A few years ago, I wrote a post with this same title, recounting an experience from a few years before that. What follows is a shorter version of the original, and my conclusion–which hasn’t changed; perhaps it’s getting more emphatic with time–that we should be careful when sharing our “talent, time and treasure” with those we don’t really know, and particularly, those we know only in their online manifestations.
Ever since the events recounted below, I’ve been involved in two or three “situations” that I think might be fallout from my actions on behalf of some folks half-way across the world. Hopefully that’s all in the past now, but those encounters have done nothing but reinforce my belief that one shouldn’t look further afield than the nearest soup kitchen, veterans’ charity, or local cultural endeavor, when investigating how one’s skills and abilities can best be deployed to help others.
A little professional background: I retired almost fifteen years ago from a career in Healthcare Information Technology. When I retired, I was a senior manager at a community hospital, responsible for all desktop and mobile technology and for all servers, and all local and wide-area network infrastructure at the home campus and about twenty-five remote locations, region-wide. Along the way, I’d honed my skills in many different areas, including, for a few years, the design, coding, and maintenance of websites for a number of small to medium-size businesses, most of them (because of my belief that charity really does begin at home), local non-profits to which I donated my time.
When I took on this ‘international’ project for what I believed to be a worthy organization, I considered my substantial contributions to WordPress, to domain registration services, to several plug-in vendors, to a number of financial clearinghouses, and to sundry other necessary underpinnings to get the site up and running, just part of the deal, and I committed to pick up the cost (several hundred dollars per year), if the project was completed to the satisfaction of all, for at least the next five years.
I investigated, researched and implemented a “dual-language” option for the website, so that a person visiting it could easily pick the native language for the organization’s location, or could choose “English,” the language of the majority of the underwriters and supporters for the charity. I found translators in the United States who could help me produce both English and native language pages. (This was not a trivial undertaking given the language involved.) All of this took several hundred hours of my time.
There was only one native speaker of English at the organization, someone I’d never met, and he was my point of contact. We had a good relationship, and things were moving forward at a good clip, although the eleven or twelve hour time difference presented some difficulties when it came to setting up meetings or even just conversations.
I also had a close friend at the time, someone I had met, and who’d spent a couple of months living in my home with my husband and me early in 2018. He had a history of helping out this organization with financial donations and material goods. Between my contact and my friend who lived close by to the organization and who said that he would assist with the project, I thought that I was well-situated and well-informed, working in good faith with a good friend and a reputable organization.
One day, though, my good intentions hit a speed bump, when I was testing my way through the “donation” portion of the website. At the point where I was ready to deploy it in a test mode, the PayPal links suddenly stopped working. (Getting PayPal to work smoothly as a donation option for one-time and/or recurring donations was a significant focus of the project.) I thought the sudden problems with PayPal were an anomaly, so I called PayPal to see what the problem was.
That’s when I learned that PayPal had suspended the organization’s account due to suspicious activity. My contact at the organization let me know that Paypal would probably never re-enable a “business” account for the organization (which rather put the kibosh on what I was trying to do), and that they best they could hope for was a new, personal, PayPal account for someone who worked there. (Personal accounts don’t work the same way, or have nearly the same options as do business accounts, so–from the standpoint of what we were trying to do–that pretty much rendered what we were trying to do unachievable.)
I emailed my friend (who didn’t work for the organization, but who was a long-time supporter, and who was my ‘boots on the ground’ in the local area on the other side of the world). I expressed my discomfort with what I’d heard, told him I’d appreciate a second opinion, and asked him, several times, to please look into what was going on, and see if the story I’d been given by PayPal and by the organization’s employee checked out. He never responded to my concerns.
So, eventually, at the suggestion of, and with the consent of, the only person who was communicating with me, the organization’s English-speaking employee on the other side of the world (who was about to retire and return to the States), I stopped all work on the website, not least because the “next step” would have been involving myself in the organization’s finances, and becoming part of the “approval” process for payments and donations, something I was deeply uncomfortable with, given the Paypal “hitch” and the reasons for it.
By the time I backed out of the project, I’d sunk upwards of $1000 of my own money, committed five or six hundred dollars a year to it for the next five years, and given thousands of dollars of “in-kind” services–my time is valuable, and I can still command a substantial fee for professional expertise, whenever I choose–to a charity on the other side of the world. That charity is not registered in the US. Setting up such a registration was also part of the project I was working on. So don’t be thinking I got some massive tax deduction, for my efforts I did not. What I did, I did for love of the organization. Not for money.
But I’m not a fool. Even for love.
Since the undertaking I’ve described above, and which I now view as a huge and very naive mistake, I’ve encountered a number of strange cyber-intrusive occurrences which I think might be related to it. I believe I’ve navigated all of them without ill-effect, and I think they’re now all in the past. But I view them as a warning to myself going forward, and so I share that experience with you.
Be careful. Maybe don’t rely on “friends” (who may well turn out to be “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”) for business concerns. And–no matter how much your heartstrings might be tugged at the plight of unfortunates on the other side of the world, do your proper homework before committing your resources, whether financial or professional, to their succor.
Above all, when it comes to helping others, maybe start with your neighbors and those deserving in your community, and move outward (slowly) from there?
PS: The image at the top of this post is the El Greco portrait of St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes. Story of my life. LOL.
