“Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.” Eli Khamarov
Oxfam have stated that 967 million people in the world are going hungry, nearly a sixth of the planet’s population. It is a shocking statistic no matter what way it is looked upon.
In times gone by the advertisements and pleas on television and in the newspapers may have held our attention for a moment or so and maybe in times of financial problems, we may generally become even more insular but there is no doubt that something needs to be done and something needs to change.
Care International says 17 million Africans, including half of Somalia’s population, are now starving. In Britain, Campaign to End Child Poverty’s figures show that five million kids have parents struggle to feed and clothe them because are crippled by poverty.
Barnados NZ have stated that children make up 22% of New Zealanders living in poverty. The more these figures are rattled off, the more desperate it sounds.
Targets agreed to by world leaders and institutions in 2000 included halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015, and halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day.
We have too many people believing that this can be done with a simple click of the fingers (Bono and many others like him) and we have the other side that says it takes time and that policies and methods cannot be changed overnight. A middle ground is needed.
I would love to see, I would love to believe that we can be human enough to show compassion (and I include myself in this) to those who really need it. To show others a way to stop having current generations paying for mistakes made in past centuries.
In the advertisement I have just seen, it states that “Every child has the right to survive”…I do not think I need to add anything to that.
Thursday, October 16th, 2008 and is filed under Thoughts & Questions, Views on News.
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