Shocked at the images and news coming about the tsunami calamity, I could not keep up with the rising toll in dead and homeless.
Until yesterday there were 150,000 dead, 500,000 homeless. Donations from world countries have been pouring in and they increased by the day. TV stations and websites around the world were announcing donation campaigns for the victims of the Asian earthquake and the tsunami it spawned.
Amid this stifling feeling of helplessness, I expected a surge of donations from Arab countries and especially the Gulf.
After all we always are urged to help our brothers in other countries as we always talk about our Islamic values that tell us to help the poor and needy and be of service to others in times of need.
In the past I remember the huge amounts of money raised for Afghan fighters, and all those fund raising parties where women gave money and even took off their jewelry and donated them.
Somehow I had this thought that maybe people are not being active enough because their generous feelings have been used and, might I add, abused also.
People now do not feel the same urge to give money to others. They saw their money going into wrong hands and being used for killing people, instead of helping the needy.
I recall all the donation campaigns to help Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Somehow the effort this time is not as active as it was with all the other campaigns.
People watch TV and feel sad but there stops their reactions, for most of them at least. Yesterday Saudi official donations were tripled to $30 million, and only then did we hear about a campaign done by Saudi TV to collect donations.
Other TV channels are busy putting latest music clips and films and running a SMS crawl instead of placing calls for donations.
On the individual level and in places where Southeast Asians work, there has been limited efforts to raise money for those workers who are watching their people and their own homes disappear from the face of the earth without them being able to do anything about it.
Online I looked for reactions and I found one unofficial charity organization in Makkah collecting money for the victims.
What was more shocking to me though, was the attitude of some people who started analyzing why this catastrophe happened to that side of the world, while some moralists sat there theorizing about how this quake was a punishment from God.
As shocking as this attitude is, it simply reflects a self-satisfied attitude that we excel in. We always congratulate ourselves on being the good people, and start theorizing on how other countries are not as moral or religious as us.
Somehow those people do not understand anything about the workings of nature, though they think they know it all.
Leaving those theorists aside, if we scan the media we’ll notice that most people feel saddened for what happened and is happening in Asia.
On the BBC Arabic forum page, reactions from Arab readers were amazing in the sense they reflected the feeling for other fellow human beings. There was also the surprise that the donations given by Arab countries were very little — they gave around $50 million compared to more than $600 million given by Germany and $350 million by the US.
Somehow that raised a question on how Arabs like to talk more than to act. Another question on the website, was why don’t the Arab countries do more to help the devastated areas, why in the time where Arabs should show support, they sit back and wait for others to act first?
A reader on the BBC site suggested that an emergency meeting of Arab League discuss how the Arab countries can help. Some countries in the Arab world might not have a lot of money but they can help in other ways.
An editorial in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas said that the Gulf Arabs should dig deeper in their pockets and help the victims.
It added that Gulf countries depend on the labor from Southeast Asia, and it is Gulf Arabs’ duty to repay those workers for their efforts and support instead of showing them their stingy face.
In the last year oil revenues have increased and all Gulf countries are enjoying a surplus. It is only logical that with this extra money their donations should be bigger.
“We have to give them more; we are rich,” Waleed Al-Nusif, the editor in chief of Al-Qabas said in a telephone interview to the New York Times.
And in a world where the image of an Arab from the Gulf is always associated with extravagant cars and jewelry and lavish spending on vacations, maybe we should encourage our people to donate more money for charity causes to at least change an image that we always complain of but never try to change.
On the other side, some people said that they lost confidence in charity organizations that might misuse their money, while others were afraid of being at any point later associated with any terrorist organization, since there has been lots of wrongful accusations against genuine charities in the past year.
But for those, there is always a sure way of doing the right thing and making sure it goes to the right people.
In Saudi Arabia we have a large expatriate community from Southeast Asia, and we can help those in our midst at least.
There are those who work here who lost friends and family back home and for those any kind of help and sympathy means a lot.
All we need to do is organize ourselves and believe in a cause. Watching TV and feeling sad is not good enough; after all people are dying and we are not reaching out enough.
