Poverty Is Daily Disaster for Millions

Most of the world is aware of poverty, hunger and disease. Most of the world is aware that people are dying, especially that children are dying or growing up weak and stunted and maimed. We are aware that the numbers are vast and the apparent causes--poverty and underdevelopment--are pervasive. It is because we are aware of this that we lose our capacity to distinguish the immediacy of this disaster. We lose our sense that this is really happening. It is only when the daily tragedy rises to a new dimension--like the screaming horror of famine in Africa--that our consciousness focuses on the death and suffering as a real and immediate occurence.

But there are silent deaths, silent catastrophes, causing no headlines. In the last 10 years, 150 million children around the world have not grown up. They have died. They have died agonizing deaths. And at least another 150 million have been disabled, crippled, maimed, stunted. In terms of numbers, this is as if every American and Canadian born in the last 10 years were now either dead or crippled!

We didn’t read about these deaths. We didn’t see them on television, because I’m not talking about the famine in Africa and other parts of the world that has commanded so many headlines. I’m talking about the children who went hungry and malnourished and diseased even without a famine because their families were trapped in the cross-fire of extreme poverty and gross underdevelopment, victims of illiteracy, lack of access to health facilities, lack of clean water.

I’m talking about the tens of millions of children--15 million last year--who have died quietly in the arms of their mothers or all alone. Forty thousand children die every day without a volcano or an earthquake or even a famine. And because so many of these deaths and cripplings were so readily preventable, even in this imperfect world, perhaps the greatest tragedy of this is that at least half of these children need not have died.

How could they have been saved? There is one kind of answer that is not getting headlines. It is a good answer--not an answer only, but a reality of aid work in progress, of a revolution spreading in country after country in the developing world, having its effect in the industrialized world as well. It is a revolution that could very well change the world. It is a revolution to overthrow ignorance and neglect, which is needlessly killing all these children. It is a revolution in child survival and child development.

But for this revolution to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to secure the human rights of every individual born, we also need to change our way of thinking, of planning, of ethics.

What we need, in fact, is a new, ethical way of thinking, urging and demanding different governments in this world to sign a Convention of Children’s Human Rights, which is being drafted in Geneva.

I propose a similar new ethic of response to the tragedies of deprivation that rarely capture headlines--a response by governments as well as institutions, communities and individuals, fully accepting their responsibility for the health and well-being of all people.

To achieve this, we are also responsible to guard against the temptation to feel sentiment rather than compassion. Of course we will cry when we see a mother on TV who is mourning her dead child, but sudden bursts of generosity born of emotions help only temporarily. The important thing is also to see this mother in my own home--with my own family--so that compassion could be what I display all the time.

We must also learn to work within deep-seated cultural attributes and cultural reality if we want to make a change. Until we begin to look at other countries far away as our neighbors--and neighbors not unlike ourselves--until we genuinely feel that we are all part of the privilege and opportunities of this world, it will be difficult to create the renewed ethical thinking that is needed for a peaceful revolution--a revolution for children’s human rights that could save so many lives.

To experience someone else’s reality as real as my own. . . . I remember a mother in Ethiopia. I saw her standing by a water well. She had been told that the water was polluted. In her arms a little baby, dying of thirst. That mother had two choices: to let the baby die of thirst or to give the baby polluted, poisonous water. I watched her bend down, take the brown water in her palm and feed her child. Deprivation is really to have no choice.

Any failure by us as individuals to turn our backs to the lack of choice of others, defines us as human beings. Any failure by a government in recognizing the needs of its weakest and smallest citizens must awaken our outrage, as if the government failed to recognize the face and the body and the breath of our own child. An outrage equivalent to what would be ours if 20 faulty jumbo jets filled with little children crashed each day in India alone--which is exactly how many children die in that country every day.

We all share vulnerability toward disaster and deprivation. No one really knows where the mud is sliding next time, or the earthquake trembling, or the missiles put into action. “Any man’s death diminishes me,” John Donne wrote. Yes, any suffering or neglect or death I choose to turn away from defines me as a human being.