Mickey Z

Cool Observer

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Direct Aid for Tsunami Victims

Posted by Mickey Z on 01/02 at 09:21 AM

very helpful. Thanks

Posted by deb from seattle on 01/02 at 10:59 AM

I’ve just been stunned, sometimes into silence, by the calamity in Africa and South East Asia.

Since the event, I’ve been recalling one of my most favourite poems by W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I attend the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington. In his sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day, the Dean, the Revd Ken Poppe mentioned the call to action from Episcopal Relief and Development and told us that this relief organisation foresees the rebuilding of effected areas will take ten years or more. ERD, in its mission statement, “ provides relief in times of disaster and promotes sustainable development by identifying and addressing the root cause of suffering… within the Anglican Communion, with ecumenical bodies and with others who share a common vision for justice and peace among all people.”

The insert in Sunday’s bulletin was a donation form from ERD. I read the small print at the bottom: “If this project is over funded, ERD will use these funds for other life-saving purposes.” I would hope that ERD will not leave the effected areas, because major NGO’s (Médecins Sans Frontières, Unicef and Oxfam) and practically all media accounts have stated that the earthquake and tsunami on December 26th were one of the worst natural disasters ever.

One of my college friends who lived in Sri Lanka, emailed me recently:

“Hasn’t this been a disaster region all these years? Much of the relief work that aid agencies are planning, and that millions of dollars are pouring in to enable, is to fulfill needs that have existed in all the affected countries for decades. Millions of people in these countries have lacked proper housing, a livelihood, often food and the means to buy medicine. Surely the lack of all those things is bad in itself. Why does it take the context of a natural disaster to evoke compassion?

“These needs will remain, and this ongoing disaster will continue, long after the media stops talking about the tsunami, and we have pushed it to the back of our minds. Will we still feel, as so many of us have, the responsibility to do something, anything, to make things better?”

I have no hesitation about donating to ERD. It provides funds and aids to local organisations, unlike some NGO organisations (Médecins Sans Frontières, Unicef and Oxfam). . These NGO’s are big business (what some have called the “Toyota Taliban") and they move on to other areas. I wonder if they will continue to help after this travesty becomes a faint memory pushed to the inside pages of newspapers and is no longer a news alert on Fox or CNN. Some of my friends are not donating to the big NGO’s, but rather to smaller, local agencies in Sri Lanka and Indonesia’s Aceh Province. That’s good, too. But I am hopeful by what Ken said in his sermon - that organisations like ERD realise that it will take ten years or to recover from what happened in a few hours on Boxing Day.

Posted by Jay Vos from Burlington, VT, USA on 01/05 at 11:40 AM

Thanks for the poem and the post. You highlight a crucial issue: Where was all the help for the past century (or more)? I’ll repeat: Getting these areas back to normal is not a noble goal. Normal, for them, is starvation, disease, repression, and misery.

Posted by Mickey Z. from on 01/05 at 01:21 PM