As some of you already know (because you have received an email where I was going on and on about my latest distress), I have been faced with sort of a moral issue lately. A moral issue that at the end of the day I couldn't do much about, but that did cause very strong reactions in me, for some reason or another.
See, I work in an NGO. And this NGO has been facing problems lately due to donors reducing their funding. That's not because we're a bad NGO or we're not doing our job properly, it's just because there's quite a serious economic crisis in Malaysia at the moment and companies are feeling it. Now, my NGO decided to try and smooth talk our sponsors. And one of the ways it chose to do so is to rename our center names (that before just took the name of the location...in my case we had Putrajaya Community Center) into names that would contain our donors' name. Nobody (including me) protested to that because we went on the "whatever makes them happy and gives us more money" type of attitude. Then we found out the center names...I obviously got the Starbucks Community Center...just because it's written in my stars probably. But anyways...I mocked away and decided to live with it the best I could.
The bigger problem arrived when I got to see the new banner that was supposed to be hung in front of my center...to summarize it, it's basically as if we would be selling Starbucks at our center. The Starbucks logo is so big, the text is now in the Starbucks colors, the name of our NGO is so tiny, that it made my heart sink and hurt. I really felt intense physical pain. I tried to chill myself and waited because generally after shocks, it takes me a bit to get used to it and to process it and the horrible feeling goes away. However, this one didn't. Two days later I was still getting shocks in my chest when thinking about the situation. Which is when I decided to write the email to the people, cause I figured external and more detached perspectives will help out.
And they did partly. I started focusing on all the good things the people were saying. It's not what is hung outside that matters, it's what you do there. It's maybe even better because Starbucks is so well known (and definitely liked) in Malaysia. You should detach yourself, look at the big picture and carry on focusing on the students. The funny thing was when I went to administrator of the building with my new banner, so he could put it on. I put on my best smiling and happy face, but when he opened it, his face dropped and he was like "That is one biiiiig Starbucks sign!! I will need to check with our committee to see if I can put it up":) Anyways, the committee saw it, decided to put it up but not in the most visible place...and now we have this wonderful thing at the entrance in our center:
You might wonder (like I did also) why this thing bothered me so much. I have been thinking about it quite a lot lately since I've been receiving various opinions on it and since it awoke such strong and physical reactions. The main points are the following:
- I did not mind that we need to promote the donors. It's quite normal and money needs to come from somewhere. So we are happy that they come from them. But the size of it all felt very very very displaced! If you take into account also the fact that my particular center gets more than half of its expenses covered by someone else, than it just feels completely bogus!
- the donors did not ask for such a thing. We sort of offered it to them. Which is fine but then why make it sooooo huge?
- I am holding classes about eating healthy and not drinking crap. And although in other countries Starbucks might be better, in Malaysia it is a sugar making factory. So it felt very far from the general messages we are trying to convey.
- it made me feel like I was working for Starbucks. And if I wanted to do that, I would just get a job for it.
I cannot say that I've made my peace with the situation yet...at the moment I am just trying to not look too much at the banner when I come in :) Any coping thoughts or suggestions are still welcome :) But the students do help, so I am just focusing on that!