When Charity Becomes a Show

For many people, charity has become their stage performance. Am I giving to be seen or to really make an impact? This is a thoughtful question anyone can choose to ask him or herself. Nowadays, charity is becoming an opportunity to showcase all the doings online. People can even choose to go live just to capture themselves giving to the beggars or donating to charity organizations.

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If it's for awareness, it's not wrong; it can even motivate others to join in the giving, but sometimes, the motive behind the cameras is just questionable. And the big question remains: the money we donated for charity, is it actually being used for what it was donated for?

A few years back, some of us here on Hive came together to donate for charity work. We donated lots of hives; others donated HBDs, all thanks to Sayee, who came up with this charity idea. The plan was to extend the charity donations to different countries as much as we can. We started in my country, and I was the one who saw it. I bought all the needed items we took to the orphanage home, took a picture of those items, and shared the receipts of all the expenses in a post inorder to carry the donors along .

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No doubt, it was a lovely experience putting smiles on the faces of those orphanage children. I could recall some of them eating the chocolate right there in my presence, but that was the list of the items I took there. There was a bag of rice, beans, groundnut oil, and many more items. I never mentioned this, but today's prompt in the Hive Learners community made me reflect on what I noticed on the evening of the day I went for the charity visit.

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Over there, I saw a grown-up girl who was sitting with the little children on that day, but I felt she was part of the orphans. While I was discussing with my friend along my street in the evening of the same day, that same young girl passed with a bag of rice, the same brand of rice and the same size as I took to the orphanage home. Immediately after she passed, my friend said, "This lady leaves with the man in charge of the orphanage home I visited." Wow, I tried connecting the dot immediately. I was like, why was she going home with the bag of rice? Why is the rice taken away from the orphanage home when they have a kitchen and everything for cooking there? The rice was meant and donated for the orphans and not for the man in charge of the orphanage home and his family.

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I kept asking myself 1001 questions without an answer. But it's obvious; the man took some items donated for the children to his family house for his private use and that of his family. It's difficult to really ensure that the charity donation we do sometimes is actually being used for what it was donated for.

Even some so-called reputable charity organizations can't be completely trustworthy to use charity donations rightly; it is what it is.

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Real charity isn't about looking for who will praise you. It doesn't even need a camera. You can quietly decide to sponsor your neighbor's child in school or quietly help a widow with foodstuffs, making impacts in people's lives; that's what matters most.

Having said that, how I ensure that my money gets to who needs it and not in the pockets of some greedy fellow is a bit challenging. Most times I just give without following up to know if it got to the right hand because I felt it wasn't necessary, but with my experiences and with what I see online about charity donations, I prefer giving directly these days or, better still, trusting my instincts while giving .

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This is my response to the #Hive Learners community prompt on the topic titled, A Little Charity.

Images were taken from canva