Sunday, August 24, 2008

A glaring lack in charity in poor country service

Everyone focuses on the obvious areas of charity, when providing charitable goods and services to poor countries, and that is obviously important. But there is an area I've wondered about for years now, about why there is not a concerted effort to help there and that is for airlines in poor countries with serious safety issues.

On the one hand I see that everyone and his brother "loves to fly" and "builds their own planes" and "flying is their life." And they like to fly around sick children and that's all a good thing. But I don't understand why the tens of thousands of airplane geeks with decades of experience did not form an advisory charity to help struggling airlines in poor countries. They could have provided or obtained training for both flight skills and maintenance of the crafts. They could have developed sourcing of low price but high quality parts for the aircrafts. They could have "donated their services" in person to train and advise, just as medical services providers do. If you freaking love airplanes so much why aren't you loving the poor people in poor countries who have to fly on unsafe and underfunded airlines? A lot of them are in AFRICA by the way. But I guess people think more about beauty parlors and what not when it comes to African charity. I think if I was in one of those countries I'd appreciate some rich westerners who got together to organize discount or free access to quality spare parts and other resources than "teaching self esteem through hair stylists and handicrafts." I'd like to see "self esteem" by having families be able to get on planes in "even" poor countries, whether it is governmental or private airlines, and have a really good chance of arriving at their destinations safely. Sheesh.

So here we read about a crash today, on a known struggling airline based in Kyrgyzstan, that has been banned from flying over Europe due to its lack of safety. Well, why the hell isn't there a charity of rich fly boys and girls who could have been advising and helping with training, obtaining parts and so forth all along? Too busy being the Red Baron in the backyard I guess. I read in one of the articles on the web (not this CNN one) that a youth basketball team was on board and over half of them were killed. I mean, people, come on, you can't claim to be humanitarians and wise and charitable if you don't take your abundance of skills in "what you love" which is "flying and being free" and help those in impoverished countries, because they are people who love to actually, you know, stay alive. Isn't there something wrong when crashes in like Nigeria become all a blur? Where are you race relation advocates then? Why aren't you donating time and resources then? So many questions and I get so few answers from humans.

And here's like another example of what could easily be done. Why not have an "add a maintenance worker" fund? Airlines could apply and have extra maintenance workers trained and added to their staff with the salaries and costs paid for by this charitable fund. Imagine what a difference adding just one new position, paid for by the charity, could do for an airline company struggling with safety issues. I mean, sheesh, how hard would that be to do?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/08/24/kyrgyzstan.crash/

More detail in this article, very sad, just like the crash in Spain was heart wrenching for the survivors and the loved ones of the victims.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iAZy8IKqN-9n172E2aS1bjAucRZQ