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
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little we hear of them through the news media now.) It may be that we allow the overabundance of impatience we have accumulated while living in an immediateresponse world to spill over into our expectation of what our charity should do and how fast we should see results. The strife in Somalia did not arise overnight, however, and it cannot be reversed without the most resolute kind of patience and perseverance. Somalia has been suffering for the entirety of my life. Every summer of my childhood, late-night Save the Children commercials expressed the reality of rail-thin children and mourning mothers. Fathers were conspicuously absent, a detail that spoke of Somali’s social crisis to anyone who would listen. Why has nothing changed? To understand this, one must look to the history of the area and the origin of its recent unrest. Â






