The Financial Crisis has hit here

UNHCR announced this week budget cutbacks in assistance it provides to the local urban refugee population.  What is happening in Europe and elsewhere with the global financial crisis (GFC as it is named) is now having its 'trickle down' effect.  There is having its impact here on wider populations and issues as there just isn't the money being given by the big donors to bodies like the UN.  This means that the big agencies just cannot keep helping their target populations as they have been.  Once again, it is the poor who suffer even more, the victim who remains the victim. 

This would surely be the experience in Spain, Greece, Ireland or elsewhere where the GFC has hit with such ferocity.  Those who suffer the most anywhere are the working man and woman, the little people, the ordinary citizen as they don't have what it takes to protect themselves from such crisis when it hits.  That is the way it seems of the world.  Now it is the turn of these poor people here who are already desperate enough and will now only know a little more desperation.  You wonder how much people can take before they crack. 

As a priest in my role here with these people, I have the great privilege of seeing the other side of what is happening in the midst of the GFC.  Despite all the hardship, what I see happening, as ones approach me from back home and beyond in the west about wanting to help refugees I know, is that the little people, the ordinary citizen, the working man and woman, the decent and kind individual continue to give to those who remain desperate and vulnerable in our world.  It is humbling to see these people give out of their own need, looking beyond their own suffering and concerns to help others whom they regard as being so much worse off, despite any economic crisis. 

It tells me that there remains a generosity and a kindness in humanity no matter what and it says that the human spirit for goodness and compassion cannot be killed off  by hardship and crisis but continues to shine in its little and unknown ways.  There is another side to the story of hardship and crisis in the west that we are told in the media and that is that the goodness of people still lives and is undying.