Donation don'ts
The Bureau of Customs intent on burning boxes of clothing intended as donations for Typhoon Yolanda victims? At first, outrage. Then the next reaction, sheepish.
As it turns out, there are apparently good reasons behind the bonfire. And it's not just burning fodder for basketball game victory celebrations.
For a while, what was burning was indignation though. After all, many kind hearted strangers had gone through the process of raiding their closets and perhaps, setting aside serviceable and maybe even barely used outfits to give away to the flood victims. Then someone had to spare time and resources to collect them all and bundle them into a shipment. And, someone had to foot the bill to transport the wardrobes to Philippine shores, hoping they would land on a poor shivering sufferer's frame.
So to find out that those extraordinary acts of kindness would be stymied by a bureaucratic Customs official? That was enough to send the blood boiling. One hundred and fifty boxes imported into Cebu are slated for destruction, because the Bureau needs the space. All that these clothes were doing was occupying much needed warehouse space, so the fix offered by Customs was to burn, baby, burn!
But wait. Apparently there are reasons. First is the official Department of Social Welfare policy of avoiding diseases. Like you know, of the plague type. As in MERS and the Ebola virus. We may be importing exotic viruses in, and unless there are ways of disinfecting and decontaminating the shipments, the DSWD is afraid that the survivors might just end up catching a bug and then dying off.
Not an unrealistic fear given the pandemic threat hovering over the Middle East and Africa at the moment. Granted, our government's resources aren't capable of meeting a sudden medical emergency, so the ounce of caution isn't just going to save a pound of cure. (We don't have the pound to spend or save, actually.)
Second, some of the shipments were originally intended to be used for scrap material to make rags. But the importer had folded shop, and no import duties could be paid, and so the shipment had been "repurposed" into Yolanda donations. But the DSWD had called in the brakes because of the same disease threat.
So, essentially, these used clothing shipments weren't really sourced from the closets of kindly souls, but had been purchased with cold discounted cash. No objections then to disposing of them, although it would be nice if some charitable soul could fork over the import fees, with maybe the extra cost of some disinfectant, and then making some industrial laundry shop happy. That might have been the ideal solution. But I guess that's not happening soon.
(God knows how the smugglers are able to bring in store-fulls of ukay ukay merchandise. I'm sure none of the used merchandise have been deloused, much less disinfected.)
Moving forward, perhaps it would be best if international aid agencies could just let the do-gooders know ahead that they shouldn't send over used clothes. And we should do our part, since we're so disaster prone anyway, that we should be ready with an insta-list of acceptable donations.
That way, when the clarion call comes trilling out and resources are urgently pleaded for, we can avoid this waste of tee-shirts and jeans and sneakers that may have been so much better than what the recipients could even have afforded in the first place. Rather than be saddled with what will eventually land in a smoldering heap, maybe we can then receive what may be more meaningful, tailor made donations that would have a better impact on victims.
As I said, we've been in this boat so many times before. How hard is it for our functionaries to become disaster experts? (Perhaps a direct hit might work. But that's being mean. Which is so me!)
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