Thinking About the Future of Children
“Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for our children.”
-Chief Sitting Bull (Lakota Indian Chief)
The future of the worlds children is in all our hands, it is not for one alone to strive to see that the children of today and tomorrow are given the lives they deserve. As a global community we must come together as one, united for a better world…a better future for all children, then and only then can we create the best future for our children.
They say that two heads are better than one, imagine the the lives we could create for the worlds children if we truly worked together as a global community to ensure that all children are brought up in a world where poverty, discrimination, slavery, preventable disease, conflict and war, are not part of their future.
Yes, even if we work together, we are a long way off from a world free of pain and anguish for our children. However we sit here in a world riddled by preventable diseases, gender discrimination, low literacy rates, child soldiers, child labor…and we can work together to change these for the better. While the root cause to most of our worlds evils is poverty, we can work to increase education and advocacy…we can work for empowerment. Empowerment is the true key to the future for the worlds children and their families.
While aid programs are indeed necessary and vital, we must see that the aid and support we are giving is not only suited to the situation and culture at hand, but sustainable. We can not apply a band-aid to the future and pray that it fixes itself, meaning one cannot just toss aid at people without looking at what they really need and what will really assist them in the future. Therefore we must look at each situation, culture and climate individually and provide sustainable development programs. For example we can not put into place job skills programs such as sewing if there is no market or the market is saturated, we cannot put the same literacy programs into place for children and adults, etc. So let us not look to give people aid, but give them empowerment and no longer look at development as helping the week, but giving resources and empowerment to the strong. This is the lives that we must create for out children.