Having (been) volunteered for a store lead position at one of Pudong’s Carrefour stores (since I live in PuJersey) as part of a food drive volunteer project, I was very curious to see how locals would react to a bunch of Caucasians standing at the door passing out flyers like street hawkers, trying to convince them to donate food to disadvantaged people in southern Anhui. The store staff said they had never heard of anyone doing anything like this, and were dubious about the possible effectiveness of the engagement. Thankfully it seems to have been a success; though I have no appropriate benchmark for which to judge. Exhibit 1: 400kg of food loot:

As usual I question whether the effort spent on in-kind aid wouldn’t have been more efficiently allocated by simply giving money to charity; contra argument is that it’s harder to motivate people to simply give money and, more importantly, it’s a lot easier to embezzle money than heavy sack-o’-rice, so China-dwellers might be much less trusting. There’s also probably a multiplier effect among your volunteer group also, since money is crass and food is necessary to live. There were two other groups at different Carrefour stores, between the three I believe 1700kg of foodstuff was collected.

People seemed very positive, overall it didn’t seem very different from an average food drive in the U.S. Some people ignored us completely; others donated a lot. Observations: Old couples tended to be very curious, and asked at length what we were doing/why we were doing it. Several people pointed out that they were “members of disadvantaged group, why aren’t you helping us?” People responded better when we indicated that we were affiliated with an international charity rather than a Shanghai charity. Likelihood of donation increased if subject was part of a couple, especially if they had a child.

One long conversation I had with an older Shanghainese man went something like this: “So where you all from?” – “I’m from the U.S. and she’s from Venezuela.” – “Oh. So why are helping Chinese people?” – “Global development is important.” – “Oh. Okay. What do I do?”

Generous and wonderful people everywhere.