By Galen Eagle
International aid workers and human rights activists have been racking their brains for years wondering what it takes to make people care about the plight of other humans. Apparently, it takes an earthquake.
Like many other Canadians, Centretown residents have opened their wallets and have answered the call to help South Asians who have been devastated by last month’s tsunami.
Local schools, bars, hair salons and individuals have raised thousands of dollars for the tsunami relief effort.
Charity webpages have crashed and phone lines have jammed trying to handle the wave of generosity pouring in from around the world. In Canada alone, private citizens have donated over $150 million.
But people involved in charity work are beginning to ask why people have responded so well to this natural disaster, yet often ignore other crises around the world.
Centretown resident, Adrian Senn, 22, attempted to raise money for schools in Sri Lanka long before the tsunami hit the area. He says it wasn’t easy.
“The biggest problem that we encountered was just general apathy. No one cared,” says Senn. “After the tsunami, that was no longer a factor.”
Senn says the response since the tsunami has been overwhelming. In fact, he recently started his own foundation, Senn Charities, to meet the demand for donations.
Kwesi Loney, the regional manager of UNICEF, has been in charge of coordinating fundraising in the Ottawa area. He says the response has been tremendous.
“We have never had anywhere near this amount of response,” says Loney. “This definitely overshadows anything before.”
Loney says there are several reasons why people have decided to give.
“It has a lot to do with the severity of the devastation in South Asia. It was also Christmas and people are definitely more in the giving mood around that time and just want to help out,” he says.
While Loney is grateful for the level of caring he has seen in the past few weeks, he doesn’t understand why other crises don’t get the same attention.
“It is definitely frustrating at times to see that the community outpour right now is for South Asia but it just seems that we have forgotten what has been going on in the Sudan as well as the AIDS epidemic and what’s going on in Haiti,” says Loney.
The Dec. 26 earthquake and resulting tsunami has killed more than 200,000 people in 11 countries and has left hundreds of thousands more without food, shelter and water. The devastation sparked the largest relief effort in history.
But numerous crises around the world have had larger consequences and have had much less international attention.
Worldwide, 35 million people are infected with AIDS, of which 25 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease has killed 19 million people since it was discovered and analysts fear it has destroyed any hope of economic progress in the sub-Saharan region.
In Sudan, Janjaweed militias, armed and supported by the Sudanese government, have killed approximately 70,000 people and have displaced another 1.5 million in the Darfur region in the past year.
In the past 10 years, the world has experienced human rights disasters at a level not seen since Nazi Germany. In Rwanda, over 800,000 people were massacred in a genocide lasting 100 days in 1994. Civil war and ethnic tensions have killed thousands in Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Condo, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and Haiti to name just a few.
These crises have been left off the radar.
There have been no nation-wide school campaigns, no pancake breakfasts, no CBC telethons for these human rights disasters.
It is difficult to understand why people are willing to give in a situation like the tsunami in South Asia, yet tend not to respond to ongoing disasters created by humans or health epidemics.
Some point the finger at the media. Loney says people tend to rely on the media when deciding who gets their money.
“The media plays a large role,” says Loney. “Pretty much whatever they show on television or in the newspapers is where the public interest lies.”
Virgil Hawkins, a professor from Osaka University in Japan, examines how the media covers conflict in his study, “The Other Side of the CNN Factor: the media and conflict.”
Hawkins found that after studying media coverage in 2000, the large news organizations in the United States, Europe and Japan dedicated almost all of their coverage to relatively small conflicts in Europe. However, conflicts in Africa, which have been responsible for 90 per cent of the world’s total war casualties since the post-Cold War, received little, if any attention.
Not everyone is convinced, however, that media coverage, selective as it may be, actually influences people to make a contribution. Perhaps the worldwide tsunami relief effort has simply made it convenient for people to give.
Margaret Foddy, a psychology and sociology professor at Carleton University, says people tend to give only when it is easy for them to do so.
“I gave my adult children gifts for Christmas via Oxfam and UNICEF. The Oxfam website was not easy to manage, but I managed to give. If it had been any more time consuming than that, I would have given up,” says Foddy. “It’s very sad that we’re like that, but it’s nevertheless true.”
Regardless of their reasons, Canadians have shown great compassion towards the tsunami victims. The problem is, however, there are far too many areas in the world that are neglected.
We must not rely on the media to make our judgments and decisions for us, nor should we donate out of convenience. It is apparent that Canadians can and want to give, but we need to become better informed and spread the generosity around.