International charities face obstacles

When College sophomore Dau Jok received a donation of 200 soccer balls, 15 basketballs and other sports supplies for his charity, the Dut Jok Youth Foundation, he knew sending the gift from the United States to South Sudan would be a challenge. What he didn’t anticipate were the costs: several months’ wait and $3,000 in fees.

Upon initially paying the $1,100 shipping fee to send the sports equipment to his relatives in Uganda at the beginning of May, Jok found out he would also be charged about $2,000 more, the amount the donation was worth. The supplies did not arrive in South Sudan, where the Dut Jok Youth Foundation has been implementing its programs for Sudanese youth, until mid-July. Jok explained that in East African countries, “if you do not know people [in Customs] or aren’t well-connected, you’re going to run into a lot of problems.”

“If you buy [supplies in the U.S.], it costs a lot more to ship because the best way to go is using mail, and sometimes that takes a lot longer you can anticipate,” Jok said, adding that buying materials in East Africa costs more but may cause fewer problems. “We’re open to either donations of money or equipment, and we’ll try to work around that by taking them as luggage on the plane, which is a lot cheaper.”

However, that strategy doesn’t always work. When College sophomore Max Presser chose to travel to Ghana with Unite for Sight, a nonprofit organization, to help bring affordable eye care to impoverished villages, he didn’t anticipate being questioned in a detaining room in a Ghanian airport for half an hour.

Presser, who did not have a cell phone with him, was almost not allowed into the country when he couldn’t tell the airport officials the exact address where he would be staying. Upon reaching Customs with a suitcase filled with 600 pairs of eyeglasses, he found himself in another difficult situation.

“When I opened my suitcase and [they] saw the black trash bag with the eyeglasses, they started questioning why I had them and said [they were] going to have to charge taxes on them,” Presser said. When he explained that Unite for Sight had made an agreement with the Ghanian government to get a tax exemption, he was brought to the detaining room before they let him join the group.

Beyond transportation issues, international service organizations at Penn face a number of other obstacles to achieving their objectives. Jok explained that some of the other problems his organization has encountered include language barriers, miscommunication and reliance on Sudanese people — who may not move as quickly as Jok would like —to get things done. He also noted that it’s important to “consider some factors like what season it is in Africa. In South Sudan, the rainy season is from May to October, so it becomes really hard to ship things.”

Penn International Business Volunteers, an organization that sends volunteers to provide consulting services to other nonprofits throughout the world, has experienced similar issues with cultural and language barriers when communicating with foreign non-government organizations.

“We always have an English-speaking contact at the NGO to help out in misunderstandings,” Wharton junior and PIBV Co-President Chris Perez said. “In the months before the trip, we’re in constant contact with the NGO and trying to figure out the logistics … [such as] having office space and internet access in advance.”

In 2007, College senior Turja Chakrabarti founded Pratit International, a student-run nonprofit that provides comprehensive medical care, educational initiatives and community empowerment in the slums of Calcutta, India. The organization — which sends groups of 10 volunteers to India during winter and summer vacations to implement clinical and educational projects — has also encountered its share of difficulties in carrying out its plans.

“A significant amount of time, thinking and planning goes into our projects … but once you go over there, it’s rejected by the ground realities — you can’t see on a day-to-day basis what’s going on and how things are changing. It’s very unpredictable,” Chakrabarti said.

One of the communities Pratit is working with is a squatter settlement illegally located on government property in Calcutta. “As we at Penn are planning a clinic next week and figuring out which types of patients we need to see and what medicine to distribute, we might hear tomorrow or the day after that the slum might be demolished,” Chakrabarti said. “That’s where we have difficulty — what role should we be playing?”

Chakrabarti also explained that communication is a major issue given the difference in time zone and working hours. “When a clinic is going on, it may be 3 or 4 a.m. here, so if there’s a problem, our ground staff can’t communicate. They have to make some decisions that we didn’t envision they’d have to,” he said.

Despite the setbacks, Chakrabarti is optimistic about Pratit’s work in India. “With more communication technology and access to internet in India, we have some high hopes that this can be an easier process in the future,” he said.

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