Apparently, HOPE Worldwide has been able to send thousands of metric tons of Non-Fat Dry Milk to Nigeria and the Philippines. Now, I’ve sent frieght to Nigeria before. It was about one metric ton of books. I even got a letter from Mike Talliferro of thanks.

According to their bill, they sent it for about $179 per metric ton, so the particular bill in the link cost $77,686. Assuming the same rate for the total orders for 2003, they would have spent $304,300 over the course of 2003. I don’t know the rate for the Phillipines, at $179 a ton, it would be $358,000. Not a bad deal, really. The governemt buys a bunch of milk to keep the cost low, and then you can buy it for free to donate overseas. Not just HOPE, but a lot of folks did it, including the Catholic Church in 2002 (Baltimore Diocese). The World Food Program, Project Concern International, and Food for the Poor also shipped milk in 2003. (Side note, you should look at Food for the Poor’s 990 Forms. They handle 10 times as much money and materials, they only have 30 guys making over 50,000, but their top 5 get paid about 20% more. Amazing.)

Why do I mention this at all? Sometimes, food does go to folks from HOPE. Do I still have issues? Yup. But I also want to be fair. If they do something good, I want to demonstrate it. Now this doesn’t show up on the 2003 itemized list of things they did for Nigeria that I could find, but hey, milk got sent overseas.

Now, there’s other links that raise eyebrows, but that’s more from the source than HOPE Worldwide employees. I would think it a bit unfair to carry the headline “HOPE declares Taliban good people.”

Anywho, all for now.