The Reporter's Dilemma: when you're interviewing starving children, is it ethical to give them money?

I recently bought an elaborate dinner for some of my sources. If that sounds corrupt, so be it. These particular sources are stone-crushers who live in Zambia. Their lives are as miserable as any I have seen in three years covering Africa for The New York Times.

So after a few hours of interviews, I drove to a grocery store and bought about $75 worth of food: rice, cornmeal, milk, cooking oil, bread, a bag of candy. I returned and unloaded it, to undiluted pandemonium--actual dancing in the street. They were that hungry.

This sort of thing is common in less-developed parts of the world. How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that turks in the background of many interviews.

Journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it.

So what to do when a girt tells a story about her brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for tack of money to buy anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a small gift of money would keep him alive? What about the dying mother in the next hut who missed out on an interview by pure chance?

In reputable journalism, paying for information is a sin, the notion being that a source who will talk only for money is likely to say anything to earn his payment. So what to do when a penniless father asks why he should open his life free when he needs money for food? Is that so different from interviewing a Washington political consultant over a restaurant lunch on my expense account? If it is, which is more ethical?

My own code is simple: I never give people money in advance of an interview. When I am personally moved by an individual's situation, I sometimes offer help afterward. And I tell. myself that I cannot also help all his neighbors and friends without impoverishing myself.

Sometimes, an article moves readers to contribute money. Two years ago, after I profiled a Swaziland town hit hard by AIDS, New York Times readers offered about $10,000 to give residents access to lifesaving drugs. When I wrote about a poor South African boy who dreamed of becoming a pilot, readers committed to financing his education.

But here, too, there are hurdles. How can money be funneled securely to villages without banks or even cash economies? Can people to whom $10,000 is a vast fortune be trusted to spend it wisely?

The boy who dreamed of becoming a pilot has been attending private school courtesy of Times readers for a year. Sadly, he is also failing and at risk of expulsion.

On a recent trip to Swaziland, I saw a familiar face outside the village hit by AIDS. It was the boy whose sister had anguished over her inability to buy him drugs. I had given her $50 for a temporary supply of the drugs, and contributions from Times readers had provided a bus that tater transported him and others to actinic where the drugs were available free.

He was no longer emaciated. Far from tying down, he was walking briskly along the road, with a broad smite on his face.