What Stays Lit After the Cameras Leave #298

A couple of years ago there was this heavy rain in my neighborhood that destroyed a lot of things, including the street; electricity was off for twelve good days, and after the flood, my neighbor's daughter, about eight years old, still sleeps with a small touch light under her pillow even a long time after the flood happened. Even after the water had dried up and a small solution was provided, darkness became something her body remembered; this time electricity was even back.

When I read the update on the terrible disaster that happened in Venezuela last month, she was the one that came to my mind, because for her to have felt that way, thousands of children are also feeling like that right now and left without shelter since the two earthquakes measuring 7.5 and 7.2 struck Venezuela last month, which requires two things that look so small but yet far away at this point to them. Something that allows you to see in darkness and something warm.

The death was not the thing that struck me while reading the incident; numbers that large stop registering properly at some point. What stopped me was just a single thing, like in an appeal, that the fund that was meant for the children in Venezuela was hardly a third funded even before the earthquake happened. And right there, reading that sentence, I got what I needed about how doors usually close in a silent way, not by being cruel, but just through focus shifting to another place while the initial needs stay just the way they were.

I remember what happened in Haiti some years ago, and the top musicians around the world really rallied to make a huge provision for the displaced, but is that still happening today?

I have seen a similar pattern in my community of how donations fall apart even before they begin. Generous at the beginning, then at some point, everything goes off, neighbors growing suspicious after stories of relief items going missing instead of reaching those who required them. That suspicion is the real door we have refused to talk about. It is not that people went cruel or stopped caring. It's that they stop putting their trust in the chain between their money and a child's blanket.

And in my opinion, choosing to keep the door open simply means choosing the organizations that are already working directly on the ground with accountability, and showing the exact specific places where the supplies are going to, and giving in September when nobody else is paying attention to them.

Even though my neighbor's daughter needed her torchlight for a long while because she is now a big girl. In my opinion, somewhere in Venezuela, a child just like her does too.

Thank you for reading.

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