Okay imagine a run down building in your local area. No windows, dust and dirt everywhere, broken foundation and ruble all over the ground. Okay now picture for some reason there are beds in this run down building. Now picture 2 to 3 children on these beds in these rooms, some with unsanitary IVs in their arms, some just laying there. There's your local hospital! A consultation with a doctor is 10,000 GNF (the local currency) which is about a 1.30$ in the States. Procedures don't cost more than 25$ in American money, but these people can't afford that. They could maybe afford that after saving up for half a year, if that. Most of the children that I talked to were there for Malaria which is totally treatable with a five dollar pill, but if not treated can cause a painful death. Some little babies had Asthma and one little boy had AIDS. I have heard about AIDS since I can remember, but I've never seen it in person. I've heard about this disease, but to see a child in front of me with a sunken in body, dry flakey face, and swollen bloody feet is a completely different experience. It's a realization, a realization that this disease is real. All of these diseases are real and they are killing children, God's children and our brothers and sisters. Why are we doing NOTHING to help these people? No, seriously why? Maybe because we don't want to think it's real. Maybe because we want to believe that these are just statistics, not actual people. Maybe because we're lazy and self-consumed. Maybe because we think other people will do it. Maybe because we are scared of leaving our comfortable lives with our money, family, friends, house, food, etc. I am so guilty of using all of these excuses, but eventually I ran out of excuses. I pray to God those who aren't helping the "least of these" as Jesus calls them, run out of excuses before it's too late. Before one more child dies of preventable diseases. Before one more person takes their last breath due to starvation. Before one more baby dies after being abandoned by her family who can't afford to take care of her. Most of all, I pray we all run out of excuses before either us or some "statistic" across the world or in our backyard dies without truly knowing, loving, serving, and obeying The Lord Jesus Christ and miss out on eternal life in His Kingdom.
We often think that we cant help. You're just one person and there are billions of them, what difference can you make? Obvious results aren't always going to be quickly produced, but Rome wasn't built in a day, right? In one of my favorite books called Kisses from Katie, Katie writes in her journal
"Sometimes working in a Third World country makes me feel like I am emptying an ocean with an eyedropper. Today, it often still feels that way. I have learned to be okay with this feeling because I have learned that I will not change the world. Jesus will do that. I can, however, change the world for one person"I'm not saying we can all get together and magically end world hunger or find the cure to AIDS, but we can make a difference for the homeless guy begging downtown, for the orphan in Nicaragua, and for the starving family in India.
These people may be physically sick, but we are spiritually sick. Lets fix their bodies and conditions and they will fix our hearts.
"Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Luke 12:33-34
EMILY MY DEAREST:
ReplyDeleteI am very proud of you, I hope that many will be touched by your stories, there is clearly a lack of knowledge and understanding by most, people have to realize how bad the situation is in a large number of countries .
Most have not seen it or live it, and even in many part of our country things are very bad for our children I see it every day, they are our most precious and important resource, jet they are treated poorly to say the list.
The health care, and educational system we have is way below world standards, I could go on, I see it and live it every day. Let me give you some numbers to put things in better prospective:
Three-quarters of the deaths are caused by conditions that can be prevented at low cost, but three-quarters of the medical budget is spent on curative services, many of them provided for the elite at high cost. - -David Morley, 1976.
In 2007, 136 million children were born in the world, and 9.2 million died before they reached 5 years of age. Documentation shows that 98.8% of the 9.2 million deaths occurred in developing countries-an extraordinarily high proportion. If the whole world had the same mortality rate as the industrialized world, there would have been only 0.8 million child deaths. Thus, there were 9.2-0.8 million, or 8.4 million unnecessary deaths. This is 23,000 unnecessary deaths every day, or 960 every hour.
The most common causes of death in children <5 yrs of age are acute respiratory infections (19%), diarrhea (17%), prematurity (10%), neonatal sepsis (8%), birth asphyxia (8%), and malaria (8%). As David Morley pointed out in 1976, most of these conditions can be prevented or treated at low cost.
Because people in low-income countries need to have surviving children to look after them in illness or old age, fertility rates will not decrease until there are substantial reductions in child mortality. Reduction in child mortality requires increased equity both within and between countries; to achieve the latter, we need increased international aid and improved terms of trade. International development aid can play a crucial role by supporting investment in education, health, and economic infrastructure; there is an urgent need for the establishment of a Global Fund to reduce child mortality and improve maternal health. Unfortunately, very few rich countries donate anywhere near the United Nations minimum government target of 0.7% of GNI. Only Norway, Sweden, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Denmark achieve the 0.7% target-and the governments of Italy, Japan, Greece and the United States all give <0.2%. If all the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries had donated 0.7% of their GNI in 2000, aid would have increased by $114 billion, which is five to 20 times the amount required to reduce child deaths by >50%.
Improved terms of trade are even more important than aid. Oxfam has estimated that, if developing countries had increased their share of world exports by just 5% in 2002, this would have generated US $550 billion-seven times as much as they received in aid. Unfortunately, many wealthy countries have high tariffs that prevent the entry of goods from low-income countries, and they provide huge subsidies to farmers, the European Union and the United States spend more than one billion dollars every day on farm subsidies that severely disadvantage farmers in low-income countries. The Oxfam Double Standards Index is a measure of free trade rhetoric vs. protectionist practice in rich countries: the worst offenders are the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Japan .