Whenever There is a World Crisis Someone Makes a Fortune

It is now official, all the drama in the Middle East is going to affect us all – right into our homes. If you do not believe me, read it in this article in the Standard. It is no longer those battles that you watch indolently seated lazily on your sofas and wonder why people are so dumb as to keep fighting. No! The numerous little uprisings in the Middle East and in North Africa, and generally in the oil rich Arab world are pouring out from behind the TV screen and holding a eerie party right in your sitting room.

For the young jobless youth, and especially one in Kenya, this can well start to spell the beginning of the end. The high cost of living, the hiked transport fares, the even higher food costs all together result in an increasingly emptier pocket, or do they?

As I may have said on this blog or elsewhere, I also have a full time day job in the NGO sector. One of the most interesting things in that world is the way we sing the carols. We do not sing at Christmas, we sing when Haiti is under the rubble. No, it is not because we are pleased when there is disaster – indeed, you will find that the most compassionate humans are likely to find a place to manifest in the NGO world. The reason the catastrophes bring the carols in a backward sort of way to our doorstep is this; when better can you truly meet a human need at its most glaring than when there is a disaster?

There are many people out there that wallow with the rest of the world when there is a crisis to moan oh how terrible God is to us to allow all this to befall us. However, there is another breed of human being that says, how can I offer a solution to humankind in the midst of all this turmoil. That is the soul that will flourish in the hard economic times that are soon to be more here than we care to discuss. If I were a young person, and I were jobless, I would start to think long and hard on this one question:

What can I do today to make the lives of those that are in distress over the lousy economy just a little more comfortable? In that question lies your flourishing when all else looks dire in the undeniable hard economic times ahead.