What would be your answer if you are asked, why did you work in non profit sector, as social worker or NGO staff, or any support staff within a non profit orgaization? You would normally answer, because you would like to practice your altruism, or at least to be able to do good things to others, while being paid.

But what happen if someone ask you as an NGO staff, an NGO that works to advocate good and clean governance, and promote anti corruption principles a question like this: "Why did you report corruption (in this office)?" or "Why are you so kind and generous to the poor and resistent to the powerful people?". There must be something wrong here, don't you think so? Something ironic.  Because the vision of the organization is that they believe poverty and suffering caused by inequalities and injustice..in the world full of resources. Sound so saint-ful, so socialist.

I remember a woman activist in my university mentioned in her talk previous day, "This is a value-based industry, the aid business". It involves significant amount of money, and relatively good pay for them who are in the system. It explains why many people are interested to enter the industy, regardless their motivation.  Whether they have the sense of altruism, charity, driven by religious sense to practice generousity to their neighbours, or simply a money digger, treasure hunter, a traitor to humanitarian and development vision itself. But this kind of people, the latter I mean, survive and maintain their jobs well. Of course they can, they are busy preparing luxurious dinner for the donors, they are busy telling the community to tell the donor 'only the good things', to save their job. They are busy to tell the staff not to dare mentioning bad practices they conduct, -corruption, fraud, patronage type of leadership that they practice. Rights based approach and egalitarian? You must be dreaming. Look at their house, their crafts, how their servants serve them with their heads down. And yet their programmatically discuss about rights based approach, for the poor to have dignity.. 

And I witnessed many kind of people like that in my previous job. Those whose background is not clear, claimed to be humanitarian and development worker, expert this and that (as a matter of fact, knows nothing when it came to real work), good talker, good in convincing people during interviews, want to do anything so the boss is happy, and having no passion at all to the poor and marginalized people's interest. Those who are very good in entertaining bosses and managers and donors' staff, -but treating the office boy, guards, office girl and other 'insignificant' people like rubbish. And those people who claim to be put in their email (on signature part): "Let's work together to overcome poverty". It made me sick.

And when one of the hypocrites did fraud, the other colleagues protect him to death, and they sacrificed the insignificant staff, those in the lower rank at the office. They don't care about Code of Conduct, about justice, about good and clean governance, and about all the preaches that they told the community to do. It's their ass to be saved. They are talking out loud at international level about labour rights, fair trade, global injustice. And look what they do here in Indonesia. They made a lot of staff deppressed and stressful. They hired human resources staff from factories who are familiar to fire laborers as quickly and as efficient as possible (and as much as possible, without protesting and without labour union). They talk about gender equality, but they don't bother implementing it internally. Oh yeah, they have a lot of programmatical tools, sure they do have! They are the fronliner in struggling for gender equality in the world and Indonesia!  (and look what an area manager once said: 'I don't like women who are too confident'. He indeed fired 3 women staff after that. And coincidentally, they are all have self confident).