(The Nationalist, March 2006)
In the world:
- One child in seven has no health care. Imagine having no access to a doctor or nurse. So parents do what they can. If that isn’t effective, a child may die.
- One child in six is severely hungry. Imagine your child being constantly hungry, rarely full.
- One child in five has no safe drinking water. Rivers are often sewers, dumps – and drinking water sources. Dirty water means diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera or typhus.
- One child in three has no toilet facilities at home. Shared toilets may mean shared germs. Who takes responsibility for a toilet shared between a street?
- Over 640 million children live in dwellings with mud floors or extreme over-crowding. Mud floors, especially in wet weather and an absence of footwear, mean colds and infection. Extreme over-crowding may mean a family in one room.
- 240 million children world-wide are labourers. 14% of Nicaragua’s children are forced to work 10 hours a day. Watch the Trócaire advert on TV.180 million children work in the worst forms of child labour. For example:
Mining: children’s bodies are small, and can get into parts men can’t reach;
Carrying water: fill a 20 litre bucket with water – it weighs 20 kilos – then carry it. Try it on your head.
Portering for soldiers: carrying their pack or weapon, doing cooking and cleaning; providing sex. - 120 million children, most of them girls, never attend primary school. That means no reading, writing, or arithmetic. In the race of life, they are tripped up before it starts.
- 2 million children, mostly girls, are exploited in the sex industry. That means sleeplessness, hunger, beatings, rape, sexually-transmitted infection, and the prospect of early death.
- 1.6 million children were killed in war during the 1990’s. During the civil war in El Salvador, some 80% of the soldiers were under 18 years of age.
- 21 children die every minute of preventable poverty-related illnesses. An example is diarrhoea. We’ve all had a dose of the runs, and it didn’t do us lasting harm. We can buy a packet of oral rehydration salts in any pharmacy. Ordinary salt and clean drinking water can alleviate the effects of diarrhoea, preventing a child being drained of bodily fluids. But when I was in Zambia, salt was a luxury.
How many minutes have passed since you began reading this article? Multiply that number by 21, and you have the number of children who have died in that time of preventable illnesses.
We have a choice: to do nothing or do something. Something isn’t everything, but it is better than nothing, isn’t it?
For those in a hurry: ‘The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or not a Christian at all’. (Karl Rahner)