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