Begging Letters

Amongst yesterday’s mail was an airmail letter from Uganda. The handwriting and my mis-spelt name on the envelope looked familiar. It was a letter from a pupil at St Agnes Senior Secondary School in Kampala, the third such letter that I have received, though each purports to have been from a different student. This student’s story mirrors that relayed by her two predecessors. She is an orphan having lost her dear father to the ravages of HIV/AIDS and her mother in a tragic motor accident in which a taxi in which the woman was a passenger ploughed into a petrol tanker with everyone dying in the consequent conflagration. This tragedy was shortly followed by the loss of her two siblings who had been supporting the student by paying her school fees. Her sisters had been kidnapped, raped and then finally killed by members of a rebel group. She is now utterly alone in the world and begs me to meet her school fees of $390. ‘I am here on bended knees’, she writes, ‘crying for your parental care and love towards my suffering’. It is difficult not to be moved by such a catalogue of disasters.

Unlike its two predecessors this letter has an appendix, a copy of the student’s ‘O Level Terminal Report’ which indicates how well she is doing in the seventeen subjects she is studying. The report bears the official school stamp and is signed by the headmaster. I note that all the marks, comments and teacher’s signatures are written by the same hand. Sending me the report is a clever ploy, because in a postscript to her letter, the student requests that I return the report to her as the headmaster wants it back again at the beginning of next term. Whereas I could easily dismiss the first two letters from my mind, this time a response is demanded.

It was clear to me from the initial letter I received that the School, assuming it exists (it has an E-mail address but I have not been able to locate any information about it via the Web), possesses a copy of Crockford’s Clerical Directory which lists the names, addresses and clerical biographies of all Anglican clergy in the UK. It looks as if students are encouraged to select a promising donor and write off to him or her. The question I face is whether these are cases of genuine individual need, whether the school is exploiting the stories of children to raise funds, or whether this is yet another African scam.

Am I being too cynical about the situation? The trouble is that in addition to these letters purportedly from students in Africa, I am in receipt of others from Africa. There are those which are certainly a scam: individual letters, mainly E-mails, from Christians in Nigeria whose beloved father has passed on leaving behind a fortune in properties, diamonds, or oil revenues. For political reasons the son or daughter has to get these funds out to Europe, and if I allow millions of dollars to be sent to my account for safe-keeping, I will be rewarded both by God and by my Christian brother to the tune of some 5 million dollars. All I have to do is send my bank account details . . . The rest of course would be history with not a cent arriving from Nigeria, but any money that happens to be in my account being withdrawn by my Nigerian Christian brother. Apparently even though these scams are so obvious, people do fall for them. What angers me is the way in which both the gospel and Christian discipleship and solidarity are being cynically manipulated and abused.

The other kind of begging letter I receive from Africa is genuine enough, and comes from students on the programme I teach there, who are struggling with very meagre resources to establish small educational or economic generating projects amongst persons living with AIDS. But even in these instances where the need is great and obvious, my sympathy erodes when either the project is unnecessarily grandiose and seems fired by personal ambition and benefit, or where there lies revealed an underlying culture of dependency which regards Christians in the West, prompted by guilt over their colonial past, as the primary fount of resources. This demeanour becomes even more complicated for me when African Anglicans are happy to declare that they are no longer in communion with me because of what they perceive as my liberal and unbiblical views, but happy to solicit funds from me. I experience at a personal level something of the dilemma the Episcopal church faced when the Church in Uganda declared itself to be no longer in communion with the American Church because of its election and consecration of a gay bishop, yet continued to solicit major Episcopal funding.

I have been facing a similar dilemma over my ‘Lenten box’, into which ever since Sunday School I have been encouraged to make contributions towards overseas missions. These days I want to be sure that my gifts are going to worthwhile projects which benefit communities rather than individuals, like those which contribute to developing an infrastructure which will reduce endemic poverty and the suffering which accompanies it, or which promote educational projects for HIV/AIDS. I don’t want to see a single penny go towards the salaries of corrupt bishops or the expenses of local churches, least of all those which insist that their partial appreciation of the Gospel is the norm for Christian orthodoxy. Instead my Lenten self-denial gift goes these days to Christian Aid along with a letter requesting that the donation be directed towards the kind of project to which I am committed.

Christians have special duties of compassion towards the suffering and of expressing solidarity with the world’s poor. But as Jesus suggested, we also need to be as wise as serpents to ensure both that we are not being exploited by those who are abusing Christianity, and that our gifts have the potential of making a real difference.