Showing

In a wedding in the Transylvanian Szék/Sic, when every guest found his or her place, and before serving the first plate, the ritual called “showing” takes place. The groomsman, in a loud voice so it can be heard well even at the end of the wedding tent, says thanks to each and everyone by name for the wedding present given – mostly in cash – to the young couple.


After the recent catastrophe we are far from speaking about weddings in Szék, but now we also perform the “showing” as we promised it three weeks ago when we asked for help for our friends in Szék whose house was destroyed by the flood.


On our appeal 110 thousand forints and 150 euros, all in all about 550 euros have arrived thus far from nineteen readers of ours: 42, Anna, Csaba, Effe, Gyetvai Ági, Hamar Laci, Katarina Ludik, Marika, Melinda and Gergely, Petteri, Petya, Ritoók Magda, Sebestyén Angéla, Szedlák Ádám, Tenczer Ágó, Tóth Gábor, Vándor Kinga, Vida Zsófia, Wang Wei. We gratefully thank to everyone for your generous support!


Even more people asked for an account number to which, however, they have not yet transferred their contribution. Some others wrote that they would spread the word among their friends, but no echo has been heard this far, as only the readers of Río Wang and Kata’s blogs have sent any donation. Nevertheless we do hope that some help will come from the other places as well.


We are also grateful for the help of the Hungarian portals mandiner.hu and blog.hu which also inserted our appeal in their daily blogroll. True, the first one emphasized in the lead the bamboo rather than Szék, so it did not necessarily catch the attention of the readers interested in supporting catastrophe-struck people. But the other, the largest Hungarian blog portal most probably made a generous exception with us, as I do not remember any other case when they included any post written at a different blog portal like ours at Blogger.


We have to specially mention our non-Hungarian readers. Río Wang has ninety-seven registered followers, two hundred and fifty subscribers on Google Reader, and although we do not exactly know how many people read it on a daily basis through other readers and how many others have inserted it in their blogrolls, they also must be well over a hundred. With all this, from outside Hungary we received support only from Effe (Italy), Katarina Ludik (Slovakia) and of course Wang Wei.

We can only guess the reasons of this almost complete lack of response. Perhaps for the other readers Szék is a too far away and too exotic place, about which they only like to read here in Río Wang, but they do not even think it seriously that they can effectively help them. Perhaps they did not believe that those ten or twenty euros, the price of a fast lunch, can mean a serious help in a place where for some people this is the wage for a whole day. It is also possible that on the basis of their own experiences they do not even imagine that there can be a place in Europe where in case of such a catastrophe there comes absolutely no help, neither from the state, nor from social or relief organizations, but one depends exclusively on himself.

By clicking here you can send via PayPal or from bank card any amount to the flood victims of Szék. We will send a receipt of each donation. Thank you for your help.

The first part of the support received we sent to Szék in the last week with a friend going there, and we have already received the acknowledgment of receipt with a letter of thanks. The sums received after that will be sent there in the next week. In the meantime some further houses were flooded as well (including the one from where this wedding started), and they also have the first casualty: the wonderful deputy mayor of the town who worked hard for several days on the rescue of the houses destroyed, had a heart attack and died, leaving two orphan children. So any support really has its place there. If you can, please help.