I used to spend time in a country on the other side of the world—actually it was Chile in the old days. In those days there were a few rich people and a lot of poor ones and I found that the country was crowded with charities by which the rich helped the poor.

During my visits there seemed to be a charity fund-raising event almost every night, and my rich friends took me along to some of them. Most of the fund-raising events were very worthy, and I can only remember one that I did not approve of. This was a competition between rich society ladies to design table settings for a five course banquet with three accompanying wines. This was in aid of the starving of Africa. Not very sensitive, I thought to myself.

Every rich person seemed to have a personal charity. Of course they had excellent motives, and they gave employment to many thousands of charity organisers. However, I felt that with fewer charities those thousands of organisers could have used their talents better doing charity and not doing administration.

Just before one of my visits, there had been a major earthquake, and there was a rush of charities to bring aid. So many charities indeed that they were almost fighting to get to the front of the queue. I heard that the local government of the disaster area was tearing its hair out trying to control the prima donna leaders of charities and I went down there to see what was happening.

Well, there was certainly a big problem, with thousands of people homeless and living in tents, threatened by the cold winter weather which was just round the corner. However, I couldn’t see any charity chaos, just one group distributing food and clothes. I spoke to the local mayor and asked him whether the competition between charities was a problem.
“You foreigners don’t understand,” he said. “My people are cold and starving.  I can’t afford to turn any help down and it’s my job to get more. It really was messy at the start but now I’ve developed a system. Each charity is allowed a half day to distribute its stuff. Each charity puts up lots of banners with its name on it for photo-ops. Our children sing a thank you song. Once that one has finished, we tear the banners down and replace them with the banners of the next charity. Actually their old plastic banners are very useful to make roofs for the temporary houses. At the rate of two charities a day we can get the help of 14 charities in a week.”

I asked if he ever encountered two charities insisting on doing things at the same time. “Yes, once" he replied. "The two lady charity leaders were sworn enemies and neither would give way. But you see that army tent over there? My military friends escorted the two ladies away at gunpoint and distributed the goods without them. The message got around and I haven’t had any trouble since then.”

Isn’t it a strange world that we live in?