By spending that money on yourself, instead of sending it to buy bags of rice for a famine-stricken region, or mosquito nets for malaria-ridden countries, or tin wood stoves, or water pumps, or water filters, or transparent plastic bottles, or latrines, or condoms, or any of the various simple and inexpensive supplies or devices that aid agencies are distributing around the world.

There are a lot of aid agencies that waste money; but there are some that don't. I don't know how much money it takes nowadays to save a life; the value keeps changing, and different studies biased in different ways conclude different things. But it's certainly less than what I spend each month on coffee. It's less than I could save each month by turning my heat down. It's much less than I could make over the weekend by taking a second job.

It's also true that many of the attempts to save lives are foiled by the people whose lives are at stake. Cultural conventions prevent people in one area prevents people from boiling their water, because drinking water that has been heated is believed to be a confession of weakness. In some places, people won't believe in germs. In some places, the first people who do what the aid workers tell them to are poor people who hope to gain status by associating with foreigners; and this taints whatever it is as "something poor people do". I remember someone saying they'd gone and built concrete latrines somewhere, and the people refused to use them, because of negative cultural implications of concrete. So they built wooden latrines that wouldn't last, but that people would use. And the stories of aid workers who give people things that they don't take care of and so break soon after the foreigners leave are numerous.