Before that, Mr. Pichardo also received small sums of aid from various groups -- $250 from the Salvation Army, $700 from the Red Cross.
Similarly glum expressions meet the foreign dignitaries who trudge through Gaza's rubble promising vast sums of aid, including $5.4 billion pledged at a conference in Cairo on October 12th.
Critics have, of course, been quick to dismiss ideas of a "new Marshall Plan" on the grounds that large sums of aid cannot be absorbed efficiently (or cleanly) by poor countries which are, anyway, very different from western Europe.
Both the US and EU have vast reserves of soft power that they seem reluctant to use in promoting democratic change, most notably the huge sums of aid sent to Amman each year.
What can we do?" Many Americans blame Marshallese outright for their plight, saying they have wasted large sums of aid and that they crowd together in substandard housing because of the islanders' communal culture.
Brazil still receives substantial sums of aid, particularly for its impoverished north-east region and President Lula's government has been criticised for sending money abroad that could be used for domestic poverty alleviation.
They surmise that insurgents try to sabotage aid projects, because if government-supported projects succeed they may weaken the public support of the insurgents.Some may argue that outcomes like conflict or corruption are hard to avoid when large sums of aid money are involved.
The EU's leaders may soften the blow over Kosovo by waiving a precondition that the country co-operate in full with the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague before signing a stabilisation and association agreement that would bring it large sums of aid.
The sum far exceeds the amount of aid expected to flow to this ruined land in the next year or two.
In fact, their voluntary transfer of money triples the sum of foreign aid budgets to the same developing economies.
