My organisation is involved in the relief effort, and my boss asked me the other day why it is that the worst disasters always happen to the poorest people. This is a wicked irony. The riskiest areas to live in are populated by the poorest people, both at a national level and at a local one (drought in Ethiopia, seismic activity in NTT, floods in New Orleans). Land is cheap when it is dangerous.
Furthermore, when disasters do occur to poor people they are less able to help themselves, and other people are less willing to help them too. After all what is there of value to save? They have no industry, no commerce; there is no military significance. The only valuable thing to these people is there lives. But it seems that that is not enough. Pathetic.
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The bodies
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The villages
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The homeless
3 comments:
Your recent blogs have made me think.
Governments of ‘Developing Countries’ never seem short of money to spend on ‘military’ purposes, why not social problems, looking after their people? We in the UK are no better, spending £5 million per day making war in Iraq.
20 years after Band Aid, Bob Geldorf etc, campaigned with Live8 and persuaded ‘Developed Governments’ to write off billions of Third World debt. Ethiopia, whose famine gave rise to Band Aid, has just sent tanks and troops into neighbouring Somalia to ‘assist the interim Government’ and continues to make war with Eritrea, another neighbour.
Are NGO’s making the problems worse, even perpetuating them, if NGO’s did not exist would the local population in ‘Developing Countries’ just get on with sorting out their own problems?
Is it right that the ‘West’ particularly the UK and the NHS entice, with salaries far greater than they could expect 'at home', large numbers of trained, experienced medical staff from ‘Developing Countries’, whilst experienced people from the ‘West’ do ‘voluntary’ work in ‘Developing Countries’?
What does being 'human' mean - history and current affairs clearly and consistently demonstare our capacity for violence - and to be brutally frank, it leaves me thinking so what - but this is/has allways been counterbalanced by mirrored demonstartions of our capacity for compassion - our need to support, help and 'save' our fellow man. Human kind is unique, among the species of our plannet, in our ability to interact with and affect our environemnt, to have a (faslely?) high sense that we control our destiny - we have the ability to pro-actively adapt much more quickly than most/any other species and at the same time to dmage and effect our living space. I'm not sure that the 'poverty' issue is as brutally relevent to natrual-disaster 'suffering' as it might seem on the face of things - such events, could it not be argued, serve as neccessary renuals of our 'humaness', a statement of our power as the dominent species. Is it not the case that natrual disasters are mankinds' common enemy, something that we 'fight' together, something that binds us - for it is the threat and the reality of 'natrual' disdsater that is likely to be our 'end'. Disasters, as much as violence and war, define us - they are in any event perhaps two sides of the same coin
dt
As I sat on the tube today i glanced over at a Metro someone else was reading and saw a bit about the earthquakes there, I thought of you and all the recent disasters Indonesia has faced. Coming from a country that's has its fair share of regular natural disasters - typhoons,flooding volcano eruptions, oil leaks(not quite natural) and mudslides.And of course the Philippines like Indonesia is a poor country. A poor country made more poor by its Government's corruption (stemming from the Marcos era....and Imelda spent most of the money on her shoes!which for a girl who loves her shoes - I don't really know how I feel about that!)
Anyway cheap land is dangerous but some natural disasters are sometime helped by 'man'. As in
the case of the mudslides that follow the monsoon rains and typhoons in the Philippines they are often linked to illegal tree logging. These tree loggers are doing this to get away from dire poverty - so who is at fault? This also touches on Johns Q' of enticing trained medical staff from third world countries to work in the 'West'. As a daughter of a mother who was a nurse that left a 'developing' country to work in England for a good 30 years it was a choice that was made because of a want to provide a comfortable life for their children in London and family back in the Philippines. Often the money that overseas workers send back to their 'developing' countries are very important for that country's economy. So I guess people do find a way to help themselves even though their own governments won't.
I have also seen people face disasters in the most extraordinary way. The Filipinos have a great attitude to tragedy and hardship -'bahala na' which loosely translates to 'whatever' - meaning whatever happens you deal with it with a smile and as best as you can with what you have. I can only stipulate that this comes from a history of heartache, poverty ,and corruption. People will face hardships head on because of the innate need to survive. And those who can help will because along side the very human capacity to destroy each other we also have the capacity to preserve our species.
Ps. Karen keep blogging- it seems likeyour doing well.Will send some books - dunno how long it will take to get there!
Take care of yourself, be safe Gwenneth xx
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