Generosity with Others’ Money

We have tried to be generous with things like giving our
chickens (pictured above) away at Christmas, but often
when you start doubting the worthiness of the cause it is
harder to be so generous.

Many of our experiences of money and gifts can be related to the principles we’ve been reading in the book African Friends and Money Matters. A striking example that is representative of these experiences is shared like this (pg. 120): In many African cultures, if someone goes back on the agreed payment for a service and asks for more because they know you can technically pay more, it is greedy and selfish for you to refuse. Even though it means breaking the earlier promise, it’s thought to be of more value to make the person who’s arguing for more money feel better by offering at least something more, because it is easily in your power to do so. In the author’s experience, if you don’t give more money, the taxi driver whose car you’re in, who’s living hand to mouth himself, may end up giving the other person in the dispute some money because he can’t deal with the person being hurt by your lack of generosity. In “Western” culture we feel like giving money to such persons is just creating a bad precedent for the rest of their interactions and the rest of society, and will bring about worse consequences. In these cultures, they feel like giving money to keep the peace and help someone else when you are technically able will be a much better thing for that individual and for the society as it increases the peace and sharing.

In selling our old car we’ve run into the problem that the middle man car dealer, who’s related to our friend, had made an agreement with a buyer several months ago and got the first half of the payment. But now the buyer is not on speaking terms with the middle man because the middle man has insisted in holding him to the original agreed on price before he gets the keys, rather than reducing it for him to reflect the money he actually has on hand now. We’re frustrated because we’d at least like to get a second installment and then wait for a third or fourth, but it looks like there will be no movement on the deal because there has been too much offence caused. Now we realize this is likely due to the idea that the buyer feels we “can afford” to take a lower offer and is upset with the middle man for not graciously facilitating this renegotiation, but instead being ungenerous with a “rich Westerner’s” money. Even before we could put words to this concept, our language teacher promised he would try to get the parties to come back together and make peace on the premise that we would be willing to accept less money according to what the buyer thinks is just for his situation. Taking a step back and looking at this, it’s clear that this is a dance. Now we’re used to the dance in the US with certain rules and room for creativity, but here there is more room for creativity and different rules that apply.

--El Padre