CAIRO: A little over two weeks into Ramadan, and volunteers at Resala Charity are already wrapping up the Ramadan bags packing — as opposed to last year when the process continued to the end of the holy month.
The difference, which materialized in less food supplies distributed on the needy this year, is insufficient funds.
“We were able to produce a number of Ramadan bags ranging from 75,000 to 80,000 last year,” Waleed Ramadan, who’s responsible for the Ramadan bags activity at Resala, recalled. “Yet, this year we were able to produce only 29,000 bags, before the activity stopped altogether, 10 days early.”
This is an estimate of a 64 percent drop in donations for the Ramadan bags activity.
“Most of the ready-made Ramadan bags previously donated to us throughout the years are missing this year,” Ramadan explained. “And even the number of bags which we supply from scratch has been cut short due to the rise in prices of their components.”
The cost of one bag has risen from LE 40 in previous years to LE 70 in 2011, organizers say.
This is not the case, however, in a number of other charity organizations.
Al Orman charity organization, for instance, doesn’t suffer from any shortage in donations.
“Things have been a little shaky after the revolution,” Mohammad Fareed, from the media office of Al Orman, admitted. “However, by the beginning of Ramadan, the flow of donations started getting back to normal. Now, I can actually say that it is has increased almost 20 percent.”
Mostafa Mahmoud, another charity organization, also confirmed to Daily News Egypt that the flow of donations this year is almost equal to that of the previous years.
As the final bag of food supplies was being packed, volunteers at Resala were already making plans for volunteering at a different charity organization during the last week of Ramadan.
