Abdur Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera – Join Your Local Emergency Planning Board (Important Advice for Muslim Communities)

Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa

barakato. I hope everybody is doing well in their communities.

And may Allah subhanaw taala help us through these times. There's

just some experiences that I want to share with you, that has

happened locally. And it's made mashallah the job very easy

certain tasks during these Coronavirus times very easy for

us. So there's two things that I want to speak about today. And

Inshallah, if you can incorporate these things, for your own

community, Inshallah, it will help you a lot. So the first thing is

that nearly every borough or every small town or area throughout the

country, they should have an organization called the borrower

resilience forum, or the town resilience forum. Sometimes they

actually call it the Emergency Planning Board. Every every place

should have one of these. What that is, is that this is not just

for this time, but basically, that runs throughout the year. They

have members that come in, that represent the different

communities. And what they do is they try to plan for emergencies.

So for example, just before the events of the Coronavirus, they

did a simulation that if there was a gas tanker that burst in a

particular place in this area on a particular road, then for

approximately two miles or three miles, what are the contingency

plans that the emergency board would have to put in place. So

essentially, what they're doing is they're planning for emergencies.

Now, the only way that we can when something an emergency happens,

like it has happened right now, the only way that we can actually

make sure that our interests as a Muslim community are also met, is

that if we actually take part in these from beforehand, a lot of

the time, what happens is that we have these emergency issues. And

then things are not catered for us. And then we say that it's

discriminatory or something, most of the time, it's because of our

own inaction. And we're not being proactive, we need to actually

become part of these things. Because especially if your

community is a decently sized one, you need to be able to be part of

that, because they don't know what the Muslim community requires and

what it needs. So for example, what would be really beneficial

for the Muslim communities in this regard is that if they took part,

and they can still probably try to get involved with this, because

it's open, it's open, and they want actually representatives from

all the communities which are represented in the area. So for

example, one of the things that we put forward is that when these

things happen, then we need halal food provisions. For example, if

families are going to be evacuated to the town hall, or for a sports

hall or something like that, then for Muslim families, we may need

to have segregations segregation issues. If there has to be we'll

do facilities, again, segregated will do facilities, solid

facilities may be a prayer room for men, for women, and they're

willing to contribute this because they basically do it for each of

these things. So what they then do is that once they plan these

things, they, they,

they produce contingency documents, these are then filed

away. So when then an emergency crops up, they pull out these, and

they've got a point two point list. And it has been thoroughly

developed from beforehand and formulated beforehand. And they

basically, they basically just follow that guidance. If you've

not been part of it, then there's no way that you that you can be

represented there, unless you try to get in afterwards. So in these

boards, you have the gold, the silver and the bronze emergency

control room units, these guys are very well connected, right? The

highest is the gold one. So basically, these are depending on

the importance. That's how they work. They have connections in all

the right places that you've got direct connections when anything

happens. They've got direct contact with the police, the

ambulance services, the hospital, the faith leaders, up to the up to

the ministry up to the ministerial level, they've got context so they

can get things in place. So I'll just give you an idea. You know,

we've got the hustle issues and the bathing issues and the storage

issue. So I'm right, I'm actually standing here outside this

refrigerator, which is actually provided by the council. Right,

because obviously Council has a responsibility for storing, for

storing bodies and so on. We're basically trying to help them so

that our local members, they contacted the council and said

that basically we need we need help. The emergency services

through the emergency service contact contacted the council. And

we wanted two things. Number one was that some of the graveyards,

they finding it tough to dig up as many graves as are necessary. And

we're having obviously an increased number of of deaths. So

they said we need excavators we need basically help to dig the

graves. Now counsel doesn't have excavators. So alhamdulillah

somebody came up with the idea that what we should do is there's

lots of construction companies who are sitting dormant right now

because you know, they're not working. So the marshal or the

council, they hide some of these, these excavators from some of

these construction companies to go and do the job right in the

graveyards that are that basically are represented in our local

community. The other thing that they might have mashallah managed

to provide

Ross is basically this refrigerated container in there,

we obviously needed shelves, because to maximize the space,

they actually paid for the shelves as well. The only way you can do

this is to actually take part is to get involved and, and do

something about it. It requires obviously some teamwork, some of

your messages and organizations locally have to get together.

Sometimes we've seen that where there was a certain project that

they wanted to petition for, to get some help with. And then some

of the organizations were dragging their feet or not playing ball.

Now that creates a problem. So then the person who's in charge

was coordinating, they need to be quick on their feet and try to

reorganize, if one person isn't going to allow one of these things

to be in the area, then maybe you can put it into a different

question. These councils they're willing to give, you just need to

create

a relationship with them to do that, because it helps their

function, this is their responsibility. So it actually

helps them to do that. So basically, in this regard, we need

to be proactive, and we need to do teamwork. And we need to make sure

that we've got our house in order and try to do the best, of course,

you need a coordinator. Right. The second thing that I want to

mention about right is dealing with the deceased in terms of the

death, the death certificate, and the burial, the burial

certificate, and so on. That's a process. Normally, we're dealing

with maybe a few deaths a month, maybe one or two a month in

community. And even if that takes long, there's a tolerance level.

But right now, with Russell's bathing, deceased people coming in

every day and burial is needed. So the procedure is for that is that

when a person dies, if they die in a hospital or just seen by a

doctor, the hospital, the doctor, the hospice, they will generally

provide a death certificate, right after doing their checks their

procedures, they will provide a death certificate that's very,

very important, then what happens is that if somebody actually dies

at home, then there's nobody to provide a death certificate. So

generally, in these times, what they have right now is right now

in these current times, what they've done is they've actually

developed a special COVID unit. Right, a COVID unit is basically

made up of generally a police officer, a fire person, and a

paramedic, they'll come to the house, they'll assess the

situation, and then they will provide the death certificate that

deaf city gets very important because without that, you can't

get the burial certificate afterwards. So death certificate

you have to first get. So what then happens is that generally on

a normal on a normal basis, you get the death certificate, you go

to the you have a meeting, you set up a meeting with the Registrar

for the death certificate, and you give them the death certificate,

they give you a form that used to generally take about 40 minutes to

fill in something you do every day, people don't know how to fill

it in used to take about 40 minutes to fill in. That was quite

a cumbersome process. Hamdulillah you heard that they've actually

made that into about seven minutes. Now they streamline the

process. So alhamdulillah now we've got such a relationship with

the registrar and the registrar's are actually all working from home

now as well. So they got the green certificates there. So now we can

actually get that within 30 minutes, that you fill up the form

properly, your contact them, they can actually do it for you now in

30 minutes, but in a lot of other places is a massive backlog, and

there's no connection. So that's why it takes days sometimes. So

again, it's well worth getting this relationship in Sharla it's

not everybody's job to link to the registrar registrar doesn't know

everybody, it's good for the registrar as well that they know

one person from the committee community, one representative who

can take these death certificates help the individual families fill

in the forms for the registrar. Registrar knows that person

they've developed a relationship. That way, what happens is that

what used to take three or four days sometimes to get the burial

certificate, which is also called the green paper, something which

used to take 234 days before you can get the body Alhamdulillah

that's been streamlined. Sometimes you can actually get that within

hours, right? Especially if you've got somebody from the community

representative who's developed a relationship with the registrar

who helps the families or on behalf of them, they fill in the

special form for that. So again, if you can have that relationship

with the registrar that will make releasing the bodies very, very

easy. And that will make your job easy. This is the time to be

proactive, right? It's the time to get these things in motion so that

we can just make all of this system very easy because in Islam,

we have the recommendation to try to get the body buried as soon as

possible, rather than to keep them laying in a morgue or laying in a

in a freezer for a number of days. Of course where it's not possible.

That's understandable, but there's a lot of stuff that we can do to

just streamline and hurry the process. It actually helps the

system because it makes it easy for them. They don't have to worry

too much about the paperwork. So Jazak Allahu May Allah subhanaw

taala accept from all of us and May Allah facilitate for us in use

this time for us to get much more proactive and inshallah help

others. Allah subhanho wa Taala will always help us as long as we

help others and of course we need to help ourselves in Allah Allah

you have a Euro Mobio comin hatha yoga you don't want to be unfussy

him that is very important on

Allah will not bring a change to you until you bring a change to

yourself So may Allah accept from us and facilitate from us and give

us that guidance but I could read that run I'm hamdu Lillahi Rabbil

Alameen