First time I saw a Kielburger presentation, I was underwhelmed. They obviously had a pretty slick shtick, but it was a little too slick for my tastes.
I recall one of the lads regaling the crowd with tales of his first mission to end child labour in Bangladesh or somewhere. Then he was in the paper. Then he decided to start a NGO. Then he met the Prime Minister. Then he met the Sec-Gen of the UN. Then he met Mother Teresa... it was a most cringe-worthy orgy of name dropping.
For fucks sakes, he's gonna pull the Pope out of his ass in a minute...
Sure enough!
Anyway, I was wrong. Their little NGO caught fire. Soon they were building schools all over Afghanistan and Kenya and all kinds of other benighted lands, or "shit-hole countries," as some would frame it. On paper, that's not a bad idea, but when you think things through, it's pretty obvious that most of the shit-hole countries are shit-holes primarily because they've been ruthlessly plundered and abused by the "liberal democracies" of the West for hundreds of years.
So I'm not impressed by two-bit NGOs who are gonna make it all better. Nevertheless, they soon had hundreds of thousands of school children baking cup-cakes for fundraisers to build schools for needy children in less fortunate countries, an undertaking that apparently demanded a substantial real estate footprint in downtown Toronto.
The latest revelation surprises me somewhat. Sure, they overplayed their shtick, but not even I suspected they would engage in out and out fraud. According to the CBC, the Kielburgers would fly a big money donor to Kenya to witness the opening of a school built with his money. They'd have a big ceremony and unveil a plaque with the donor's name.
A couple of weeks later, they'd fly another big donor to the same school and repeat. The article doesn't specify how many times they dedicated the same school to different donors, but we definitely seem to be in the realm of criminality here.
I wonder how many of the teachers who fell for the charms of the Kielburgers will embrace this time as a teachable moment?
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