May be because most Pakistanis in UK are from those inflicted areas? More power to these people.
More than £3,000 has been put into the collection box at Mohammed Asif’s Gloucestershire shop. Those proceeds will be spent 4,000 miles away, in the north-western province of Pakistan, where the businessman’s extended family has constructed a soup kitchen for hundreds of flood victims.
The aid supply chain linking Asif’s Oriental Food Store in Cheltenham to refugees flooding into the Pakistani city of Nushera is one of hundreds of ad-hoc relief efforts that British Pakistanis have begun organising while Pakistan’s government struggles to cope with the disaster.
“The support from the Pakistani community to us has been extremely noticeable,” said Brendan Paddy of the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation which responds to major disasters overseas. “But there are a significant number organising their own community activity and wiring money to contacts in the country.”
The surge in support from British Muslims, who are currently observing the holy month of Ramadan, contrasts with donations to multinational relief charities, which have struggled to raise the sums given after recent disasters elsewhere in the world.
Asif, 36, whose family lived four miles from the swollen Indus river, which is causing some of the most severe flooding, said his relatives had survived. “Their situation is better than some villagers who have lost their entire savings. They’re just focusing now on helping the survivors.”
He added: “People are coming in off the streets and putting £20 notes in the box. Even kids are giving. People here remember the floods in Cheltenham and Tewkesbury in 2007, so they can relate through that.”
When friends returning from Pakistan told Rezwan Farooque, 32, from Crawley that, in contrast to the 2005 earthquake in the country, the floods represented a “creeping disaster” he decided to take action.
His football team, Crawley Tigers, most of whom are of Pakistani origin, opened a car wash outside a local mosque. The £5 fee has helped raise £3,700, he said, money which has been given to the aid charity Islamic Relief. It is the kind of local, small-scale action that appears to be flourishing in Muslim communities across the UK.
In Leicester, one group began selling £5 boxes of curry to office workers. “We’re just a one group of friends who wanted to get together and raise money,” the organiser, Shah Ali, told the local newspaper, the Leicester Mercury.
“What we’re saying is that food for you means food for people in Pakistan. We were amazed by how many orders initially we received so we doubled the target to 2,000 boxes.”
Similar initiatives are afoot in Huddersfield, Bradford and Blackburn.
Irim Ali, 31, a Labour councillor from Newcastle upon Tyne, said £15,000 was raised by British Pakistanis at a recent event she organised in the city, with just five days notice and the help of the Asian radio station Spice FM. The proceeds will go to Islamic Relief.
She said: “Muslims give about 2% of their wealth to charities during Ramadan, so the timing has been good. A lot of businessmen and families have relatives who have been affected out there so they are donating large sums of money.”