I T IS RIGHT around this time that the images of starving Somali men, women, and children will disappear from news splash screens and front pages, making their way to last month's online archives. This is a predicable evolution of news-and reports of the most dire human suffering, unhappily, are no different. They have their place in the queue. Even if the humanitarian crisis in Somalia and its Horn of Africa neighbors stayed on the front page, it is an unfortunate reality that we ourselves are giving less sadaqah the further away we get from Ramadan, the month of giving. Great appeals are made during the holy month in a rush to try to maximize donations, but the truth is, without consistent giving throughout the entire year, the money ends up being spread too thin. The slow-down in charitable giving is not a phenomenon specific to Muslims. People on the whole tend to reduce their donations to any given cause that is more than one or two (media) months old. Moreover, chronic crisis, like the ongoing drought and food shortage in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti, tend not to receive as muchattention as spontaneous natural disasters, which there re ever more of in our climate-collapsing world, like the earthquake in Haiti and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (Note that even though both these countries remain in dire need of aid, Haiti being particularly desperate, how