Earlier this afternoon, I opened an email from Saigon Children, a charity whose stated mission is to “enable disadvantaged children and young adults in Vietnam to reach their full potential through receiving a quality education relevant to their needs.”
This was the second email I’d received in just over two weeks from the charity, urging me to sponsor a child for the next academic year beginning in September. I’d been meaning to take part since last October, and this paragraph finally had me reaching for my credit card:
We are on a mission to fulfil at least 1,500 scholarships by this September, when the new school year opens. While much of the primary-school scholarships have been sponsored, over 80% of the higher-level scholarships have not had a donor.
15 minutes later and $210 lighter, I returned to my inbox-clearing task with a warm glow in my chest.
Empathy-driven altruism
I don’t donate much. In fact, Saigon Children is the only charity I donate to.1 My first donation to them was last year, to sponsor a Covid backpack for struggling families in Ho Chi Minh City.
I had received countless other donation requests over the years, but the Covid backpack drive was the first message that hit home. I was living through Covid and seeing with my own eyes the shuttered shops, the streets empty of vendors. I was stuck inside in a lockdown that stretched for months. I could easily imagine how difficult life would be for those families, out of work and trapped inside four walls that are undoubtedly far less comfortable than our airy, well-lit, well-stocked two-bedroom.
I could empathise with the families’ plight—and that’s why I pulled out my credit card and meticulously entered its details on the Saigon Children website last October.
Similarly, it took only a couple of emails for me to part with $210, a much more substantial sum than for the Covid backpack, because I can wholly empathise with the cause—sponsoring a child’s education. Back in 2007, I received a government scholarship to study in the UK, and the subsequent seven years would make me the person I am today. I have first-hand experience of how a sponsored education can literally change someone’s life. So, if all that’s needed for a child to access high school is $210 from my pocket, that’s the easiest decision in the world.
A world apart
But there’s a hard limit to empathy-driven altruism. And the irony is this limit means I’m not sending help where it’s most needed.
It is easy for me to empathise with a family who’s struggling because of Covid, with a child who cannot afford an education—because I can imagine their reality, put myself in their shoes.
It is far less easy for me to empathise with families whose homes burnt down in climate-change-induced wildfires, a faraway country ravaged by an ongoing civil war, hundreds of millions of people starving—and this is just the beginning of a very long list of “really bad things” happening in the world today that we don’t hear about on the news.
It is difficult for me to empathise because I cannot begin to imagine what life must be like for someone whose entire village burnt down, someone who’s running from rains of bullets every day, someone who goes to bed hungry every night not knowing if they’ve eaten enough to wake up the next morning. Their realities are so different from mine that we may as well be living a world apart.
I understand that their situation is dire. I intellectually see that they need help. But I don’t feel any empathy. In fact, by definition—I can’t.
And because empathy is driving my altruism, it’s channeling my hard-earned dollar into other directions—by all means worthwhile causes to give to, but arguably not where help’s most needed.
What do you think?
Thoughts of empathy and altruism have been swirling in my mind for the past few days, triggered by a request from a friend to assist the Ukrainian war effort by translating—for lack of a better word—a wartime pamphlet into Thai. I was deeply uncomfortable with helping propagate a text the veracity of which I couldn’t verify, so I turned them down. But I wonder if my response would have been different if it was for a different cause, one I could empathise with.
What drives your altruism? How can we get help to where it’s most needed?
Do you have any other thoughts on this important, but not talked about enough, matter? Send a reply, leave a comment, share this with an altruistic person you know.
Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,
Val
Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
Correction: Since writing the first draft of this post, I have made one more sizeable donation to an orphanage in Thailand at the behest of a dear friend, also for educational purposes. This is uncharacteristically generous of me and I shall now return to my miserly ways.