In Reply to: Ever since the bombings, the sales pitch posted by sherbert on Wednesday, 25. April 2012 at 06:44 Bali Time:
After the bombing, when it REALLY was quiet and their livelihood flew out on the next plane, when standing on Jln Legian or Poppies 1 or wherever you were it was possible to be the only Bule in sight, then yes help, charity if you like, was needed. Food aid was given out in Kuta and Legian. A wise older poster on here who was involved in distributing this food aid told me then. "Don't give money" and he was correct really. Of course many of us did "help" friends from the tourist area who no longer had a rice field to which they could return.
Now please understand that I am not talking about areas of very real poverty in Bali such as parts of arid Karangasam and elsewhere in rural Bali. I am talking about the Southern tourist strip where the beach and market traders are doing extremely well by local standards and good luck to them. The massage beach ladies, for example, are earning quite substantially more than most hotel employees. If you REALLY know some of them and not in a lopsided way where you believe that they should be pitied, therefore laying yourself open to tales of woe, they will tell you how well they are now doing.
What happened after the bombs was that with the best will in the world we fostered a kind of "welfare mentality" which is not in the genuine best interest of the trader nor the tourist. Now we had just better suck it up and not be too conned, nor too outraged either, by the sob stories.
NB there are of course always in their society (like our own) some sad stories in the tourist strip too, just not as many as we may be lead to believe.