Gotong-Royong, American Style

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 28, 2005)

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in Peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? – James 2:15-16

A friend in the US has spent the last few weekends volunteering with the Red Cross in Knoxville, Tennessee, helping out at shelters for refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana parishes where she lived as a young girl were some of the worst hit areas and that may have had something to do with her wanting to help. I could also say volunteering comes naturally to her -- she did train as a nurse, though she is now the archivist for a media company. But that would be assuming that all nurses are compassionate and caring; some are probably just efficient professionals (who get unfairly characterized as sadistic and cruel in the fiction of Kesey and King).

It would be nice to think compassion is an inherent trait some have and others don’t. That would let me off the hook. It was days after the Kuta bombing of 2002 before I had any thought other than about how it affected me personally. I assured friends and family by e-mail and phone that I was well, that there was no need to evacuate to some place ‘safe.’ I called up former colleagues to offer my services as a freelance reporter. I took a ride in a helicopter over Kuta with a news photographer taking aerial shots of the damage. Everything I did was based on being near an event receiving worldwide attention, some of which spilled over onto me.

My callousness shamed me when I realized that many people had dropped everything and headed to south Bali to see what they could do to help. I hadn’t even thought of the need, partly because I thought volunteers would be in the way of professional emergency workers; partly because my instinct was to think of the tragedy in journalistic terms: Who did it? How many died? What will happen with tourism? What will happen to the rupiah and Indonesia’s economy?

My reaction to the tsunami last December was much the same, only then I was e-mailing other people to see if they had survived. Again, while others where jumping to help, I never got around to asking the question, what can I do? And how quickly one gets to that question is what separates ‘adults’ from ‘children.’

So, it was with some pride that I learned my friend had been helping out in Knoxville. It’s comforting to have friends that are adults; it gives an assurance that somebody will always be around to think of the things that need to be done. She quickly got to the question of what she could do and ended up assisting hurricane refugees from New Orleans and Louisiana for three weekends at shelters in a Knoxville church and at the city’s Civic Coliseum.

She kept with it despite the apparent ineptness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the “petty power struggles, (and) poor organizational management” of the Red Cross. “Most of the volunteers see through all the nonsense and try to make the best of the situation anyway,” she wrote. “That’s how things get done – isn’t it always?”

It would be easy to take the attitude that if the “professionals” can’t get it right, then what’s the use of amateur volunteers trying. In Indonesia, though, where medical emergency and other infrastructures are poor, people are used to the idea that some things just won’t get done unless everyone pitches in to the best of their ability. Gotong-royong, or community self-help, isn’t just part of the culture; it’s an everyday necessity that can kick into overdrive when disaster strikes. It’s both disconcerting and heartening to see a gotong-royong spirit in the US filling in for the infrastructure and community neglect Katrina has exposed.

“All of it makes me infinitely sad for all of the people that have lost everything and lost family, not only in Louisiana but also in Mississippi and Alabama, sad for the loss of physical place and the loss of a sense of that place, sad because our government is so screwed up, sad for the country and how we look to the rest of the world in that we can't even take care of our own, just sad about it all. It will be a long, long time before I'm not sad anymore,” my friend wrote.

Then she went out to help get soup, sandwiches, blankets, and clothes to the people who needed them. That’s what adults do.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Katrina & The Wave

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 14, 2005)

… for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. – The Gospel of St. Matthew, 5:45

Some folks love to see the hand of God guiding death and destruction in natural disasters to wipe out “sinners” unlike themselves. Thus, Michael Marcavage of the Philadelphia-based Christian organization Repent America pointed out that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans two days before the start of Southern Decadence, an annual gay and lesbian festival. And in December -- after the tsunami hit Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India -- Hindu, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders blamed people who don’t pray enough, Western tourists who have sex on Asian beaches, humanity’s inherent evil and depravity, among other things.

Someone or something divine, it seems, always has to be behind each catastrophe that strikes. Or maybe some people feel superior blaming collective and personal karma instead of petty heavenly entities – as if karma is any better at explaining what is and what happens.

“Grant an idea or belief to be true; what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? … What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” asked the American pragmatist philosopher William James (1842-1910). I can only answer that little of what we choose to believe or think makes a difference in how we respond when waters are rising and there is breath to struggle for and food to be found.

Since I started thinking about and writing this column, a plane has fallen out of the sky in Medan killing at least 148, a theater fire in Egypt has killed more than 30, crowd panic on a Baghdad bridge killed hundreds, and typhoons have killed dozens in China, Taiwan, and Japan. And tomorrow, next week, next year, people are going to die in car accidents, in more plane crashes, more natural disasters. Once we get past the mundane explanations for why a disaster or tragedy occurs and kills – a loose screw, a poorly maintained levee, lack of advance warning – to asking and answering a cosmological “Why?”, we quickly reach the limit of the utility of our knowing.

It doesn’t matter whether an earthquake, tsunami, volcano, or hurricane is God’s retribution on sinners or his warning to the spared. It doesn’t change what has to be done: The dead have to be buried, survivors have to be assisted, plans and preparation have to be made to make sure it isn’t as bad the next time. The question “Why?” doesn’t enter into it, no matter how you answer it.

In day-to-day life, too, “Why?” doesn’t change what one does unless instead of rising and going to work one is going to sit under the Bo Tree and wait for enlightenment. And that doesn’t work unless we are all Buddha. Someone is probably going to argue that we are all Buddha or all God or all little bits of the Great Whole playing a game with ourselves by having forgotten that we are all little bits of the Great Whole. But even that someone is going to wake up in the morning, have their morning cuppa, and do whatever it is they normally do -- even it is only to take the next shift under the Bo Tree. Even then, if that someone happens to be caught by tsunami or typhoon, he or she will still either be dead or just another survivor looking for help.

As skeptic and pragmatist, perhaps materialist, I don’t deny mystery; I simply don’t accept explanations that can’t be proved or that aren’t useful. I don’t know if God used Katrina to strike New Orleans as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah; I don’t know if Katrina was a “soldier of Allah” striking against the Great Satan of America (as some Muslims bloggers have said, according to the Times of Oman Web site). I am pretty sure that stronger and higher levees would have kept most of the flood waters out the city; just as I’m pretty sure something vital was missed in the last maintenance checkup of the Mandala Airlines’ plane that went down.

Finding ultimate explanation in deities and karmic workings is fine as long as it doesn’t keep people from tightening screws and tying their shoelaces. But that is what I fear -- believers counting on God or Allah or fate to determine the outcome of an event and not paying attention to holes in the dike, worn brake pads, flammable materials in a corner, loose railings, overdue elevator safety inspections, dead batteries in the smoke alarm … Oh, Isis, protect me!

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi