Gotta do something, somehow

Three times I've heard it now: the high-pitched hopeless crying, the heavy thuds, and the matter-of-fact BBC voiceover telling me what those sounds mean. The first time, I shouted at my radio. The second time, I turned it off and ranted at Glenn. The third time, it was the radio waking me up this morning. I turned it off again and thought about that young woman.

I fear that she is dead. I know that I cannot help her. I cannot help that particular young woman in Swat in any way.

(And what I write here is all about me, not about her. I don't know her. For me, she is a symbol of a big set of problems for women, particularly for women in that region of Asia, but she is also an individual whose voice I have heard. Because I listen to the radio so much, I have become a witness to her beating; I have taken on a duty to bear witness whether I want it or not. It's a thing to bear, witnessing, but my burden is light.)

Okay, I fall back on what I always do: when I encounter a problem I can't fix myself and feel a duty to do something about it, I give money to people who are doing something that might help fix that problem. I can't give huge amounts of money, and I can't always find something that directly affects the problem, but I give what I can. I think about the problem and approach it from a few different directions: is there an organization I trust that is doing something about it right now? Is there an organization I trust that is doing something about a related problem?

One hears of horrors every day. I hear of horrors every day. I know I can't solve them. I know as well that I could reshape my life and dedicate myself to fighting them in some particular way every day, but I do not feel that as a vocation. I do feel the need to try to make the world less bad for some people, some of the time; I do not feel the need to save the whole world.

Most of the time, I deal with my need to make the world less bad by supporting writing organizations. I learned early on that the cure for bad speech was more speech, that the way to improve people's lives was through education, that knowing more things gives people more tools with which to comprehend and encounter the world, that the more you know, the more jokes you get. I am not a teacher, nor a journalist, nor a fiction writer; the writing forms at which I excel are private letters, school papers, and grant applications. These are not the tools with which to change the world, but this world must be changed. If I see that it must be changed, I must work to change it, and I must use the tools I have at hand.

I'm pretty good at research, too, and I know how to read the financial statements of non-profit organizations. When I start making donations to a new organization, I check its form 990 through the Guidestar web site (unless I know the people running the organization personally or have some other reliable source of information about it). What I look for: do they file their form 990 regularly? Are they current? When I look at the numbers, do they tell me a reasonable story? Is the organization painfully sincere in revealing details about how they spend their money? (I like that, by the way, because it shows that they're trying really hard to be thrifty and transparent.) If they're running a deficit, does it look like they have a good reason for doing so, or a plan for changing it? If they're not running a deficit, are they being sensible in what they do with their excess? If they're really tiny (under half a million a year), do they look like they have a chance to survive long enough to fulfill their charitable purpose and therefore make good use of any money I give them?

And I don't spend my whole day trying to find the perfect organization to make myself feel better. There are women's organizations on the ground in Swat that might be appropriate for me to give money to, but I have no way of judging most of them and no time to find a good network through which to vet them.

All right, I look for something addressing the problem of educating women in Moslem countries, and I find http://www.greenvillageschools.org/faq.htm. I've read about Green Village Schools before. I don't know any of the people involved, but I know people who know some of them. There's information about all the board members on the web site. The form 990 is in order for at least three years. They've built one small school in Afghanistan, which was a big success with its village.

The Taliban burned it down.

They're going to build it again.

And I've found a new organization for my donor dollars. They're in Afghanistan, not Pakistan, but they're fighting the Taliban by building schools, and by rebuilding schools, and by rebuilding schools. The Taliban and the forces represented by the Taliban are my enemy, and I want to fight that enemy through education, because that's a tool I understand, and because that's a tool the Taliban understands, too. They fight us by building bad schools ("bad" by the definitions I accept, where "bad" means educating only boys and not girls and teaching an extremely limited and distorted curriculum); we have to fight them by building good schools, where both girls and boys are educated, where they learn a wide variety of subjects, where they see the possibility that life can be different from how it is now.

I can't save the world. You can't either. We can make parts of it less bad for some people.