Tsunami Collections Everywhere

I am heartened by seeing, pretty much everywhere I look, collection buckets for tsunami appeals. On every till in the supermarket I ducked into this evening, for example.
There seems to be a real penetration of the idea that our sacrifices, however small, can make a real difference.
I’m hopeful that this marks something of a sea-change in how we in the developed and wealthy west regard our wealth, as something bringing great responsibility as well as opportunity. Something of a re-emergence and re-legitimisation of the UN may take place as well, to the good of us all.
But, as has been frequently pointed out, the disaster in Bam a year ago – an order of magnitude less than the tsunami but still a level of destruction almost beyond comprehension – is still far from healed, and aid from the west didn’t all come through. Let us keep that disaster in mind as we look toward renewal from this one – the lesson, if we are to learn it, comes from the earthquake as well as the tsunami.

2 thoughts on “Tsunami Collections Everywhere”

  1. I don’t know whether people will make the connection between this, which is a catastrophic disaster in the sense of a single large event causing homelessness, starvation, disease and hardship, and the ongoing disaster of poverty/uneven distribution of wealth causing homelessness, starvation, disease and hardship. People can give in the former case because it is a one-off, it requires no ongoing effort, whereas a serious attempt to address poverty would…
    And what DOES one do to address poverty?

  2. Already stories abotu of aid funds and properties being diverted away from where theya re needed.
    Some christians took up a collection in OOty and west to Nagaputtnam (one of the harder hit regions) to distribute it to the poor and were told by the police to give it all the the district co-ordinator or get out. That’s okay you might say, except that that the district co-ordinator was giving it to wealthy friedns who were not badly it as a way of currying favour with the more powerful in the area. Little of it was actually getting to the devastated fishermen and poor people who lived right on the coast.
    There’s no simple answer to this. I offer no solutions. It happens that there’s not a lot that can be done about it.

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