To give or not to give?

Recently I finished a book about the journey of one cyclist around the world, Moods of Future Joys by Alastair Humphreys. During the course of his four-year cycle ride he travelled through many countries, including Ethiopia, where he describes the mayhem that surrounded him whenever he entered a village:

'A crowd of kids ran around me, laughing and shouting incessantly, "YOU! YOU! YOU!" ... Of all the words in the English language, how had they come to know just 'you' and 'money'? Children, smaller and skinnier than they should have been, tried to pull things off my bike as they ran around me, shouted and jeered, and aggressively demanded money.'

Later, he writes that he noticed a direct correlation between the villages where he was treated in this way and the villages which bore signs announcing that that village had been helped by a particular charity.

Perhaps this is a cynical observation, but it definitely raises questions about aid and charity. Were those children being outrageously greedy or were they simply struggling for survival? How should charity money be spent - is it better to build infrastructure such as wells and schools or to educate the residents about a better life - and who should decide? How much should we interfere with the traditional way of life of those people - is our lifestyle necessarily better? Where is the line between the generous and the over-generous? And how do we separate need, want and greed?

Please email me your thoughts! geographyrocks@live.co.uk