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Sam, thanks for your tuotghhs. I agree, many times NGOs go where the money takes them and where the donors dictate. I think though, that this is a disservice to the work that they do and the people who they are trying to serve. I have seen first hand many times when organizations took restricted dollars to do pointless, trivial projects in places that didn’t need the work done to begin with, but they did it just because the money was restricted to that. In my opinion, it would have been better to do nothing at all. In an ideal world (and clearly this is not), NGOs would be able to say, no, we need the money more for this place than for that, and still be able to survive. I think that is a matter of changing donor culture, something I think about often. I didn’t mean that organizations brag to the donors about the places the operate, more, that they think that it gives them more clout and credibility when they can say we operate in ### number of countries. Donors do consider this impressive and as an indicator that means something to them especially private individual donors. And organizations do love to talk about all the places they operate (I used to work in RD, I’ve seen it a lot). Also, just because a person has the desire to go different places doesn’t mean they don’t have good intentions, and I am not questioning the intentions, but what comes out of it. Of course I do not think that Paul Farmer decided to expand just because he wanted to visit new places, but I do think that many aid workers do operate under the dichotomy of both wanting to help people and wanting to travel, and this is something that is underlying in both NGOs and the people who work for them.

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