The next day

December 22, 2011

Bored and annoyed

Today very busy as tomorrow is the last day for the staff and also our yearly Childrens Christmas Party for the children in our neighborhood.

Also partly because of the time I lost yesterday in the city, one of our servers not running properly so we cannot properly work, together with year end stress' I found myself very annoyed when my partner indicated we were supposed to go shopping. And yes, we agreed that and it needs to be done, so I had no real option not to go, so I tried to put the staff to work as good as possible and left.

And yes, you may guess, more annoyance when I arrived at the church where my partner asked me to go and where he was cooking for the evacuees that currently reside there.

So no shopping yet and just waiting, because I did not feel like participating in the cooking. So I ended up sitting somewhere together with a friend of mine and kind of complaining about what was going on.

Please don't get me wrong. Of course I know many or all of those people had lost a lot or basically everything and certainly need help, food, shelter and probably many other things, but cooking food for them didn't mean much to me as I was very busy with my own things which would now be postponed and I thought there are much more important things to do for them than cooking their food.

But maybe useful looking back

Anyhow, in the end I figured out this might still be an opportunity to know more about what happened and who are the real people affected by the floods caused by typhoon Washi, so I decided to look around and bumped into pastor Goel.

He told me a more complete story about what was going on, as you may have read between the lines I did not really see any 'helpless', 'devastated' and/or 'people in real need' in the evacuation center and of course that is also not the whole truth.

Pastor Goel gave me some more clues about what's going on behind the scenes and also some more ideas about what I am planning to do if I can manage to raise some serious funds.

The first thing he told us what I did not see was that there have also were class families been living in the affected area next to the church and that those people would not show up as they would be too proud (or embarrased) to ask for help.

The second thing he told us that many of the 'squatter type' people living in the dangerous area near the river don't want to leave, or actually maybe even 'can't leave'. Main reason is that many of them have jobs in the city and that the designated 'safe area' for them to move to would be too far from the city, so it would be too costly in transportation cost to go to work.

A third thing he told us was that indeed for the short term things are quite ok, which is also what I see. However, he predicted that after about two to three weeks the real problems would arise, during the rebuilding of the lives and homes of the affected people. And that is exactly what I have in mind about the type of help I might want to be part of.