Some people are so surprising – or perhaps they are entirely predictable. In the wash of ‘I’m so glad I made it; we’re so lucky to be alive’ survivor stories coming out of the disaster zone in south-east Asia, the whining of one Maltese tourist struck such a discordant note. In the midst of the tsunami chaos, she is agitating with her travel agent for a refund of the money she paid for her spoiled holiday. When interviewed by a newspaper journalist, she appeared to have lost all sense of proper perspective at a time when most others – including those who, like me, were on the other side of the world at the time – had gained it. Aside from a cursory, throw-away remark about her fortunate escape, much of the interview piece centred on her complaints about her ruined holiday, and it ended with a good old whinge about how she had tried and failed to get compensation from her travel agent – as though he was to blame for the earthquake and the floods that followed. I read it and would have gasped in disbelief had I not been so familiar with the syndrome so many of my fellow Maltese suffer from: dinja ghalina maghluqin go bozza. It’s so contradictory: on the one hand, we rush to give aid after watching the suffering on television. And on the other hand, we narrowly escape death by drowning in a tsunami, we are aware that 150,000 others have died and that thousands of bloated corpses have yet to be recovered, we know that millions are displaced and that the economy of the region will take many years to recover as individual businesses are rebuilt bit by bit, we hear of the millions of dollars in pledges pouring in from the international community – and what do we do, instead of being grateful for our lives and our home? We rush straight to the travel agent to complain about the tsunami and try to get our money back. Let us give this woman the benefit of the doubt, and believe that she may still have been stunned into irrationality when she spoke to the journalist in question. The alternative – massive egocentricity and complete unawareness of the true nature of the crisis and how it has affected the world – is quite ugly. Had she been plucked out of the Arctic after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, she would probably have complained to the first reporter to reach her about the fact that her jewellery was at the bottom of the ocean. She has her life, but now she wants her money back.

***

There is no accounting for the spitefulness of some, even in the midst of such overwhelming generosity. One man wrote to The Times to claim that he had “heard rumours” that “the organisers of L-Istrina take a commission” on the money they raise. The Times, demonstrating unusually poor judgement, published his letter. I know the ins and outs of the libel law well enough by now to classify that letter as slanderous, rather than as fair comment. Yet it was the decision to publish the letter, rather than its actual content or the spite of the person who wrote it and of the others who spread the rumours, which shocked me. Why are certain individuals considered fair game for libellous criticism when the same newspaper would never publish anything similar about any other person in the public eye? If The Times really felt the need to clear up all talk of commission on funds raised, in the interest of its readers’ right to know the truth, then what it should have done, upon receipt of that letter, is call up the organisers of L-Istrina and get their side of the story. They would have told them that all such talk is slanderous and untrue. But to publish the letter and leave the slanderous rumour hanging in the air like that, until the organisers’ formal response is published in turn, is completely unacceptable and seems to be an act as spiteful as that of the person who wrote it.

The accusation that charity fund-raisers working in a voluntary capacity cream off some of the money for themselves is a very serious one. To treat it as though we were speaking in terms of a clerk pilfering a ball-point pen from the office stationery store is truly capricious. It is not the sort of accusation that a newspaper which prides itself on its seriousness should allow its correspondents to make in a published letter. Again, I will have to allow for the benefit of doubt – perhaps it was a crazy moment after the festivities and the person who let the letter slip through for publication wasn’t thinking quite straight. In any case, more care has to be taken with these matters. There will always be hatred, envy and the desire to slash at tall poppies in the field. Newspapers should not allow their correspondence pages to be turned into the sort of forum where rumours can be spread against some by others who resent them. We have street corners, dinner parties and some gatherings of bridge-players for that purpose. Facts are one thing; rumours are quite another. Nor should newspapers allow letter-writers to do their work for them, in which case it will be done wholly shoddily. What would it have cost to get one member of The Times’ considerable newsroom to pick up the telephone, call the organisers of L-Istrina, and say: “We have a letter here alleging that you take some of the money you collect for charitable causes. Is this true?” They would have had nothing to fear, as the organisers are not the sort to unleash a torrent of virulent abuse and bad language – though I wouldn’t blame them for being sorely tempted to do so.

***

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Those who make the effort to do something good are inevitably regarded with suspicion by those who couldn’t be bothered to do anything at all. I can only imagine that casting aspersions on those who are more productive and motivated than one is serves to alleviate some of the guilt and inadequacy one feels for not doing the same. One tells oneself that there must be something in it for them if they are working so hard, that they cannot possibly be doing all that purely on a voluntary basis. Then one feels better for not doing the same because, after all, there’s nothing in it for “me”, is there?

***

Those who curse the media should bless it instead. It is thanks to the massive worldwide coverage of the suffering in the Indian Ocean that there has been such a strong international response. Millions of people who are geographically far removed from the scene of the horror have been moved to give, raising hitherto unheard-of sums. They have put pressure on their governments to pledge even greater amounts, shaming their leaders with their own generosity. There have been similar natural disasters within the past 100 years, with comparable numbers of people dead and huge swathes of territory destroyed. The scale of the destruction was known only to those who endured it and survived. Because of this, history has blipped over these terrible events and they have not been burned into public memory as the shock of Boxing Day 2004 will be, or for that matter, 11 September, 2001. I was interested to read in a newspaper article that the 1908 earthquake in Messina left roughly as many dead as did the tsunami of two weeks ago. It wiped out the city and its surroundings and tens of thousands of our Sicilian neighbours. Malta is just “down the road” from Messina, but the average Maltese remained unaware of the true scale of the destruction at the time. Just as a miss is as good as a mile, so Messina might as well have been Alaska in those days of no mass media, no telephones, no instant communication, and ineffective newspapers without pictures and with hugely delayed reporting of events.

Peppered through many of the news stories in the international media, you will now find references to the tsunami as the worst natural disaster ever. Clearly, this is sheer hyperbole. We have no way of knowing the scale of many past disasters – certainly not those that came before our lifetime and of which scant records have been left. The world has an extraordinary ability to heal and repopulate itself. Of course, there have been far worse disasters, disasters which changed the face of the planet. Folk memories of them survive many thousands of years later in myths, legends and biblical tales. Much closer to us in time, there was a massive earthquake in Japan in the 1940s that killed at least 150,000 people. There have been floods and famine, pandemics and other natural catastrophes. In the Middle Ages, the plague and other disease flew through the whole of Europe, decimating its population within such a short space of time that there were few people left to work the land and mass starvation ensued. People resorted to cutting off their own limbs and feeding them to their families. If we live only in the present, we cannot know these things, so we cannot put the catastrophic events of the past few days into their proper perspective. Widespread disaster and the deaths of tens of thousands have happened before, and they will happen again. It is the nature of the world we live in, and the only escape, as one British columnist put it, is through increased wealth. Money, or what can be bought with it, is the only effective safeguard against the horrible vagaries of nature. He pointed out that, geographically, the northernmost countries of Europe are completely hostile to human habitation. Without material trappings that come from plenty of wealth, it is next to impossible for communities to thrive there, which is why their inhabitants remained barbaric and savage tribes for centuries after the rest of Europe was civilised. At the other end of the scale, the Indian Ocean is, in its natural state, inviting and conducive to human settlement. Look at the difference that wealth has made to this purely geographical scale over the centuries. The Nordic countries are now the world’s most civilised and comfortable, with a top-ranked standard of living, while the countries of the Indian Ocean remain mired in poverty and exposed to the risk of being wiped out by natural cataclysms. It’s the “paradise is really hell” school of thought, and I agree with it completely.