the Philippines for an extended stay.
Others, too, are keen to help.
Indeed, volunteering has become a business for some.
A recent guidebook, Frommer's 500 Places Where You Can Make A Difference, lists a wide range of excursions, from caring for baby elephants in Sri Lanka, living with Masaai tribespeople in Kenya, to teaching Fijian children how to swim.
Some of the visits come at a hefty price: a 14-day Amazon conservation project costs upwards of $3000 (not including airfares).
"Certainly, America is leading the charge on that," Mr Craig says.
"It has become an industry. To be fair, a lot is done with good intent, but a lot is not done well. Having said that, it is easy to be the cynic. The value of the experience can alter someone's paradigm.
"There are other groups. Gospel for Asia has a guy who advocates, 'don't go - send the money you would spend going and they will spend it more effectively'.
That is a smart move in a lot of ways, but at the end of the day there is a huge amount people can offer by going, just things like teaching English. It is a coin-toss.
"Even big charitable groups make mistakes. After spending a lot of time in an area you build up what I call cultural intelligence; you see beyond the obvious judgements that people make when they have short-term trips," Mr Craig says.
He points to the example of a village 25km from Phnom Penh.
Relocated from a city slum, 1000 families lived without water or drainage; in fact, with no facilities whatsoever.
"Two different NGOs put up their hands to help. One of the NGOs had listed its budget and was told it needed to spend a certain amount before the end of the financial year if it wanted to receive funding for the following year.
"It went out there and saw there was no drainage so asked if the people wanted some; of course, they said `yes', so it brought in truckloads of huge concrete pipes and dropped them by the side of the road. A year later, they are still sitting there.
"In another example, at the same place, another organisation had gone in and built a house that was uninhabited. Why was no-one living in this house? Basically, because it wasn't the style of house Cambodians live in. They hadn't done their research. They weren't culturally aware enough."
Why we give aid to poor countries and how effective it is are two of the most pertinent questions faced by the international aid sector, according to the Wellington-based Council for International Development.
Indeed, even the term "aid" comes with its own baggage.
At an international aid conference in Ottawa last year, officials noted the focus should be on development rather than aid, that the concept of aid could be considered anachronistic. The relationship between donors and recipients should be more equal, it decided.
However, at some point those in rich nations have to give to those in the poor ones.
New Zealand is one of 189 signatories to the 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets aimed at significantly reducing extreme poverty by 2015.
The goals are: to halve the proportion of people living on US$1 a day; to provide universal primary education; to ensure women's equal rights and opportunities; to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds; to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters; to halt the spread of HIV/Aids and other diseases; to ensure environmental sustainability; to establish a global partnership for development.
To achieve these goals, it was agreed that developed countries would need to give 0.7 % of GDP in aid by 2015.
The New Zealand Government has promised to increase aid to 0.35% by 2010.
That will get us halfway to the internationally agreed goal.
In a 2007 survey, 76% of New Zealanders approved of New Zealand giving international aid and more than half of New Zealanders believed that New Zealand had a responsibility to provide what help it can to people living in poverty overseas.
In New Zealand, the two main channels of aid are government funding (Official Development Assistance) and private (non-official).
New Zealand's ODA level in 2007-2008 was $429 million, some of which was provided directly to other governments through bilateral agreements. Other money is sent to institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank, which then use the funding for projects or programmes through grants or loans.
Private aid comprises donations, made by individuals and businesses and trusts, usually to non-government organisations (NGOs), which include Christian charities such as World Vision, the Christchurch-based Christian World Service and Catholic group Caritas.
New Zealand's largest Christian aid agency is World Vision, which currently supports more than 70 projects in more than 25 countries.
Founded in 1950 by Dr Bob Pierce, an American serviceman during the Korean War, to provide emergency care for war orphans in Korea, World Vision focuses on emergency relief, community development and advocacy.
Over the past five years, World Vision's New Zealand operation has increased its income from $53.1 million in 2005 to $61.8 million in 2009.
This includes "development" income, which is predominantly child sponsorship.
The number of sponsored children has risen from 68,037 in 2004 to 79,983 in 2009.
Expenses (as a percentage of total income and cash income), including administration, fundraising and public relations, have hovered around 20% for the past five years.
Other Christian aid groups in New Zealand include the Catholic-based Caritas, which last year spent $3.37 million supporting development and humanitarian relief and rehabilitation work in the Pacific, Asia, Africa and Latin America; Mahitahi, which places Catholic volunteers overseas for anywhere from three weeks to years; and the Christian World Service, New Zealand's oldest aid agency.
The Christian World Service was founded on December 14, 1945.
Based in Christchurch, the multidenominational group tackles poverty, helps people build livelihoods in their own communities, responds to humanitarian emergencies and campaigns against the causes of global poverty and injustice, "regardless of race or religion", its website states.
Like other NGOs, it receives financial support via government grants, individual donors, bequests, trusts, and church groups including the Association of Presbyterian Women, the Christchurch Anglican Diocese, Methodist Church of New Zealand, Methodist Women's Fellowship, the World Day of Prayer, as well as various parishes, church schools and youth groups.
The group's total income for 2008-2009 was $4.43 million, its expenditure $4.35 million, with 83% of expenditure spent on community development programmes and emergency aid, and 12% on internal costs such as administration, promotion and fundraising.
Such figures pale in comparison with those of Action by Churches Together (ACT) International, a global agency which has about 160 member groups and an annual income of $US1.8 billion.
Last week a New Zealander, Jill Hawkey, was appointed deputy general secretary of ACT.
Established in 1995 as a result of the genocide in Rwanda, when churches and their related agencies around the world responded to the disaster through ACT's precursor, Church Action Aid, the group is the largest Christian aid agency in the world.
"Churches and church organisations are at the forefront of emergency relief and development assistance but are often never recognised, so by bringing this alliance together it is hoped to lift the profile to increase its advocacy potential," Ms Hawkey says.
A director of Christian World Service from 1993-2003, Ms Hawkey says the current global economic crisis is hurting the world's poor.
"In many ways, people needing aid last year were sheltered from the crisis because many governments had allocated their aid budgets before the crash came.
I think 2010 is a big worry ... there are cutbacks from governments; fewer people are giving to appeals on the street.
"It is difficult to give that little bit more when you've been made redundant or your investments have dropped back. But we do need to remember that there are people whose very survival depends on this money," Ms Hawkey says.
"I was in Malawi and Mozambique a couple of weeks ago, working with church leaders as well as the developed countries who fund aid to them. For a country like Malawi, food security is a huge issue, not being able to grow enough food, which has been greatly impacted by climate change.
"Then, of course, you have got HIV and Aids. In a country like Swaziland, 27% of adults are HIV-positive ... there are huge implications, both in terms of health and medication but also in terms of getting food on tables.
"Now is certainly not the time to be cutting back on our giving. We've got to look at political will. Governments have the will to bail out banks but do we have the same political will to overcome poverty?
"I think that is a real test for us."
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