You came to LUMS and showed us such amazing numbers (in terms of amount of flood relief fund) you and your team were able to pull. But my question is: After their immediate needs are fulfilled, will they be able to somehow sustain themselves? Are we only going to feed them the fish and not teach the how to catch a fish? No economy can sustain such relief, you cannot feed them all the time. Most of them don't want to work just wait for the "best food" from a good NGO to come. Is this how we are helping them and building a strong nation?
You'll gain nothing by just feeding them. Teach them how they can still earn a living. You have the numbers, you know the area, you have the knowledge and the resources; just use them intelligently. Come up with a workable scheme so that next time i give you my money or time I can see that I somehow made a change in the other person's life - for life not for just five mins.
Moreover you asked about fears and hopes - I am very hopeful that we will never run out of good people in this country but my fear is that effort of those good people would be ineffective. My hope comes from the exponentially increasing number of graduates in Pakistan but I fear most of them don't know how to use this education or worse what is the essence of their education. I can't sleep at night when I see that when my kid will grow in this society he would loose the pakistani identity, he would not have those core values that our forefathers fought for. Most of our youth can't even speak a whole sentence of pure urdu or knows the whole national anthem.
Tags: Change, feeding, fish, policy, Relief, Teaching