Faking it for charity?(Comments RSS)
The BBC recently did a follow up article on the slow recovery of the Mynamar people from a cyclone. The BBC repeatedly referring to the country as Burma, apparently ignoring the change of name in 1989. What concerns is the fact that they interviewed a dozen or so children for the article, every one of which had had it's face smeared with mud, yet were sporting clean clothes, clean hands, clean arms and legs.
Some of the muddy faces had clear adult-sized-finger smear marks on forehead and each cheek.
Other than the clear and terrible squalor these children lived in (for which we must all feel guilt), they appeared well nourished, clean and fully clothed. So, none of the grinding pain of flyblown Ethiopian refugees or corpse-like malnourishment of Bangladeshi flood survivors. So, did the BBC deliberately smear mud on these childrens faces to sex-up their plight, or were they in turn taken in by the local aid agencies?
Have we become so inured to human catastrophe that we have to see bloated stomachs and flies-in-the-faces before we up our donations to charity?
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