When gift giving hurts

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a story about gift-giving at the orphanage and why I was more and more opposed to it based on the negative impacts. A lady from the US wrote me asking my take on Operation Christmas Child in this situation, because the Operation Christmas child boxes are only supposed to be given out by national groups who have a relationship with the recipients of the boxes. I was mulling this issue even before she wrote. Spending two years away from the States and then being there for four months makes things stand out a bit more starkly, and I think the materialism of Americans stood out more than anything else to me. This past year, though, God has been teaching me quite a bit.

My answer is over 2,500 words, but it’s a complicated issue.

We Americans always want to give something. We did presentations at 24+churches during our furlough last year, and we shared our most pressing need: financial assistance. We need people to partner with Children’s Hope Ukraine so that we can work with Ukrainians to open more homes for kids from the orphanages. We need to be helping kids finish their education, get work experience and find jobs. We need to be spending time (a lot of time) with them. We simply don’t need stuff; we need people helping us financially. We would spell that out at every presentation and during every one-on-one meeting that we had in the States, and invariably people would ask us afterwards, “How can I send gifts for the kids?” We can understand their mindset, having been there, but it got frustrating. A lot of it has to do with our definition of poverty. In our minds poverty is the lack of money and things, so things is a viable answer to the problem. But the kids have all the things they need. What they don’t have is a healthy living environment, decent education, good role models, people to love them, or opportunities to improve their situation.

There are many negative aspects to gift giving in general by Americans who don’t know the culture or individuals to whom they are giving. One negative aspect of gift giving is the strain on missionaries and nationals to be good stewards of what has been donated. Two years ago, a couple of college girls who had been to Ukraine before, got together with different small groups on their campus to make some fleece blankets for all of the kids in Komarivka. The idea took off and instead of making 100 blankets (that would have been enough for the kids that we have a relationship with), they made over 300. Cool, right? Any idea how hard is it to give out 300 blankets? Well, we gave them out at Komarivka and two other orphanages. We’ve given blankets to friends at church with small children, but at last count we still have about 100 blankets and we are trying to decide what to do with them, because the people who gave them to us asked us to give them to children that we have built up a relationship with. We also want to give the blankets in the fall so they are used during the winter, which means that right now, we’ve tabled the issue for a few more months. On top of that, they probably spend well over $500 to get them to Ukraine. Every member of our team has a pile of stuff that people have shipped to Ukraine because they want to help us, and we just don’t know what to do with it all. It’s not uncommon for orphanage staff to sell donations and pocket the money. That’s the constant struggle, do I just get rid of the stuff as quickly as possible or do I wait until there is a specific need that I can meet with this stuff? But that means constantly remembering every little thing we have and then trying to find it in the mountains of boxes we have. Usually when a specific need arises, what we do have doesn’t fit that specific need, so we end up going out and just buying something.

Last year after we gave out our Christmas presents, some of the teachers requested that next time we get gifts for the kids, we give them flashlights because the orphanage campus is really dark during the winter and this would be something practical that would help everyone. We thought that was a great idea, and always appreciate the input of the orphanage staff, so this year we bought every kid a little LED flashlight. Later, one of the kids came up to Janna and tried to sell his to her for 10 hryvna (it cost 20 to begin with). It made us think, how many kids already sold theirs? We don’t know. We had been hearing about this; most of the older kids sell anything that is given to them so they can get money to buy cigarettes or other junk. T-shirts, soap, anything they can possibly sell, they will. So even practical gifts aren’t really a great idea. For me that was one of the most defining moments leading me to think that we shouldn’t be giving “presents” to the kids at all.

Here is another issue: kids in the orphanage are given everything. Living in the orphanage doesn’t cost them a thing and it doesn’t cost their parents. They don’t understand the concept of ownership. In this situation, the last thing the kids need are gifts. What the kids need are opportunities to earn things. They need the motivation and reward to teach them the value of working towards a goal. This is a much harder system to implement. Sending a shoebox is 100 times easier than teaching a child the value of earning something, but that’s what is needed. Bottom line: when we just send a gift to kids like that, we undermine their future. Slowly but surely that’s what happens.

Janna and I dealt with a related issue recently. She and I do private tutorials for the girls in the transition home we are responsible for. Usually, private tutors are ~$10 per hour, but of course we help the girls for free. However, in the spring the girls were complaining about having to do lessons; they don’t want to write or repeat after us, they don’t study their vocabulary. They haven’t once done their homework. Janna and I pay for our lessons, and we do our homework 95% of the time, and even when we don’t feel like learning we press on and don’t complain to our teacher because we are invested in the process. We are wondering if this is fair to the girls to give them something so valuable that they can treat so poorly. Our thought is that the girls need to take ownership of their lessons in some way, or they won’t receive them. This is a very difficult and complex issue, because the girls have never had motivation, never needed it, but we need them to become motivated to learn. And this is with something very crucial. Knowing English in Ukraine means that you can find a job (in a country with a 37% unemployment rate). Throwing out gifts of any kind helps ensure that the kids won’t be good stewards of anything that is given to them, no matter how valuable.

Gift giving also turns the kids into beggars. Almost every time we go to the orphanage, the kids will ask for something. We’re often bombarded with tons of kids shouting “Give me! Give me! Give me! Sometimes we’ll show up, and the first thing out of a kid’s mouth is “Do you have a gift for me?” It’s not “Hi, how are you?” The majority of the time people who show up at the orphanages show up and give out presents of some type, so they just come to expect it. We’ve basically showed them that we’re the rich Americans that are always giving gifts. That’s not grounds to build a relationship, or to build character.

Now, I don’t believe that all gift-giving is bad, but gift giving outside of real relationship is almost always problematic.

Like you noted, Operation Christmas Child has some good policies in place to help it be as effective as possible. They don’t give the gifts out themselves; they supply the boxes to churches and ministries on the ground and instruct them to use the boxes to minister to the needy in their congregation or to help build relationships with those in their community. But like the blankets, too much of a good thing can become a burden, and so churches devise ways to get rid of the boxes in a way that seems a responsible as possible. This is what happened in Komarivka when I wrote about the Christmas presentation. That church had their youth put together a Christmas program and they went from orphanage to orphanage, spent a few hours at each, shared the gospel, and gave out the boxes. There wasn’t any relationship, but most churches can’t form enough relationships to keep up with the inflow of boxes.

In my opinion, Operation Christmas Child is a ministry that is designed to benefit, more than anyone, the Americans who put the boxes together. We love to give away something we can touch, and just the thought of giving a box of goodies to some child who never gets any present makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. The year before Janna and I moved to Ukraine, Janna put together over 100 boxes by herself, so we understand this more than most. Last I heard, Operation Christmas Child was shipping several million boxes all over the world every year. My head spins when I think about the money that goes into that if every box costs at least $10 to make and $7 to ship. Our organization could operate all year and start all kinds of new projects on .01% of that. But every year more boxes are shipped than the year before.

There are several things that contribute the popularity of Operation Christmas Child. The first is just the idea that you can change a child’s life with just a little shoe box, it tugs at our heartstrings true or not. The second is that, unfortunately, most of us Americans want our giving to be contained. I just finished reading When Helping Hurts, and they discuss the popularity of short-term mission trips as being a result of the fact that people want to do something good, without really getting involved. One to two weeks out of the years is perfect. That’s why we typically go somewhere too, because when the trip is over, we’ve done our good deed and we don’t have to see those people again if we don’t want to. Helping the needy in our hometowns is much more messy and will require constant work. There is a lot more control in small and contained giving, and not much is more small and contained than Operation Christmas Child. There was a group that was planning on coming to Ukraine from my dad’s church to help us do a summer camp. I challenged them that in their own community there were many youth and children who were living without any kind of parent support or guidance, and if they didn’t engage with those children, then when they come to Ukraine they have nothing to share with our team here in Ukraine who engage with these kids as often as they can. You can’t do ministry one week out of the year, real ministry can’t be this little contained thing.

I believe our materialism is another of the biggest contributors to the popularity of OCC. People want to give a gift because, in our minds, things are the cure to poverty. And I’ll admit, it’s just fun to buy stuff, and if I can justify it by buying things for a small child, sweet! People often use the excuse of donating some of their older things as an excuse to be able to go buy themselves a new wardrobe or pair of shoes. The second example may be a little more obvious, but both are symptoms of our materialism. And ultimately, they often hurt us as much as the poor.

Breaking the habit is hard. Over the past year, our whole team has discussed this at length, and all of us were on the same page. However, when it came time to get ready for Christmas, even though we all agreed that we would only give out the photo albums, one of our teammates went and spent almost $20 per kid. She just couldn’t not give Christmas presents to the kids. As soon as the older kids got their gifts they started discussing amongst themselves how much they could sell it for. Janna loves giving gifts, she has often said that it’s one of her gifts, so backing away from gift giving is terribly difficult for her. However, she is changing! And again the kids are great beggars, they try and play on our sympathies all the time, or just keep asking till we give them something just to find some peace, but we are more and more convinced that we need to be strong on this.

This Sunday, when I told our house parents that we had decided only to give out photo albums and no more gifts, they both readily approved. Coming from the orphanages themselves, they have both been outspoken about not giving stuff to kids in the orphanage. They’ve also had conversations with us about what happens in their home. They don’t want us showering the girls at Second Chance with free stuff, and we respect that.

When we tell people about our ministry, we try and get them to put themselves in the shoes of the kids living in the orphanage. To an extent people are good at doing that. They can imagine the loneliness, and deep seated hurt that kids who have been dropped in an orphanage by their parents feel. But we usually stop there. We don’t try to envision what those kids really need to rise above their situation and be rehabilitated to society. We just want to address the pain right now. And yes, the kids always smile when they get presents. No matter who you are, it always feels good to get a present. But once again, giving a present is the easiest thing for us to do, and in the end, it often does much more harm than good. Working with long-term, relationship-based ministries that focus on discipleship and training is where the difference is made.

Based on our experience here, we will not send any more Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. But, it is a ministry that is designed for Americans; it will continue to appeal to Americans no matter the long term results.