In Continuum.

That tradition was suddenly halted sometime last year when the rat in the grain decided to spoil the pot of rice for the rest of us. The National Kidney Foundation (NKF) decided that it'd be stupid to use all the proceedings on their own patients, which was why they used part of their money to build an obscenely huge headquarters and paid their employees with obscene amount of pay every month. That incident not only caused the higher level officers to be under investigations, the number of televised charity shows also decreased drastically in the past year. So the life-risking celebrities decided that they should stick to their daytime jobs, the monks stopped throwing themselves in boxes of ice or walk across precarious cables hung in between two skyscrapers. You don't get celebrities urging you to call a bunch of numbers on the television screen any longer, and that has been the case for a very long time now. I guess such a trick can only work for so long in any societies, and these charity groups have become more like pests than actual charities to some people - people like myself. 

Donations reached out to the schools in Singapore back then, and I remember how the teacher used to stumble into the classrooms with a box full of fanciful donation cards. They were neat little donation cards with a column to write the name of the donors, the address as well as the signatures just to authenticate the donations. There'd be a little bag attached to the card for you to slot the money into, and it was a card distributed to all the students in hopes that they'd go around their neighborhood to collect donations from door to door. That was what some students did, but I certainly wasn't very enthusiastic about such a thing. Somehow, the idea that charity should be voluntary rather than an obligation was naturally instilled in me somehow, and I'd usually chuck the card into a random drawer in my bedroom until one day before the deadline. It just felt really uncomfortable on my part to have this donation card stuffed down our throat, and how the students were "encouraged" to have a minimum donation of ten dollars when the ones that didn't hit the ten dollars mark were forced to take the card home to collect more donations. I didn't feel comfortable with the system, which was why I have little trust in most of the charity foundations until this day. 

There was this indian lady from NKF that harassed me with my donation card back then, and she used to call my cell phone three or four times a week just to ask about the damn card. The strange thing was, the card arrived at my doorstep without me asking for the card at all, they just assumed that since we donated generously as students, we'd have similar enthusiasm after we have left that same school. She used to call me all the time regardless of the hour of the day, and it just got to a really frustrating point when I just hung up on her call and subsequently tore the donation card into half. I didn't like the way they were forcing us to donate every single month of the year, the way they disguised what they were doing with false and insincere sympathies. It turned monetary donations into this multi-million dollar industry somehow, and we were all workers of this giant company to pump in the much needed money. The truth was, none of us knew where the money went to and to what purposes, but that didn't stop the general public to pour in even more money whenever the celebrities get themselves battered and bruised on national television. Here's the irony - those celebrities were paid to do these shows. What is the point in a charity show if that's the case?

There's another charity show on television tonight, but this time it is somewhat different. It is a show organized by a television network in Taiwan, and they are doing it for the people in China that suffered from the tragic earthquake that occurred at the beginning of this week. A bunch of celebrities are present in the studio right now, but they are not doing any lame magic tricks or singing upside down like how the Singaporean celebrities would. They are just sitting there at their booths, picking up the phones and talking to the willing donors while recording down their donation sums and personal particulars. There aren't any gimmicks on television tonight, no monks performing death defying stunts for the world to see. It's just a simple show about people coming together and trying to help a bunch of people they hardly even know. There isn't that feeling of falsity in the air, they don't feel forceful at all, and some person even donated fifty cents over the phone. There isn't a minimum amount of money you should donate in this show, you can choose to donate whichever amount that you deem fit, and the turn out has been pretty overwhelming so far. Just three hours into the show and they have already collected over two hundred million Taiwanese dollars, and we still have a little more than an hour to go.

My sister is currently in her bedroom with the receiver to her ears, and she has been calling nonstop for the past two hours or so just to get through. I'm not sure if she really wants to donate money, or does she just want to talk to those celebrities over the telephone. Whatever the case may be, I guess every dollar and every cent is going to count in the efforts to relief those people from their pain. I suppose it is in the genes of my family to do such things when other people are in need, and my parents dutifully donated a hefty sum of money through a Buddhist charity organization in Taiwan and sent food supplies to the epicenter in China. They have been doing such things quietly over the years, something which I am very proud of. I mean, they are not the kind of people to go up onto television to boast about the amount of money they donate, they are not in it for the fame at all. They just want to do their part quietly in the greater scheme of things, and a part of that must be ingrained inside the blood of my sister and I.

I donated 2000 Taiwanese dollars, or about a hundred Singaporean dollars after the conversion. It is not a lot, but I guess it is enough to buy somebody a few meals for the next week or so, which is exactly what they need right now I suppose. There is a strange feeling whenever such a thing happen, a feeling that one cannot wholly explain. The death tolls provide you with numbers that you cannot fathom at times. What is 12000 people to you? How many stadiums of people is that? How many buses, or trains, or cars? The numbers are just numbers, and the sheer size of those numbers is simply too great for us to count with our bare fingers. So we ignore those numbers, we do what we can to make their lives just a tad bit better from what it is right now. I'd physically help out if I could, but then money just seems to be a lot more practical at this point, especially when the hope of finding new survivors is dwindling and it's not like you have any medical experiences to help out with the injured anyway. Which is why I have donated, and my sister is still trying desperately over the phone. She has a singular goal to talk to the president of Taiwan for reasons unknown, but at least she has pledged to donate the same amount that I have, I guess that is the least we can ask for.

It is nice to know that you can help from all the way on the side of the world, it is nice to know that somebody is going to live because of your money, somewhere. More than that, however, it is even nicer to know that there are people out there who are willing to come together for a common cause. I know that I have come across to my friends and readers as more of a cynic at times, the kind of person to point out the flaws and mistake of our species whenever I get the chance to do so. Some may think that I must have been the victim of some genocide or holocaust in the past life, which is why I seem to have this raging anger towards the general atrocities of mankind. Even so, I guess I cannot help but feel moved by the kind of things the people in this world are also doing for the ones that need help, the people whom they hardly know the names of. A hundred dollars is going to be used up really fast over there I imagine, it really isn't that big a sum of money. Still, I am glad that the bowl of rice on that side of the world that is going to bring a smile to a child's face, is going to be the same bowl of rice that I paid for with my own money. It makes me smile too, and that's really all we need in horrific times like these.