How the other half lives

Whistler Secondary

"How the other half lives" is a phrase that is sometimes used to describe poverty. How the other half lives is sometimes beyond our wildest, or our worst, dreams. Everywhere there are people who live in terrible conditions, but few of us know of the suffering of people in Third-World countries. It’s like they live a world away from us. We may have heard about how these people live in the news, or read about it in magazines, but we still don’t realize how much these people need help. We live in an "80-20" world – twenty per cent of the world’s population gets eighty per cent of the resources and the other eighty per cent of the people get twenty per cent of the resources.

While we buy another purse or bottle of wine, or when we buy another cell phone, or buy ourselves endless bags of chips and junk food, we give no thought to the fact that somewhere, someone doesn’t even have a place to live or a bite to eat. That somewhere people don’t even have the basic elements of life – food, shelter, and safety. That people are dying all the time of things that we could stop so easily if we weren’t so selfish ourselves.

Things like starvation never cross our mind as a threat; we will always have enough food to sustain ourselves. However, in other places, starvation is a common risk. While we stuff ourselves full of unnecessary foods, someone is wishing they could have just one full meal; a meal that will actually stop their pangs of hunger.

We can make that wish come true by sacrificing a few things that are of no need to us whatsoever, to help. All we have to do is share a little of our wealth with those who don’t have enough. It is as simple as sharing a pizza, or a pie – I don’t think you’d feel very good if someone else got all of it and you got none, even though you had every right in the world to have some.

A very good cause to donate some much needed money to is UNICEF. This organization has over 7,000 people stationed in 158 countries. They help children by immunizing them, protecting them from HIV/AIDS, helping those affected by the disease, helping the persecuted, supporting girls’ education, and creating protective environments for children. These children deserve proper care just as much as children here.

For example, one of their more recent projects was building new schools for children in Angola after most of the schools there were destroyed in its civil war. The number of children who don’t attend school from Grades one to four has dropped ninety per cent. Just imagine how many lives that improved. Now those children can have a chance to get somewhere in today’s world, where an education can be vital.

Lately, UNICEF has been helping out in Iraq. Half the population there is under eighteen. The children there are the innocent victims in a world so unlike our own, a world of poverty, land mines, war, and political unrest. Every year, there are many victims of land mines in that country; sometimes children, sometimes parents, leaving children orphans. These young Iraqi inhabitants are also vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.

A quarter of all children under five years of age are malnourished; one in eight children die before they are five. UNICEF is working primarily on women’s rights, child protection, education, nutrition, health, and water sanitation in Iraq. They are delivering medical supplies, water supplies, and high-protein food. However, they can only continue this with your help.

Another place where UNICEF is working is south-east Africa, in countries with large humanitarian problems – Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In the past, there have been serious famines in these places caused by droughts, and fourteen million people (half of them children) are at the risk of starvation.

However, perhaps the biggest problem is HIV/AIDS. Three million people live with the disease in south-east Africa; one in four people there between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine have it. Eleven million children are orphaned by it in Africa, resulting in child-headed households – hundreds of houses are headed by children younger than five.

It seems hard to imagine children doing the chores as well as making money for their siblings’ food and clothes. Households with AIDS result in the income decreasing eighty per cent and the food consumption can drop fifteen to thirty per cent. Many families live on a dollar a day, a shocking difference compared to what we may spend in a day.

As an orphaned boy in Africa said after his mother died of AIDS, following his father, "When my mother died, I thought we’d be in trouble. I was worried about finding food, clothes, and shoes."

This boy, Semelo, could be any nine-year-old, maybe a son or relation. He and his brother were forced to live by themselves with no one to help them. Maybe if people like Semelo’s family had a chance to learn about AIDS prevention, it could help. UNICEF is trying to provide protection for children, water and sanitation, health, nutrition, and education in south-east Africa. However, once again, they can only do this with your help.

That’s why I encourage you to think about these people who are in desperate need of help. So next time you are about to buy a pair of designer jeans for one hundred dollars, ponder whether your money could be better spent. After all, there are other jeans that are much cheaper and just as nice. Maybe think about people in places with practically no clothes at all. Because we aren’t being very fair about our pizza.