Malaysians Told To Pray For Rain

New headline on BBC. Today is Friday. Friday is the day when, between 12:00 and 3:00 all of the Muslim men go to the mosque for prayers. So, around that time you'll see men, lots of them, young and old, walking down the street to the nearest mosque. The women pray as well, same five times a day, but they are not required to go to the mosque to do so. When I stayed in the village a couple months back, my host went to the mosque to pray five times a day. He explained that in the village this is fairly normal, as the mosque is close by. In the city this is more dfficult due to time constraints, jobs, traffic, etc. So today, Pak Lah (the nickname of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi) has asked muslims to use their traditional Friday prayers to ask for rain. The more politically minded went and demonstrated outside the Indonesian embassy, demanding that they do more to combat this problem. Oh if only...

Stark reality? The problem stems from the same thing that most problems do in Indonesia, poverty. Farmers who can't afford the time or the money it takes to clear land for farming (consider $200 US and considerably more time to clear chemically, also not good for the environment, or fire... free. Also consider, $200 US to someone in rural Indonesia is like 10,000 US to you or me...), or people who allow major plantation companies to come in and do the same because they so desperately need the jobs it would provide... SO they burn... and in a season like this one, where we don't expect hard rain until October, it not only creates health problems for them, it destroys the environment at an alarming rate, creates this effect in KL, which creates economic probs for people here... SO the cycle goes... Burning of this sort was outlawed in Indo in 1995... but who can enforce it from an island far far away?