compassion fatigue

Here’s a typical morning. Over breakfast, bored children gather outside our windows asking for paper to color or to ask for a band aid for a small cut or to just say; “sis Kim, please come” “what?” “I have to ask you something?” “just tell me what it is?” “no, please come to the window” This is my clue that it is a private request for something on behalf of themselves or their parents. Food, a job, money for school fees. It happens every morning without fail. Yesterday during breakfast, someone came to the door with an injury from a morning football game. Back home we would have probably given him stitches, but myself and someone else with only slightly more medical training (more than none) cleaned his wounds, dressed it with a gauze pad and gave him some pain killers. Football injuries have been arriving at our doorstep with increasing regularity lately. In the midst of this, often somebody else comes to the door to sit down for a visit. These are almost never social calls. Often they will sit down sheepishly with very little to say and offer almost nothing in the way of small talk. After some awkwardness, they will ask to talk to someone in private and ask for money for some kind of illness or to pay for continued schooling or some other financial obligation. Sometimes they never get around to asking outright, but just mention that how they have no money to wash their clothes or make an offering at church that Sunday. One day I came out of the shower and there were 3 people waiting to talk to me. This is all before 8 AM.

I feel a constant internal pull between doing the generous and compassionate thing and avoiding being taken advantage of. I try to remind myself that it is not easy to have to come to ask for money and given the fact that most cannot find work or farm land for food, asking us for help is one of the only options they have. I know that given the same circumstances I would probably do the same, and I know that in this culture everybody shares what they have.

But being such obvious outsiders from the wealthy world, we can also so easily be taken advantage of. Often a volunteer will give money to someone for medicine and then find out that another volunteer gave money to the same person for the same drugs. So many volunteers come with very little money and have depleted their reserves or had to raise money to get over here in the first place. But the locals see us come and go and almost always give donations while we are here. It makes sense that they would try us out. But I have seen some of the most energetic and charitable people give until they are physically, emotionally and financially drained. The need on their part and the wariness on our part taints almost all interactions with Liberians. It’s the subtext off nearly all our conversations. And it is exhausting. I remember thinking how harsh some of the older volunteers treated the kids and people coming to awkwardly request help. Now I find myself acting the same way sometimes and I wonder how newcomers see my behavior. There a word for all this in the fundraising world. It’s called “compassion fatigue.” It’s how the outrage over a human tragedy becomes muted over time and it becomes more difficult to raise money for things like tsunami relief after the public has habituated to the terrible images on the evening news. I guess that comforts me a bit. To know that it’s only human to deplete your reserves of empathy every once in a while.