Equals among Unequals: The Compassionate Aid of American Evangelicals

Watoto’s performances feature dynamic and highly energetic songs and dances performed by well-trained children, all of whom live either in the villages for vulnerable children that Watoto has built on the outskirts of Kampala or, more recently, in a household headed by a mother who receives aid from Watoto’s new “Neighbourhood” project, which supports single mothers living in poverty. The children train for months before going on tour, and their performances are engaging, professional, and technically proficient. The group’s aesthetics are “African” in a general way, featuring costumes styled as hip, fashionable mash-ups that incorporate torn jeans, tightly tailored blazers, asymmetrical haircuts, and brightly patterned cloth—a look that appeals to their diverse audiences. Each year, Watoto’s creative directors introduce new songs, short films, and themes around which tours are oriented, often emphasizing the transformational power of love, or a literal sense of movement and travel (“Here We Go!”; “Oh What Love! A New Sound by a Family of Orphans”). The performances are emotionally intense, with uplifting and stylized songs interwoven between testimonials by children and adult performers.^{Footnote 5} Testimonials are important parts of each performance, as these are opportunities for audiences to grapple with the reality of orphanhood. In one memorable testimonial I heard in Uganda (where the choirs often did dry runs of their touring shows) a child spoke about tasting bread for the first time—a story aimed to demonstrate the deprivation of the orphan, and the ordinary-extraordinary kind of material salvation Watoto could provide.^{Footnote 6} Sami K, a gospel musician who toured twice as an adult performer with Watoto, emphasized the power of testimonials when I asked him how audiences responded to the choirs. “Hearing stories from the kids about what God has done with their life, through the [Watoto] organization, that was really something for the audiences. When you go to America, you have to be convinced to finish up your food. It’s just amazing that what you think is nothing for one society, is really something for another. That is what is really mind-blowing for them [the audience].”

If the abject loss of orphanhood is one message of the performance, it is always paired with a message of hope, of a childhood restored through the help of the organization and its foreign donors. This is a notable story line, given that Watoto and programs like it have faced the criticism that some of the children they serve are not, in fact, orphans, but rather are children placed in such organizations in order to access resources otherwise unavailable to their families (Sinervo & Cheney Reference Sinervo, Cheney, Cheney and Sinervo2019:5). From this perspective, Watoto’s emphasis on Ugandan children’s abandonment (as depicted in the film “The Separation”), and their salvation at the hands of the organization, is misleading, but it is nonetheless made central to the emotional arc that structures performances, and proves to be a deeply powerful way to appeal to foreign Christian audiences’ faith in the effects of compassionate Christian love.^{Footnote 7} Many of the short film clips interspersed between songs during performances emphasize the transformative power of the Watoto experience. In one clip, a young boy leads the camera on a virtual tour of one of Watoto’s villages, comically interrupting a class of children seated in an immaculate, orderly classroom and then running through a playground that features Western-style mass-manufactured play equipment (the likes of which is rarely seen in Uganda).

For American and other Western audiences, such images reinforce a sense of familiarity: children in the program are given childhoods similar to those donors recognize in their own communities. In another film clip, two children are featured on a split screen: on one side an Australian girl who has sponsored a Ugandan child, on the other the Ugandan girl she has sponsored. The two girls were shown doing the same activities in parallel: dressing in school uniforms, eating breakfast, walking to school. The Australian girl speaks to the camera about her own visit to a Watoto performance some years back, an experience that moved her to raise money to sponsor a child by selling cookies and soliciting pledges from friends and family. The emphasis was on her own agency, the effective power of her feelings of good will, a message that the audience with whom I viewed the clip audibly responded to, cheering the charitable “heart” and self-reliance of the young Australian.

Watching from the audience, I was struck by the radical argument this film made, one meant to appeal directly to Western viewers: a donor’s gift had enabled the transformation of both the donor and recipient, and these transformations had made the two girls more alike each other, alleviating the tensions of perceived inequality. The Australian girl had come to understand the pain of a Ugandan girl far removed from her own daily life, while the Ugandan girl had been saved from a life of deprivation to live much as her Australian counterpart lives, a life seemingly dictated by the quotidian teenage rhythms of school uniforms and breakfast tea. In so doing, this gift of compassionate aid seemed to assuage the violence of poverty and misfortune.

The film’s overarching argument, and the message of Watoto’s performances more generally, highlights a broader Christian orientation to charitable exchange, and the idealized effects of Christian compassion. Christian compassion—an affective response to the needs of others, often less fortunate than oneself—is understood by many evangelical Christians to be a radical act of selflessness that demands a deep understanding of the vulnerability and need of others. Such acts of faithfulness are viewed as extensions and visible manifestations of God’s love (Elisha Reference Elisha2011:166). Ideally, a demonstration of compassion is an unconditional act, given without the expectation of reciprocation. But gifts of charity are also understood as radical acts of sacrifice and devotion, a “sacralized mode of exchange” (Coleman Reference Coleman2004; Harding Reference Harding2000), whereby such gifts carry an expectation, or at least a hope, of transformation on the part of the recipient. So, while such gifts are given in a personally disinterested manner, what underlies them is the expectation that as expressions of God’s love on earth, compassion should have demonstrable effects on recipients: recipients should become examples of the power of God’s love.

For this reason, the evangelical gift of charity is animated by an underlying contradiction that shapes Christian compassion more generally: as an extension of God’s mercy, gifts of charitable compassion should be given with no expectation of remuneration, and yet, like the gift of salvation itself, such charitable acts “invoke norms of reciprocity and indebtedness,” a belief in the transformative effects of faith to make individuals more accountable, trustworthy, responsible Christian believers (Elisha Reference Elisha2011:156). As studies of humanitarianism have shown, these are sentiments that help to shape contemporary attitudes about economic development and relief more generally, as evangelical precepts of compassion animate neoliberal technologies of citizenship that emphasize the remaking of persons and communities through projects of personal empowerment, self-help, and responsibility (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999; Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012).

The split screen of the Australian girl and her Ugandan counterpart seemed crafted to demonstrate just this very point: one teenager’s own sacrifice had effected real, tangible changes in the girl she had sponsored, transforming that girl into a recognizable facsimile of her devoted Western “sister”—attending school, caring for herself, reading the Bible. Any change in the donor is rooted in the effects of her faith, the ways that Christian belief has enabled her to see and understand an orphan’s plight. This is a perspective that emphasizes the one-directional nature of such a relationship: interpersonal understanding (compassion) effects changes in a needy child. But it also leaves the onus for transformation on the child herself, who is expected to demonstrate, and justify, such gifts by embodying the effects of compassionate care, while being presented as only a passive recipient of her donor’s selfless “gift.”

If one tension underlying this narrative is the way “selfless” compassionate gifts demand reciprocity in the form of the ideal behavior of recipients, another tension concerns the ways compassionate sentiments are thought to ameliorate conditions of inequality. In being transformed by the care of donors, recipients also become more like their donor-counterparts, more equal (in theory) to their donors. The issues of dependency and inequality are expected to be resolved in this narrative, their persistence masked by an emphasis on an orphan child’s change and transformation. In another short film, three graduates of the Watoto program (adults who had been raised in the Watoto children’s villages) are shown leading lives marked by the trappings of upper-middle class wealth. One woman works an office job in one of Kampala’s banks, another is a stay-at-home mom filmed in her comfortable house while her children play outside and have their faces painted at a street festival. These are lives far different from that of the average Ugandan (and exceptional even among Watoto graduates), but for audiences these are lives that seem familiar and recognizable.

Compassion, as a radically transformative affective state, characterizes donors as empowered, agentive, and impactful; it also has the effect of downplaying the aid recipients’ own role in generating and perpetuating cycles of material support. Child recipients are thought to be transformed because of what they have received, in spite of their own social position (characterized as one of vulnerability and helplessness). Their continued status as vulnerable children and adults is largely erased by a public narrative that celebrates the apparent newfound autonomy and independence of children and adult graduates of the program. And, importantly, the child’s own work within these circuits of compassion—to solicit aid, to demonstrate need—is obscured, their own agency and labor replaced by a narrative that characterizes charitable gifts as one-directional and unrequited, and of aid recipients as largely passive. This is particularly ironic, given the very visible work that child-performers do to sustain these cycles of compassionate care: touring for six months at a time, practicing for hours each day, shaking hands and smiling as they interact with audiences after shows.

While expressions of compassion are intended to address the injustices of poverty, heightening a sense of belonging and interdependence with others (which such relationships often do succeed in doing for donors), for Ugandans the effect of compassion is ultimately to undermine the agency and influence generally afforded dependents in Uganda. These effects seem be driven by a deep disquiet among donors with the condition of dependency. One need look no further than American discourse concerning state welfare programs, and the “welfare queens” that benefit from them, to see that dependency is a status that is marked as morally questionable in the United States. Compassion is an appealing solution to children’s need because it is understood to fundamentally transform orphans, who, in experiencing Christian love, will (theoretically) become responsible, independent youths. But by seeming to erase inequality and obscure the persistence of dependency, this narrative also works to undermine the very tools typically available to children to change their own circumstances.

The Agency of the Dependent: Ugandans’ Alternative Perspectives on Inequality

For Ugandans this double bind—to remain dependent, but to deny the persistence of dependency—is especially troubling, given the ways dependency is typically viewed by Ugandans themselves. Inequality and hierarchy have long been tools of social mobility and social reproduction in the parts of Uganda where Watoto operates. The perspective of Ugandans highlights broader differences in the ways children and donors consider the relationships they forge through charity—differences that have long-term consequences for how foreign Christians and others understand solutions to intractable problems such as poverty and economic injustice. If Westerners wish to conceal inequality because of the moral discomfort it produces, most Ugandans tend to view dependency and inequality as morally productive states, which vest those in dependent positions with acknowledged forms of agency and status. A bigger problem with the compassionate response that provides the engine for Watoto’s existence is not so much the way inequalities are reproduced, but more so the ways a state of dependency is reframed as morally questionable and disempowered.

Far from a passive state, dependency in Uganda has long been what James Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2013) has called a “mode of action.” Dependents regularly use their relationships to those with more power as tools of advancement, behavior that is considered morally and socially productive (Scherz Reference Scherz2014:21). More than merely passive recipients of aid, dependent (lower class, lower status, younger) people in Uganda are considered to hold positions if not of power, at least ones vested with agency and moral standing. Those at the pinnacle of social hierarchies and those at their base are each considered important, productive members of society, whose relationships to each other are mutually beneficial. Even the work of asking for help has been described as a kind of valuable labor in sub-Saharan Africa, whereby such work is considered not personally diminishing but affirming of the personhood of both the giver and receiver of aid (Klaits Reference Klaits2011).

Child performers in Watoto are shaped by these cultural norms, and in this sense the work that they do to ask is, from certain perspectives, undiminished by the kinds of critical readings of dependency that Western audiences bring to the exchange. Apart from one instance, when a choir leader went off-script to note that American audiences never get to see the physical “beauty” of Uganda and are too often shown images of pain and poverty, I have never seen performers break with their Watoto-sanctioned script. I think this is, at least in part, because this is work that has value in Ugandan social spheres: to make connections to those more powerful, to celebrate donors, to ask for help well, are all honorable actions.^{Footnote 8} And yet, as much as Watoto’s child-performers work to cultivate a sense of emotional and personal connection to donors, these are relationships that are largely managed and supervised by the organization and not by the children. The children have little of the agency typically afforded dependents in Uganda, to cultivate relationships in ways that would ultimately benefit them personally. For most Watoto children, their correspondences with donors are screened by the organization—as it is with most child sponsorship programs. There is little sense that once you create a personal connection with a sponsor that this connection could be used to benefit you, directly, or that you could manage such relationships independently. One young woman, the graduate of another child sponsorship program, once lamented to me the loss of contact she experienced with her sponsor—a common occurrence once a sponsored child “graduates” from the program—and wanted my help locating her. “Do you know Roberta Smith, in Milwaukee?” she asked me, out of desperation. What had become of this woman who had written her, taken an interest in her, and helped to pay her school fees? Efforts by organizations to control the correspondence between donors and children seem to be designed specifically to manage when and how children ask for help, in ways that directly curtail the autonomy and agency of children in these relationships.

While donors often speak of the intimacy they feel with their sponsored children, the children themselves rarely have unmediated contact with donors. It is this erasure of intimacy, and the inability to make demands that such intimacies typically enable, that create problems for children. One exception to this rule was a young man I knew whose job it was to host and lead foreign volunteer groups during their one- or two-week visits to the Watoto program. He described to me his close relationships with these visitors, even calling one elderly couple his “jajas,” or grandparents. Over time he had cultivated that particular relationship in ways that seemed genuinely intimate, shaped by his own ideas of the kinds of relationships with patron-donors and elders that might be morally “good.” That is, he viewed the relationships as two-directional, and his own place within this relationship as one that, while unequal, was vested with a degree of agency that allowed him to make demands on, and seek a response from, the donor-couple. And in fact, the couple responded (to his initial surprise) as genuine kin, often sending him money to make ends meet. And he in turn celebrated them and spoke of them as his own elderly family members. It was this kind of relationship that typically characterizes dependency in Uganda, whereby those with less status have the ability, and even the right, to make demands on others who in turn have the moral and social responsibility to respond. In the process both parties are typically viewed as benefitting from such exchanges.

The problem with typical sponsor relationships is that children rarely have such direct, unmonitored contact with donors. That young man’s position within the organization was unique, allowing him to manage and interact with volunteers freely. His status as a highly educated young man (and, ironically, not an orphan), who spoke English fluently and who was also fluent in Western idioms and pop culture, heightened his ability to connect with visitors. For most children, their work for Watoto—bearing the burden of emotionally connecting with audiences, engaging and interacting with sponsors—is labor that generates profit not for them directly, but for the larger Watoto program, which funnels donations and profits back into the church rather than toward any individual child.

This dilemma of emotional connection in the absence of children’s acknowledged agency is clear in the ways the organization and its donors use the metaphor of “family” to speak of donor-orphan relationships. Sponsored children in Watoto often speak of their place in a “new family” at the organization, and of their relationships to donors as extensions of such a family. During one performance a young boy spoke of the “joy” he felt when he and his two triplet brothers were taken in by the organization and placed in a “new family” home. An adult performer who had been raised in the program spoke of how often she had reflected on the moment when her sponsor “picked my card” from a pile of child profiles, thereby including her in a new extended family. A group of mothers sponsored by the “Neighborhood” program speak in a short film of finding familial “love” at Watoto for the first time in their lives. But, despite the seeming familial intimacy emphasized in these narratives, these relationships lack what is most fundamental to ideal social relationships in Uganda: the sense of moral standing and obligation between social dependents and their patrons or elders.

The problem with the family metaphor is that donors and children bring to it different expectations about what kinds of relationships and obligations familial intimacy might create. For donors, Watoto promises moral and social fulfillment—a sense of “doing good” in the world—coupled with the immediacy of personal connection to those whose lives the donor has changed. And these kinds of bonds are ones that the family metaphor heightens for donors. In one video shown during the most recent Watoto performance I attended, in Cary, North Carolina, donors spoke movingly of the kinds of intimate connections they had made with their sponsored children. Their motivations for becoming involved in Watoto often emphasized how their relationships with Watoto children alleviated a sense of family loss or absence that had long persisted in their lives. An older Asian woman who hosted Watoto children on tour in Hong Kong spoke of never having had children but of finding a family through Watoto. She said to the camera, “I am their [the touring children’s] mom now. I do not have a family, but I have one now because of Watoto.” An American couple described in even more emotional terms the ways Watoto had become a replacement or extension family; they spoke movingly about the death of their son and the ways the Ugandan girls the couple now sponsors are the “sisters he [their son] never had.” They were filmed visiting their sponsored children in their shared home in one of Watoto’s villages in Uganda, crying as they touched the picture of their son that now adorned the doorway of the girls’ cinderblock house.

In the stories donors tell, the metaphor of family—and the real sense of connection donors seem to have with Watoto children—reveals again how spiritual and familial love are considered transformative forces in the lives of both donors and the sponsored children. But it is a force that originates with donors’ actions and decisions rather than children’s. As I have noted above, this is a perspective that tends to mask the very real state of inequality that persists within this relationship, emphasizing the agency of donors while erasing the labor of children that creates and maintains these ties. In this narrative of the donor-orphan family, the transformation, fulfillment, and real agency and labor of sponsors is emphasized, while orphans remain passive, vulnerable children.

When I most recently visited Watoto in Uganda, in May of 2019, I went to a service at one of their churches in a Kampala suburb, a sprawling complex surrounded by manicured grass parking lots overseen by a team of friendly, organized attendants. The service shared many of the elements of a Children’s Choir performance—upbeat, professional, urban and hip, with computerized stage lighting and a well-rehearsed musical component. One striking aspect of this service, though, was that the sermon was delivered by video monitor—it had been recorded on some recent date, when a visiting pair of preachers from the United States had led a service at the downtown Kampala church. In the many dozens of services I had attended at Watoto churches over the years, this was the first to feature a pre-recorded sermon, which lent a sense of disassociation to the experience, a feeling compounded by the fact that these preachers were an American couple. Like the kinds of intimacies created in donor-child relationships, this was a service that privileged a one-directional bond, highlighting a kind of cosmopolitan “connectedness” at the expense of the congregation’s own sense of belonging.

When I recounted this experience a few days later to my friend, the former Watoto host whose relationships with volunteers I described above, he told me he was not surprised. He had drifted away from Watoto in recent years, mainly because he felt that the church avidly sought connections “out there” in the global realm, especially in places such as the United States and Australia, but had lost its sense of having roots “here,” in Uganda. Services, always conducted in English (and never in vernacular languages), drove this home for him, especially after he returned from trips abroad and saw that American churches often held services in foreign languages such as Spanish. He felt the church was consumed by a project of creating a sense of globalized intimacy, one characterized by an effort to project a connection to, and a shared Christian culture with, Westerners, but at the critical cost of losing any sense of its own Ugandan culture. The effects on the child sponsorship project, he told me, were predictable: “I’m sure the [Ugandan] community can do something for these children, but they are not part of the solution that is empowered.” A familial intimacy with others—“over there”—was forged at the expense of potentially empowering Ugandan community members to connect with and care for each other. Such local connections might reveal the inequality and dependency that often characterize social and familial bonds in Uganda, but they would nonetheless be rooted in local solutions and experiences of shared obligation. This experience of watching a pre-recorded sermon seemed to drive home an underlying tension within Watoto’s childcare project and perhaps the local church more broadly: what Ugandan perspectives on orphanhood, childhood, and kinship are lost at the expense of privileging a narrative of connection with foreign Christians?

If for Western donors the idea of a Watoto “family” appeals because it creates a sense of intimacy while obscuring the persistent inequality between donor and child, for Ugandans inequality, hierarchy, and dependency are often central to experiences of kin and family. Kinship ties are deeply meaningful and morally and socially central to life, even as such ties tend to be shaped by, and often help to reinforce, experiences of widening inequality in social life. Family, for most Ugandans, is rarely an unproblematic, or universally positive, set of relationships. But family nevertheless typically provides fundamental networks of support and care, even as these same ties create conflicting demands of obligation, obedience, and dependency that highlight and emphasize differentials of power and status that run through and strain kin ties. As the anthropologist Peter Geschiere has noted in his work in Cameroon, kinship is rarely experienced solely as a bond of solidarity; rather, kinship is a set of relationships that increasingly becomes a lens through which people play out growing tensions over urbanization and economic inequality (2003). Family is an explosive combination of “intimacy and inequality” (Geschiere & Nyamnjoh Reference Geschiere and Nyamnjoh1998).

What this reading of kinship highlights is the ways inequality and dependency are deeply important frames through which most Ugandans understand their family. Children are taught to be obedient, mindful of the expectations of their parents, and, as they mature into young adults, increasingly beholden to and dependent on older, wealthier family members in an economy that offers few opportunities for economic independence. Even the category of orphanhood is typically understood in terms of this interplay of dependence and obligation that shapes most family relationships in Uganda. As Kristen Cheney has written of orphanhood, the category itself has no familiar vernacular equivalent in Luganda, the language spoken in central Uganda where Watoto’s headquarters are located. The Luganda translation of the word “orphan” means something akin to “left behind or abandoned,” a status that few children fully experience in a country where the loss of one or even both parents usually results in being raised by uncles, aunts, or grandparents. Cheney notes that most “orphans” are described using a wider range of Luganda terminology that emphasizes the nuances of different social delineations or situations of care, rather than the true loss of all family connections (2017:26–7).^{Footnote 9}

The status of being an orphan in Uganda—or “orphan or vulnerable child (OVC),” the term favored by NGOs—is not without difficulty or risk, of course. But a more situated cultural perspective on kinship highlights how the vulnerability generated by strained or overburdened kinship ties is usually coupled by the sense that children themselves have a degree of agency within these relationships: the ability to manage, to ask, to make demands or complaints. The negation of children’s agency—the characterization of children as vulnerable, passive victims—is pervasive within the broader world of development and aid, and at Watoto specifically. As Cheney writes, “childhood is depoliticized in the aid industry, despite the fact that both domains [childhood and aid] are rife with politics” (2017:31). Children are typically portrayed as objects of care rather than as agents of their own transformation. This is problematical because such depictions of children mask the continued vulnerability they experience, while at the same time negating any sense that these children have the ability, capacity, and right to make demands on those on whom they are dependent.

It is this last aspect of the donor-child relationship that I propose is most troublesome within the Ugandan context. To ask for help, and to do so with finesse (as the children’s choirs certainly do), is not a passive or questionable act for Ugandans. Rather, such actions are viewed as morally justified, empowered with a sense of social agency and productivity, and constitutive of broader social bonds and obligations that give shape to society.

Watoto’s performances are moments when these tensions over agency within dependent relationships are often made explicit. In Uganda, performers have a long history of using their positions to “ask” in ways that redirect resources from those with more status and power to those with less. The value of a musician’s labor—from the traditional court of Buganda’s kabaka (Cooke Reference Cooke1996) to today’s political rallies (Karlström Reference Karlström2003)—is related not only to the labor of musical production, but has also long been understood in terms of the ability of musicians to “promote” others (Pier Reference Pier2015) and to use music to show respect in ways that solidifies relationships of reciprocity between those with power and those without. This is a perspective on performance that highlights the value and productive nature of dependency within Ugandan worldviews. Watoto’s performers often seem savvy to this reading of their own labor and the power that they have to ask for help. Testimonies are tailored to celebrate the work of donors and to emphasize the transformative power and influence donors have. In the meet-and-greets that typically follow performances, the children move quickly from audience member to audience member in the church’s lobby, assessing and catering to those who seem most willing to sponsor a child. Many of the children seem to be remarkably good at reading audiences and at navigating interactions, and all of the children seem preternaturally good at performing itself. The problem, of course, is that in the context of Watoto, foreign audiences do not respond to or read children’s actions as they might in a Ugandan context. The audience’s understanding of children’s place within this relationship—as eager recipients of one-directional beneficence—differs from the ways a musician’s labor is typically understood in Uganda: as productive of an unequal, but mutually valuable, relationship of reciprocity.^{Footnote 10} Unlike typical kin relationships, or Ugandan musician-audience relationships, the labor of the children is made invisible, their dependency marked as unproductive.

The limited agency and status afforded children is perhaps most keenly seen in the problems that plague teenagers and young adults in the Watoto program.^{Footnote 11} For those unable to earn a place at university, and for those who can’t find employment, the Watoto program proposes few solutions. Unemployment for young adults in Uganda is astonishingly high, and it is a problem that many of Watoto’s graduates cannot escape. In the absence of typical kin relationships, including the extended (though strained) kin networks to which even the most vulnerable children have access in Uganda, and removed from the kinds of patron networks that interactions with sponsors might otherwise provide, Watoto’s young adults have few means of support and assistance. One adult Ugandan Watoto volunteer I knew (he participated in a program called “Father’s Heart” and served as a surrogate father figure for a Watoto household unit) spoke of this problem in terms of young people’s lack of initiative. If they would only apply themselves and take seriously the effort to find a job, he told me, they would surely succeed. Such “self-help” rhetoric is commonplace in the church community and speaks more generally to the broader consequences of the circuit of compassion, where the problems of poverty are characterized as being linked to individual behaviors rather than to structural conditions.

The danger of affective forms of charitable care is in the way compassionate sentiment masks inequality while at the same time it undermines the moral status of the dependent. To remain dependent and needy once one leaves the program—as many of the children do—is to be marked by personal rather than structural-social failures. Further, the work of being a dependent is itself abstracted within the circuit of compassion, the child’s labor redirected away from their own personal relationships and toward the service of the larger organization. This leaves children in particularly vulnerable situations, parties to long-term affective relationships with donors, but unable to access the moral authority and social status typically afforded dependents in Uganda.

Conclusion: The Injuries of Compassion in the Global Humanitarian Realm

One key claim of this article is that affective labor is central to contemporary forms of both humanitarianism and capitalism: the market, a seemingly unsentimental realm, is nonetheless shaped by intensely emotional, interpersonal forms of exchange. Another finding is that such humanitarian encounters are often governed by different, often competing, moral rationalities concerning such exchanges. In the case of Watoto, Christian donors view their donations of time and money as compassionate gifts, given freely, though with the expectation that, as expressions of Godly love, such gifts will effect change (in communities and persons). Inequality is a problem to be resolved for donors (though such a resolution is, in practice, far off or impossible to achieve). The work of emotional connection seeks to defuse the inequality between donor and recipient: to make these parties appear equal, or at least adequately, visibly, transformed by the Godly gift of Christian salvation.

The circuit of compassion I have described works because sentiment drives a sense of obligation among Western Christian audiences: they are called to respond to a demonstration of need. An argument is made within these churches that there exists an obligation to connect—that God’s work is a work of extending and demonstrating love, and that such love is transformational. But while interdependence emerges as an emotional and spiritual value, dependence remains a morally questionable state.

For Ugandans, this circuit appeals because, despite a narrative that characterizes children as being “in need of saving,” such performances in fact enable children to claim a position that has long been considered socially and morally redeeming in Uganda. Watoto’s children and workers view the work they do to make their plight known, to connect to donors, and to demonstrate the transformative power of aid, as a kind of labor that is not passive or unimportant in Uganda. It is a kind of work considered socially valuable, and, moreover, a labor long associated with performers and musicians in Uganda. This gives at least a partial picture of why children and adults at Watoto often seem to genuinely enjoy doing this work, and why the choir is popular in Uganda despite the dire picture it paints of Ugandan culture. The uplifting nature of the performances, the children’s stories of transformation, and the celebration of donors make sense in a Ugandan context that emphasizes interdependence between unequal social actors, and which values the labor involved in investing in and fulfilling relationships. But, despite this Ugandan reading, what the circuit of compassion tends to do from the perspective of donors is to conceal the power of this work, and to emphasize a narrative that positions donors, rather than recipients, as those with the agency to make transformative change.

The different readings of dependency on the part of Westerners and Ugandans are significant because they alter how the two groups understand the problems of poverty and affliction, as well as the best means for addressing these problems. Their different viewpoints also fundamentally shape different expectations as to how the other should act and respond to compassionate gifts of aid or attention. One of the most troubling things about Watoto is the way the drive to present a story about the transformative possibilities of Christian compassion obscures the productive labor of Ugandan dependents, whose own real work—as child performers, no less—is masked. These problems raise questions about the broader function of affective labor within the humanitarian apparatus, and the kinds of relationships the desire for emotional connection creates under the contemporary conditions of international aid.

The very real work of being a recipient of aid—labor that from the Ugandan perspective is usually recognized as being productive of social value—is under humanitarian conditions obscured. For Watoto beneficiaries, the labor of cultivating ties to others, of soliciting aid, and of being a dependent is not ultimately a problem in and of itself. The give and take of the circuit of compassion, the ways both donors and recipients work to create a sense of interdependence between the two, is a problem because only one party’s agency is ever made visible.

From the perspective of child performers, the troublesome nature of these relationships is that the agency and moral standing of the children within this humanitarian circuit is undermined, an emphasis on true interdependence replaced with a perspective that views gifts as one-directional, and social transformation as the product only of the donor’s labor. This is a dynamic that extends beyond the organization at hand to define broader issues with the sentimentality that increasingly defines humanitarian forms of labor.