Syed Nadzri: See poverty with right mindset
"This is poverty. This is real poverty," read the SMS from a minister who was visiting affected areas in Johor and Pahang. "Sometimes we don't realise how bad it is until we see it. And it is so sad."
That statement somehow became even more impactful when, turning the pages of the New Sunday Times two days ago, I hit upon a full page advertisement put in by Petra Group with such a moving message about whether poverty has an ethnic or religious face — so relevant, so real in the present circumstances. Hats off to this company.
This is because judging from very recent developments, there are obviously some people who would like to believe that poverty is race-biased and that they and their community alone are the poor subjects of abjection.
Well, the flood conditions every year tell a different story definitely. There are many others worse off.
The loads of pictures we get from the ground daily and the visuals we watch on TV every night give a grim reminder that we could — but only if we choose to — actually put a communal face to poverty and hardship in this country.
The adversity must have been enormous. We see families breaking their backs to save just their essential belongings.
We see children as young as 6 or 7 helping in the labour. We see these innocents salvaging schoolbooks by carrying them on top of their heads as they wade through chest-high waters. And we see farmers hoisting young livestock over their shoulders as they plod to drier grounds.
Worst of all, we see families racking out in relief centres — in classrooms or school halls — they have had to share with scores of others, including total strangers.
It would be an unimaginable proposition for many others, who are deemed lucky to be living comfortably elsewhere, to even think of sharing living space with people they are not familiar with, not to mention queuing up to use the bathroom with dozens of people they don't even know.
Imagine you have to do all this while worrying about what lies ahead — the messy clean-up, the smell and whether you still have a house to go back to in the first place and whether the farm, which provides your only source of income, has been destroyed.
And the most significant part of it is that there is a racial face in this if we choose to look at it that way. We see what we want to see.
That message in the advertisement led me to call the minister who had sent me the SMS about poverty seen in the floods.
"I get very depressed when I see these things," the minister said.
"It says something about our distribution of wealth. Underneath the economic growth we talk about and the affluence that we see in places like Bangsar, the moment you venture far out of the city and see tribulations like the floods, reality strikes at you straight in the face.
"I came across a destitute household in Pahang where the sole breadwinner, a lorry driver of Indian origin, had been bedridden after being badly injured in an accident.
"He couldn't go to work and had five children as well as the floods now to contend with.
"On top of that, he was ordered to vacate his house because he could not come up with RM2,300 in arrears of rental.
"I also came across unimaginable poverty in a Malay family in one of the Felda schemes where a woman had to make ends meet in the midst of caring for a cancer-stricken mother and a husband incapacitated by a stroke.
"It makes us wonder whether there is an adequate safety net in our system for cases like these."
And to give a better perspective of the whole scenario on poverty and hardship in the face of the voices of disgruntlement coming out from one corner of late, the last line in the advertisement says it all: "Let's try to eradicate poverty. But let's start by looking into the mirror."
