As an aside that I should have blogged about earlier, just before I left London I met up with a friend from Bam, Iran, scene of the previous Boxing Day quake that everyone's forgotten about. Pretty interesting and sad listening to him talk about what's happened there in the context of too much money being pledged to the tsunami effort. Basically, everyone's still in inadequate temporary housing, not much rebuilding has happened and the town's population is moving elsewhere as the pace of change is slow. I don't remember the world's leaders queuing up to outdo each other with 'generosity', or collecting boxes in every village shop, when 25,000 died and 60,000 were made homeless in an 'axis of evil' country. Given Indonesia's supposed Islamic militant links, the double standards and the 'politics of giving' make me, well, uneasy, let's say. When the hysteria has died down, are we allowed to ask why this level of competitive giving can't be diverted to, say, AIDS drugs in Africa or poverty in our own back yards? the good folk of Hale County, Alabama could sure do with seeing a bit of that money invested round here. But then again, given that most of the aid that was promised to Bam never materialised, maybe we should wait and see how much we really end up giving.