A Good Look at Do-Gooders

Bill Clinton, Oprah and Angela Jolie are often in Africa these days, with reporters and camera crews in their wake. This week the Christian Science Monitor is taking a long look at what they are doing:

“The world's poorest, sickest, most war-ravaged continent is now the charity of choice for many of the West's best-known political, pop, and Hollywood stars. Outside attention to the continent has fueled thousands of successful programs. But, despite the aid, the number of poor people in Africa has almost doubled in the past decade, and skeptics wonder whether some stars are most interested in boosting their own profile in the eyes of a public that expects a moral dimension to its heroes.”

In a two-part series, reporter Danna Jarman tries to go beyond the reflexive sigh or sneer at their efforts and offer insight into who is doing what and to what effect.

As she follows him on a week-long four-country tour, Bill Clinton tells her, "It's easy ... to say, 'Oh, this is not serious, they are just trying to get press' My experience has been this is not true. Not everything every actor does, works. Just like not everything I do works. Not everything Bill Gates does works. But it's not true that it's not genuine. By and large, it just is."

A visiting scholar observes, "The bang for the buck is high in Africa. You can leverage your money and time. So you are not only bringing in more mosquito nets, but potentially shaping the entire national policy."

For the open-minded and/or star-struck, the Monitor series is a whirlwind tour of what George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Mia Farrow et al are doing on a continent where nothing can be enough. If it stirs readers without big names to write small checks, that would add to their efforts.

A Large-Hearted Woman

Hollywood activists are easy targets, often earnestly silly and self-congratulating, but a shining exception is Mia Farrow and her work to stop the genocide in Darfur. This week, her efforts provoked two world powers-—the People’s Republic of China and Steven Spielberg.

During the YouTube debate, Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, hemmed and hawed about diplomacy to stop the killing, clearly uneasy about a complex humanitarian crisis in far-off Africa (only Joe Biden was an angry exception) and exuded helplessness.

Not Mia Farrow. For three years, the 62-year-old waif-like actress has been devoting herself to traveling in Darfur, Chad and the Sudan, photographing and writing about the atrocities, running a web site about them and pressuring for activism to relieve the suffering.

One of her targets, Steven Spielberg, who is artistic director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has now threatened to quit unless China, the Sudan’s largest oil customer, joins in the effort to stop the slaughter.

In the Wall Street Journal, Farrow and her son had written: "Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?"

A diminutive woman, Farrow is an emotional powerhouse. Married to Frank Sinatra at 21, then to composer Andre Previn and after that in an all-but-married relationship with Woody Allen for almost two decades, she has fifteen children, eleven of them adopted.

She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, drawing attention to the fight to eradicate polio, which she survived as a child, and the plight of suffering children everywhere.

If there is any such person as the mythical Earth Mother, Mia Farrow is that and more.