A few Sundays ago, I went shopping at my local supermarket. Half way through my circuit, I noticed that the lace of my left sneaker was undone. I was at the end of aisle 15, too far from the few available seats and afraid to bend over as my back was bothering me. I tried to balance my foot on a slight outcropping of metal about two feet up the nearest frozen food cabinet, but was unable to do so. At that moment, a Black lady came up to this old Jew and asked if I was all right.
“Could you tie my shoelace?”
*
In early February, the Trump administration began a concerted attack on a prime United States foreign aid agency: USAID. Operations were abruptly shut down—even trials of new medical programs—and thousands of staff were fired. This except from a New York Times report gives us some grim statistics:
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:
- up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
- 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
- one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
- more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.
Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.*
While the long-term effect of the withdrawal of funding for tracking and fighting disease will, of course, eventually cause United States mortality rates to rise, the main impact immediately is on countries such as South Africa, where “a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection”** was abruptly canceled.
In 2021, long before the current administration started its campaign against American aid to foreign countries, the Department of Defense posted the following report:
The Ebola outbreak of 2014 is an example of what U.S. aid can achieve in Africa. When the disease first appeared, U.S. military epidemiologists worked closely with African medical professionals to contain the disease. They worked to educate populations on ways to stop transmission and developed procedures to care for those infected. U.S. Army units deployed to the region to build care facilities, laboratories and more.
The epidemic ended without becoming a global pandemic. "Ebola is still present in some countries in Africa, but they learned how to contain it," [Army Gen. Stephen J.] Townsend said. "Sure, we helped them develop their capabilities, but they have [the] capacity to manage Ebola on their own now.”***
*
Why help other people? Yes, someday they may be able to reciprocate, but we should do so, not because we (may) need something (someday), but because they need something now. I donate to HIAS several times a year. Their slogan is “Welcome the stranger, protect the refugee.” HIAS originally stood for “Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.” The organization has proclaimed that its help for the downtrodden and oppressed is not given because they are Jewish, but “because we are Jewish.”****
*
William Blake wrote of seeing “the world in a grain of sand.” I think we can also see a world of common humanity in a shoelace.
***
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/health/usaid-cuts-deaths-infections.html?searchResultPosition=15
**** A recent New York Times article about the Sudan was accompanied by photographs in which HIAS aid vehicles were prominent and testimony by displaced people about the help HIAS was giving them.
Update 3/27/25: "On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders halting refugee resettlement, slashing foreign aid, and eliminating critical protections for immigrants and displaced people worldwide.
For Fatehiyya Mohamed Adam, a Sudanese refugee, these policies had devastating consequences.
After fleeing Sudan in 2023, Fatehiyya lost everything when a fire tore through her refugee camp along the Chad-Sudan border. For the past two years, HIAS has been there, providing aid to refugees in this camp. But this time, Trump’s stop-work order and drastic foreign aid cuts stopped us from helping."
HIAS newsletter (their emphasis)
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