You are volunteering with a team for twelve weeks in a small suburb of a semi-arid country in the Third World. During your predeparture training, the Canadian NGO you work for emphasized their sustainability policy, which stresses local ownership and a low social footprint, both for specific projects and communities as a whole, in order to avoid building dependency relationships.
You have been working with youth at the local youth centre, helping the volunteer staff build their capacity and coordinate their activities. Over the last two months in-community, you have been learning the local language and have developed strong friendships with some of the youth.
Unexpectedly one day, the power goes out throughout the region, and the local government isn’t sure when it will be restored. The infrastructure in the region only supports piped water and there is a hand pump on the edge of the community, but the well soon runs dry. Your contingency budget allows you to rent a small generator in order to pump water into the tank on the roof of your team’s rented house. In order to keep a low profile, your team agrees it will only turn the generator on for a few hours at night, so you can write reports and conserve fuel. To save water, you begin to bucket bathe rather than shower, and do so only once every three days.
A week later, you hear word that the power could be out for up to two months, well after your team has left. The next morning, one of the youth comes to your gate with a jerry can, obviously humiliated, asking for water for his family. You don’t want to set a precedent, as there is no way you can support the whole community, but you don’t want to turn away your friend either.
How do you approach making an ethical decision in this situation?
Discussion Summary
- How do you act in the short term vs. the long term? What are the immediate possibilities for providing people with water and solutions to their issues? Short-term band-aid or systematic change? Not ethical to support just one person because “everyone is equal”. But there is a problem, we don’t treat everyone the same. We cannot ignore our relationships. So what of equal treatment?
- What if you don’t know enough to make a decision like this? What if you haven’t been trained for this? Do you know enough to make a decision? This is bigger than the boy with the jerry can. You need to make a decision that preserves everybody’s integrity.
- Weaknesses of core theories – Utilitarianism vs. Deontology. We aren’t given a set of guidelines for addressing conflicts between ethical rules.
- Could do a community survey of need and help the families that are most vulnerable. However, the community must be involved in the process, ie. consult with their leaders. Should you draw international attention to the situation?
- What is your role as a volunteer? There are political problems with getting involved? You don’t necessarily know what’s already going on in a community if you’re on a short project.
- What if somebody from abroad showed up here in Canada during a crisis and tried to tell us what was best for us to do? How would that make us feel?
- Language is an issue. If you start treating people in a certain way, then they will likely start acting as such.
- Compromise? Are we doomed to an eternity of proliferation of new euphemistic terms in an attempt to be politically correct? Who is writing history?