However, I am not sure if you had noticed that in every airline seat there is a wee pouch that says foundation? or charity? and they show you a movie that shows you what the airline does for the world, and urges us the poor traveler who had just endured the worst food on earth, the smallest seat, and the worst movies, to put our coins in it. Well, I have been putting my cash and loose change in it, but now and after what happened, my cash and loose change is going to stay with me. Here is why:
Since August 2011 I have been involved with finding sponsors for few Bahraini students who didn't receive a scholarship due to lack of funds (not sure where the money went maybe spent on illegal stuff or something or the other), so I made copies of the files, took them myself to few rich people, went to universities and found few scholarships for some of the students, tweeted, blogged, facebooked and did all I can to find money for these poor kids; all had failed and the kids stayed where they are while their counterpart are already bums on seats enjoying their lives in a foreign land and having the best time of their lives.
Then a spark came to my mind when I was about to place my cash in the little pouch and hand it to the air hostess! I was going to kick myself thinking oh my god, why didn't I think of this before? why didn't I write to all of these charities that had opened up to help poor kids pursue education, come on woman, there is a fortune here and some of this fortune must be spent on those scholarshipless kids!! I charged in, googled all the airlines, and wrote them a very nice email to make their eyes tear for these poor students, some of the websites had emails, and some had forms to be filled, so I did all of those formalities. Of course I was so optimistic, to my naivety, I thought tomorrow the money will roll in and the kids will all go to universities and would have only lost one semester. The kids of course had continued to contact me asking about the date of departure even though I didn't promise I merely told them that I will do my best.
What happened next is history now, as all of them replied saying that the foundations, or the charity organizations is so small and can only provide to children in remote areas that no one knows about, hah? so if no one knows about these children how did the airline find them? do they go flying around the globe with magnifying glass stuck on the bottom side of the airplane body to hunt for young, cloth-less, homeless, snot hanging outside his nose and hungry child? do these kids really exist? or are they a fragment of our imagination?
Finally let me give you a little scenario of how much money these charities are receiving in a day; I will take one airline such as Emirates: they have a 100 destination, with a minimum of 3 flights a day, so 300 flights per day; the minimum number of travelers on these flights is 300 passengers, which means per day Emirates is carrying 90,000 passengers. If a quarter of these passengers put a dollar in the pouch, then the little charity is receiving per day 22,500 dollars! times 365, the total reward the passengers are giving to those kids in remote areas is a staggering $8.3 million dollars!! very small indeed. If we take the calculation further, and consider one of those large charity organizations like UNICEF that ask you to pay a dollar a day to feed a kid (which I used to subscribe for it too) then that 8 million can feed a lot of kids. So why do we still have hungry, illiterate and homeless kids??
while you are enjoying reading this blog, and thinking Suad is very funny, there are over 70 kids waiting to be placed in universities around the world
#university #bahrain #scholarship #unicef #emirates #virgin #britishairways
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