Daily Lessons from Life 14 August 2010 - Aid for 2005 Pakistan quake spent elsewhere

"Aid for 2005 Pakistan quake spent elsewhere - Sat, Aug 14, 2010 AFP

LONDON - More than 300 million pounds (S$640 million) of aid to help rebuild parts of Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake was diverted to other projects, a British report said Saturday.


The Daily Telegraph newspaper, citing unnamed senior Pakistani officials, said there were fears this diversion of funds would put off foreign donors from giving money to help 20 million people currently affected by heavy floods.

'There's reluctance, even people in this country are not giving generously into this flood fund because they're not too sure the money will be spent honestly,' opposition leader Nawaz Sharif told the newspaper."

Is this a revelation or not? For the naive, this is totally shocking. For the skeptics, this is so predictable in some countries with some people! For me, this is exactly one of the reasons WHY I do not normally contribute to relief funds of foreign lands that I am just too far away. Foreign lands that my gut feel tell me will abuse the charitable gifts instead of channeling to the needy people in their countries!

Lessons for me are:

1. to do good is good. To give and thinking that it is good enough is simply no longer good enough! Donors have to have some assurance that their charitable gifts are reaching the people they intended to help and not to some devious people who enriched themselves!;

2. countries with such a crooked reputation WILL find more do-gooders turning away from giving once they found out that their gifts had been abused. The people in that country MUST make sure that such practices do not exist so that when they do really need help from strangers in other countries, they will help. Of course, if it is the government of that country that abuse the charitable gifts, then the people deserved it since they could have, and should have, voted them out. The exception being the countries with a dictatorial regime and the people were cowed into submission and subservience!;

3. it is a sad reality to note that in this world, there are human beings who will explore the sympathetic donors' charity as the 'right thing to do!'!! Maybe there are some critical flaws in their DNA. Maybe they were trained or conditioned to think that way as they were the survivors of the fittest in a very very terrible environment. Whatever it may be, we know that at the end of the day, these people will get their retribution. Like the Chinese saying goes: "Is not that there is no retribution but that the time for retribution has not arrived yet!".

May the Pakistanis people get some help from the international communities as they try to sort out the devious people who exploited the miseries of the flood victims!