A group of volunteers, consist of friends and family got together to start a relief centre and aid mission for the refugee of the East Coast floods here in Kuantan. Mainly aiding the Myanmar refugees as they do not get food aid from other NGOs or Govt relief centers due to their status.
Many refugees who tried to get food aid from the local relief centers were denied the aid even when they live among the locals and have their homes destroyed by the same floods.
The food aid from the relief centre in Kuantan was giving to refugees, immigrant workers and also to locals from the same areas and villages, not looking at race, religion, political gain or citizenship status.
With the official family list from UNHCR they went into all the back routes of the towns to locate and send the food aid.
We just finish another trip to Kuala Lipis on the 1st Jan 2015, locals and Indonesian workers received rice, water, biscuits and sanitary aid. They have not gotten any help from anyone, since their status here in Malaysia.
They can’t even get aid from the centres where the government set base in the nearby towns. It was a sad scene to see them living with no electricity and clean water since the floods. They are taking showers in the back drains and polluted rivers.
Water was up at 10-15ft here. Even their factory owners didn’t come back to help this workers here. They were staying in the back jungles of the wood factory mills in their temporary shelters, some had to get up to the high zones for safety. This are foreign workers with valid work permits. Would you like to be treated the same if you or your child was a foreign worker in a different country?
At times I wonder why humanity in Malaysia is based on race, politics and religious status, when did it all go wrong for us? Why we treat humans differently just because which land they came from? Are we forgetting that many of us are also from different lands, our grandparents or great grand parents were also illegal immigrant or not from this lands at one time.
Surprisingly this is not a new headlines, it’s something every Malaysian knows or have spoke about, either in a coffee shop at a Chinese cafe or in a Mamak stall while having your roti canai. It’s one of the usual conversations I have heard far too many times.
We know we can be a little racist at times, we know the government uses dirty politics as a foundation to run the country, we know our youth do not have enough social awareness of what’s really happening around the world, we know there are many tribes or immigrants who are being discriminated.
We are not naive, many Malaysians are known to be smart when it profits them. We all know this, but we still don’t do anything about it. We allow ourselves to be conditioned and we continue to live in ego or ignorance.
Are we just poor with being socially active, or are we living in fear for a reason, we have being brought up in a culture to follow orders or we live life thinking about ourselves first. Is this what we want to teach our children and future generation, the same youth who are going to be running the country someday, to have an important position in a big corporation?
The irony is, we don’t own this lands because we are Indian, Chinese or Malay who all came from another land, we made this all up, we took land from others. The only real truth today is that we only own who we are and being humans, to live together, so why do we deny another humans right to eat or live here?
“We can carry it together, it’s not heavy. It’s for my mother and younger sisters.” They will came back again to collect water, more rice and biscuits as our truck could not go into the flood areas where they live.
Some of the houses rented by the Myanmar refugee here in Kuantan, Pahang. Locals give out their homes for rent here, raising the rents as they please.
He lost his leg 6 years ago while working in a construction site here in Kuantan. Today he lives in Kemaman.
The sign reads, ‘Are we ready for death?’, at a nearby mosque.
A refugee child collects food aid for his family, as they were to far inside to come to our trucks.
Refugees Of East Coast Floods, Pahang and Terengganu
