Thoughts for February 2010

I’ve spent three months away from Cumbria and returned to a county once again rocked by disasters. The resilience of our communities has once again been tested.

The Community Foundation has run the Cumbria Flood Recovery Fund and we are close to collecting £2m for the appeal. Over four hundred people have had support from the Fund and more than £650,000 distributed. The generosity of Cumbrian people and businesses has been evidenced again and I’d like to say a huge thank you.

Whilst away I travelled in Morocco and Australia and what we have experienced is sadly not unique. These countries have experienced extremes of weather. Australia has had both drought and floods and communities I visited on the edge of the Sahara had gone seven years without normal rainfall.

The shared theme in all three communities has been people’s wish to help and common humanity. I think this wish to help is in part stimulated by an understanding of suffering and what it means not to have things.

I travelled in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco with a group of University students. It was very interesting to see how these young men lived their lives. All of them were poor by any standard you would use in the UK. However they threw themselves at life with vigour and energy. They were particularly keen to learn and improve themselves. I know University students in the UK have to work hard to earn money to minimize their debts, but I’m not sure I’ve met students here with such zeal for self improvement.

These young men were also imbued with the strongest traditions of hospitality. Any food or shelter was shared. In a country where people have so little, what people do have is shared. People would not consider driving past someone stood by the road if they had room in their car. My student friends told me how they hitch hiked across the country, often being given food and money by the people who gave them lifts.

I think extreme events remind people of what they can do. But in such a relatively comfortable country, where much of the need is subtle or hidden we do not so easily the need or know what can be done.

Barclays Bank supported six awards for ‘flood heroes’. Five of the awards went to groups and organisations and the sixth went to a member of the public who stopped and picked up a wet and disheveled flood victim who was walking home along a busy main road in the dark. This person stopped, picked the person up and kept in contact with them, making sure that all of the help possible was made available to them. The actions of this ‘hero’ were quite rightly praised. But should they be viewed as so exceptional?

We learn how much we need our neighbours and local charities when the skies empty for hours on end and threaten our homes, but do we think about them when the sun shines?