Children

“Every 2.2 seconds, a child loses a parent due to war, natural disaster, poverty, disease and other causes. Today, there are 133 million children who have lost one or both of their parents, and 15 million are orphaned due to AIDS.”

This week is World Orphan Week (October 5-11, 2008), and in support of the week SOS Children’s Villages-USA has launched a new child welfare centered project. The project is an online video contest, which SOS established to aid in increase the visibility of the issues faced by orphaned children.

The contest runs from September 2 to October 5, 2008, the winner will be announced Tuesday, October 21. The contest winner will recieve $1000, their video will get exposure on the SOS-USA Web site and SOS’ Facebook and MySpace pages, as well as being featured in an announcement on mediabistro.com, the official video contest partner. The full contest rules and all details can be found at www.WowUs.org.

In addition to the video contest, SOS is rallying US citizens to sign a petition to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This petition will be directly delivered to the next president of the United States.

The worlds orphans often remain voiceless and marganalized, however World Orphan Weeks seeks to bring their faces out of the shaddows.  Take an opportunity this week to use your resources to aid those children in need by using your skills to create a video to bring awareness to the issues that plauge millions of orphans, sponsor a child or orphanage, donate your time and volunteer to work with orphans, or better yet look into adoption and share your love with a child in need.

YEMEN: Protecting women, children from violence
A Netherlands-funded project is aiming to provide better protection for women and children exposed to violence and sexual abuse. In June 2008 Interior Ministry statistics revealed 2,694 cases of violence against women in 2007, with cases ranging from killing to harassment; 130 women died as a result, 88 of whom were intentionally killed. Across the 2,694 cases, the violence caused 970 injuries. Yemen is ranked bottom among the 128 countries listed in the Global Gender Gap Report issued in 2007 by the World Economic Forum.

In a Fairy-Tale Village, Russian Orphans Thrive
An experimental orphanage in Kitezh is giving Russian children a taste of life’s possibilities and an alternative to the grim, crumbling state institutions where most orphaned Russian children reside. The community’s founders hope their efforts will serve as a model for reform and can be replicated in other parts of Russia.

VIETNAM: Child-led disaster training saving lives
According to Save the Children’s 2008 report, In the Face of Disaster, Children and Climate Change, In the Face of Disaster, Children and Climate Change more than 50 percent of those affected by natural disasters worldwide are children. In addition to the threat of death, they are much more at risk than adults to water-borne diseases and by the loss of adequate sanitation facilities. In Vietnam, Save the Children’s Child-Led Disaster Risk Reduction (CLDRR) programs have been operating for more than five years in seven provinces with more than 600 children in 30 schools have been trained.

PAKISTAN: The darker side of glittering bangles
Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the Muslim month of fasting, provides an annual boost for the glass bangles’ industry, but behind the glittering bangles lies another story - one of child labour, poverty, deprivation and hardship. “Usually we work eight or nine hours a day. At busy times like this we work for up to 16,” said Rizwan, as his 11-year-old cousin, Muhammad Fayyaz, looked on. Both boys are from Sahiwal, 160km southwest of Lahore, and were brought to the workshop by a relative. They each earn around 1,000 rupees (about US$13) a month. Pakistan’s huge glass bangle industry is centred on the city of Hyderabad, Sindh Province, and most production is for the domestic market. Dawn newspaper in May 2007 estimated that some 7,000 boys and 3,000 girls worked in the industry nationwide. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons 30,000 families are supported by the industry.

Young Iraqi girls turned into perfect weapon
U.S. and Iraqi officials argue that al-Qaida fighters are forcibly recruiting teenage girls as suicide attackers, drugging them and otherwise duping them into service. Rania Ibrahim Mutlib, a would-be suicide bomber, testifies that she was drugged and tricked into strapping on a vest laden with explosives.

Global leaders pledge $4.5B to send kids to school
A group of governments, humanitarian organizations, philanthropists and U.N. agencies last week pledged to donate $4.5 billion in an effort to enroll all the world’s children in school by 2015. The U.N. set that target in 2000, but the pace so far has not been sufficient to meet that goal.

LIBERIA: FGM continues in rural secrecy
Thousands of young girls annually prepare for their initiation into a women’s secret association, Sande Society, which operates mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. As part of their initiation, young women take a vow of secrecy after weeks of training in the forest, promising not to not tell uninitiated girls or men what happens to them, to assume new names, and to have their clitorises cut off - known as female genital mutilation (FGM) - according to women in the secret society. About half of Liberia’s some 16 ethnic groups, including the Bassa, Mende, Gola and Kissi, observe the rules of this historically-secret, centuries-old society.

SENEGAL: Malnutrition at crisis level in northeast
Poor rains and rising rice prices have contributed to increasing malnutrition to alarming levels in at least three regions of Senegal. Following a rapid assessment in July 2008 by the UN and the Mnistry of Health, the government has confirmed a malnutrition crisis in three of the five surveyed regions, with the most critical being Matam, where 17 percent of the children surveyed under five years old are malnourished.

AFRICA: Children take on the fight against sexual exploitation
Children should not be seen as victims of sexual exploitation, but rather the front-line fighters against it, said non-profit Save the Children Sweden at a preparatory meeting in Dakar in advance of the World Congress against sexual exploitation of children and adolescents to be held in Rio, Brazil in November 2008. The summit will be co-organised by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and NGO End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT). Up to 22 children from 15 African countries joined human rights groups, child specialists and non-profit organisations to debate how children can take on a bigger role in the fight against exploitation.

KYRGYZSTAN: Community kindergartens fill pre-school education gap
According to the head of the State Committee on Migration and Employment, Aigul Ryskulova, there are more than 400,000 Kyrgyz labour migrants, of whom 300,000 are working in Russia and 80,000 in Kazakhstan. In Soviet times, there was a kindergarten in the village but after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it was closed down. Local children were deprived of any pre-school education for many years. Olga Grebennikova, a spokeswoman for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Kyrgyzstan, told IRIN that about 11 percent of children in the country were attending pre-schools, while in rural areas that rate was between 2 and 6 percent.

UN: Ugandan rebels holding 90 children in DR Congo
The UN says 50 children were seized from a primary school and 40 children were seized from a secondary school by Ugandan rebels, who are holding the children in northern DR Congo. UNICEF has expressed concerns that the children might be impressed into fighting.

Burma’s secret schools of dissent
Political activists have established a network of schools that serve impoverished students and teach unofficial texts. For decades, the most reliable source of unofficial information has been smuggled books or underground discussion groups. Today, many go today to the American Center, a consulate branch that provides outside publications. The schools exist along the border with Thailand, in monasteries, and in jungles occupied by ethnic rebels.

ISRAEL-OPT: Thousands of East Jerusalem children not in school
Thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem do not attend school as there is no room for them in the state school system, parents and rights groups said, adding that the drop-out rate remained the highest in the Israeli school system.

PAKISTAN: Swat conflict takes toll on girls’ education
For the 300,000 children of Swat aged between three and nine, there are 842 boys’ and 490 girls’ government-run primary schools. But only 163,645 boys and 67,606 girls are enrolled at either private or public schools, according to official figures. Even before the destruction of schools began, about 50,000 were unable to get an education due to the scarcity of places.

MYANMAR: Health of cyclone-affected children improves
The health of children under five in cyclone-affected Myanmar is improving, say specialists, despite huge challenges. The nutritional status of children was poor even before Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar, leaving almost 140,000 people dead or missing and affecting 2.4 million people more. Approximately one-third of children in Myanmar are malnourished, and about one-fifth of newborns are underweight, according to this year’s State of the World’s Children report.

AFGHANISTAN: 1.8 million children to be immunised against polio on Peace Day
The Ministry of Public Health, backed by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), is planning to immunise 1.8 million under-fives against polio between 21 and 23 September.

ETHIOPIA: More parents saying no to FGM
“The knowledge [that FGM is harmful] is increasing,” said Abate Gudunfa, head of the Ethiopian National Committee on Traditional Practices (commonly referred to as EGLDAM - its name in Amharic]. A network of 40 NGOs, including EGLDAM, the government and international organisations, are involved in anti-FGM campaigns in Ethiopia. Policies have also been reviewed to ensure participants are punished. A 2007 survey conducted by EGLDAM found that prevalence across the country had dropped from 61 percent in 1997 to 46 percent.

KENYA: Young girls the new bait for fishermen
Jaboya (a customer who is also a lover), the only way for fish traders to make a living, some say and now there is stiff competition for a catch that is often less than plentiful means offering their own bodies is no longer enough, so desperate traders have now resorted to making available their younger, more nubile relatives - many of them under 18 years of age - to ensure they have an edge. The updated version of the jaboya system puts a new generation in the crosshairs of the pandemic, local health workers say. Nyanza Province has an HIV prevalence of 15.3 percent, the country’s highest. According to statistics from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, prevalence among Kenyan fisher folk reached 30.5 percent in 2006.

RWANDA: Vulnerable children living on the margins
“There are at least 2.8 million vulnerable children in the country,” said Gisele Rutayisire, the officer in charge of social protection and governance for child rights with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Kigali. An estimated 100,000 Rwandan households are headed by children. “There is a lot of vulnerability not only for children whose parents died in the genocide but also those whose parents are in prison as well as unaccompanied returnee children,” Rutayisire added.

NEPAL: Concern rising over illegal adoptions
A recent report, A study on inter-country adoption and its influence on child protection in Nepal by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Swiss NGO for child relief, Terre des hommes Foundation (TDH), revealed that the sale, abduction and trafficking of children was taking place in an under-regulated environment. The 62-page report was the result of six-month study conducted by researchers from a national NGO, the Centre for Research on Environment, Health and Population Activities and child rights advocates in Nepal.

VIETNAM: Dramatic rise in child abuse cases
A Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA), surveys indicate that the number of reported cases is skyrocketing. Statistics released by MOLISA on 22 August in a preliminary report available only in Vietnamese show violence against children in the home tripled between 2005 and 2007. Violence committed by teachers against children increased 13 times.

ETHIOPIA: Families hard hit by food crisis
Mothers and children are being targeted as Ethiopia battles mass hunger. Drought, a shortage of resources and the global food crisis are helping drive hunger and malnutrition as Ethiopia faces one of the world’s most severe food crises. About 1.6 million mothers and almost 6 million children are receiving emergency food supplies through the United Nations World Food Programme’s targeted supplementary program.

China Admits Building Flaws in Quake
Authorities concede China school construction was sub-par and at fault in the death of school children during the quake related collapse. For the first time since grieving parents and rights activists demanded an explanation for the collapse of dozens of school buildings in China’s May earthquake, Chinese authorities have admitted the rush to build amid the country’s economic boom may have led to shoddy construction practices.

PAKISTAN: Traditional birth attendants can curb maternal and infant mortality
Pakistan is working to train traditional birth attendants to help reduce the country’s high mortality levels.  Dozens of traditional birth attendants in Pakistan are getting medical training under a local aid group program to help reduce the country’s maternal and infant mortality rates. Traditional methods, such as putting cow dung on the umbilical cord to promote healing, have been found to contribute to health problems.

Child malnutrition crisis in rural Zimbabwe, say aid agencies
Aid agencies which have been allowed to resume work in Zimbabwe have reported a dramatic increase in malnutrition in rural provinces which were at the heart of the recent election violence… The government announced last week that it would lift a five-month-old ban on aid work in rural communities, imposed after Mr Mugabe accused agencies of backing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. On Thursday, the Red Cross federation made an urgent appeal for almost $27m (£15m), saying the food security situation was likely to be the worst on record because of rocketing inflation and Zimbabwe’s shortage of foreign currency.

5 Afghan children killed in raids
Five more Afghan children died as a result of two separate NATO and U.S. military actions Monday. Dozens of Afghan civilians, many of them children, have died in recent weeks, inflaming tensions and leading President Hamid Karzai to demand changes to how foreign troops operate on Afghan soil.

UN urges Nepal to free children from Maoist camps
Nepal’s Maoist-led government should immediately move to free thousands of former child soldiers still living in camps, Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, said Tuesday. Coomaraswamy is seeking access for the UN to ensure the children’s recovery and reintegration rights are respected.

“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.” - George Bernard Shaw

GLOBAL: Food wasted is water lost
To meet growing food demand, in another 40 years the world would need enough water to fill at least three lakes the size of Victoria, Africa’s largest body of water, according to a projection in a new policy brief. Lake Victoria’s estimated volume is 2,750 km3.  In Saving Water: From Field to Fork – Curbing Losses and Wastage in the Food Chain, a policy brief by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), projected food and cereal demand could double by 2050, and the world would need 10,000 to 13,500 km3/year of water supply to keep up with production requirements.

BURUNDI: FAO predicts serious food shortages
Parts of eastern and southern Burundi are threatened with acute food shortages following low agricultural yields compounded by an influx of returning refugees, an official of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said.

ETHIOPIA: Families hard hit by food crisis
Sir John Holmes, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said of the crisis; “Ethiopia is facing a food crisis that is one of the worst in the world, especially in terms of malnutrition among children,” he said. “It is important that we make every effort to deal quickly and comprehensively with this tragedy.”  Approximately 75,000 Ethiopian children have been directly affected by the drought and are at risk of severe acute malnutrition, while 4.6 million people throughout the country are receiving emergency food aid.  According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the situation has worsened due to a shortage of emergency resources including ready-to-use therapeutic food, emergency relief food and other critical supplies.

MADAGASCAR: Growing food in the off-season
A US$500,000 project by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is using Madagascar’s agricultural off-season to decrease food aid dependency and offset the effects of high food prices. The FAO launched an emergency Technical Cooperation Project in July to provide rice seed, bean seed and fertilisers to about 6,000 farmers and their families, targeting households hit hard by the recent cyclones that destroyed 80 percent of the last harvest, when people consumed seed supplies as food.

Somalia: Street children increase as food insecurity grips region
Food insecurity compounded by inflation and recent fighting between insurgents and government forces around the town of Beletweyne in central Somalia’s Hiran region has led to a sharp increase in the number of street children.

SOUTH AFRICA: Food security under threat
South Africans’ food security - particularly the urban and rural poor, is under threat as they grapple with the highest food inflation rate in five years, according to the government’s advisory body on agricultural marketing. From July 2007 to July 2008 the year-on-year increase in the Consumer Price Index for Food was 17.8 percent, the National Agricultural Marketing Council’s quarterly food price monitor noted. “This is the highest rate of food inflation experienced in the country since January 2003.”

Sri Lanka: One in four children under-nourished
The Demographic and Health Survey 2006/2007, a draft of which was released by the Health and Nutrition Ministry and the Census and Statistics Department, shows that 22 percent of Sri Lankan children are underweight, 18 percent are stunted and 15 percent show signs of wasting. “These statistics show that one in four children is under-nourished,” said Renuka Jayatissa, medical specialist in charge of nutrition at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “This is despite having all the best nutrition interventions implemented here.”

SRI LANKA: Newly displaced, rising food costs prompt UN, NGO plea for more aid
The rising cost of food and the urgent humanitarian needs of newly displaced people in Sri Lanka’s war-torn districts have forced the UN and other aid organisations to appeal for increased donor funding.

UGANDA: Food crisis looms in the north
Food insecurity in northern Uganda, a region recovering from two decades of conflict, is approaching crisis levels due to a combination of factors, including bad weather and lack of adequate farm inputs, agricultural officials have cautioned.

WEST AFRICA : Do high food prices warrant a cash response?
Experts say many of the right conditions are in place across West Africa to make cash distributions work in the current global food price crisis. Michael O’Donnell, head of hunger reduction for non-governmental organisation (NGO) Save the Children, said “the current food price crisis could be an opportunity for governments to work with NGOs and UN agencies to provide cash transfers to build up stronger social protection systems for the chronically poor.”

ZIMBABWE: Listening for the trucks that will bring the food
The villagers are waiting for the grain the government promised them, but aid agency trucks have not come down the road since a ban was imposed on NGO operations in June. More than five million Zimbabweans will suffer food insecurity by March 2009, according to aid agencies, but many are already experiencing food shortages.

ZIMBABWE: Wild fruits instead of food aid
During the nearly three months that nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in Zimbabwe were banned from operating by President Robert Mugabe’s government, people desperate for food foraged for wild fruits to survive, in some cases with tragic consequences. The fruit’s pulp is separated from the hard seed by pounding it in pestles, but if eaten in excess it can cause extreme constipation, a nurse told IRIN at a nearby referral hospital where the two children were taken.

South Africa to provide vaccinations against child-killing diseases
South Africa will provide children with vaccinations for pneumococcal disease, the major vaccine-preventable cause of death among young children, and rotavirus, a diarrhea that affects almost every child before the age of 3.

Iraqi students exempted from school fees
Jordan has waived annual fees in state-owned schools for Iraqi students to help them cope with rising living costs, a Ministry of Education official said on 26 August.

Northern desert conflict disrupts maternal health care
Since violence broke out again last year, Mahaman Hanissou Ouedraogo, director of the UNFPA Agadez office, says it is hard to reach expecting mothers who live beyond town limits, which is roughly where paved roads end. Access to the mountains, which has been the centre of much of the fighting, is strictly cut off. The most recent information on maternal mortality in Niger was gathered before the latest surge in violence. According to the Niger government, in 2006 about 14,000 women died from pregnancy complications.

WHO: World needs to strengthen life expectancy rates
Social factors have an immense impact on lifespan and health. While life expectancy rates have increased across the globe in the last decade, the world community needs to do more to even the gains, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday. WHO officials are looking to identify ways to address causes of disparities, such as education, access and environment, as a step towards erasing them.

Child malnutrition is an old stain on a new India
Although India has staved off the specter of famine successfully in its bid over recent years to become a greater world power, it is still home to 40% of all the world’s severely malnourished young children. Only Bangladesh and Nepal have higher percentages of underweight children than India, where nearly half (60 million) are malnourished. Experts warn that malnutrition — which has never been treated as a serious concern for policy by India — could threaten to undermine the economic boom that India is currently enjoying.

In India, New Opportunities for Women Draw Anger and Abuse From Men
Harassment of women has increased among the upper middle class in India, where a backlash from men has answered the gains made by progressive women. The shift toward new retail and technology sectors and social mobility has eroded the centrality of the traditional, joint-family structure, freeing young women from the power of the husband and husband’s mother.

Measles Returns
An uptick in measles cases in the U.S., owing to misplaced fears among parents about vaccinations, has led to 15 hospitalizations. As in previous years, most incidents of the disease began when the virus was contracted abroad, but this year it spread more easily — resulting in 131 reported cases among home-schooled children and others who were refused vaccinations due to debunked fears that these vaccinations increase the possibility for autism.

“Just because a child’s parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.” - Marian Wright Edelman, American children’s rights activist and president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Regardless of the reasons, the state, race, religion or social status of a child’s parents, each child should be born into this world with an equal foot and stake in the future. Sadly this is not the reality and millions of children across the globe are marked before birth by the status of their parents. It is this disadvantaged at the beginning of life that leaves many children lost in the grey shadows of an unknown future.

As a child of the 80’s when the word famine is mentioned I can distinctively hear my mother telling me to ear my entire plate of my despised broccoli, because “there are starving children in Ethiopia”. I know wonder if more than 20 years later I will soon find myself uttering those same words at my next meal.

Images of small lifeless children with hallow eyes being weighed in harness scales like the bags of grain they so desperatly need, flood ones mind.   Once again the children of Ethiopia are starving on a grand scale, and the images of the 1980’s haven’t changed, we only see them less.  While they may not be suffering on the immense scale of the 80’s, and be drawing the critical mass cries of support from the international community to bring forth the calls of Live Aid and Band Aid. The famine reached its peak with the drought of 1984, which at its height took more than a million lives. Sadly Ethiopia historically and continually remains one of the world’s most starved nations. The current plight of famine and malnutrition in Ethiopia, which is caused in part by; drought, various natural plagues, a substantial population increase, and the armed conflict in the Somali region; has been compounded by global inflation which has doubled the price of food.

Regardless of the historical famines, the issue today cannot be disregarded as according to UNICEF estimates some 6 million children under five may be at risk of malnutrition in Ethiopia. While Ethiopia became the face of famine for a generation, it is but one country struggling to provide the basic necessities for millions of men, women and children. As sadly the children of Ethiopia are not alone, the exact number of children across the globe who are severely malnourished and undernourished is unknown, however according to the FAO State of Food Insecurity in the World 2006 report, there are some 854 million people around the globe who do not have enough to eat. The fight against famine is global and regardless of what state the crisis is in, millions of children are in critical need of food aid.

According to the Ethiopian government there are 75,000 children suffering from severe malnourishment across the country. At current it is estimated that some 7 million Ethiopians rely on food aid for survival, and while food aid it obviously not new, it is only a band aid to a larger problem. The crisis in Ethiopia, which is significantly affected by the low levels of investment in food deficit areas and skyrocketing food prices, has left an imbalance in the population. As mentioned in Choosing Who to Save, this is causing an uneven balance of the country’s population, leaving urban Ethiopians to benefit at the cost of their rural counterparts. 

What can be done to save the children in Ethiopia from famine? The question still lingers on the tounges of many in the international community, but the answer has yet to be found. 

Some 854 million people around the globe do not have enough to eat, according to the FAO State of Food Insecurity in the World 2006 report. The dilemma on who to save has hit many hard, but as the article, In a time of famine, who should be saved?, illustrates the issue is not just one many families are forced to make, but also governments.

Is the international community spending to much time debating, or wasting aid? Many critics will say “yes” with out skipping a beat, as seen when looking at the US, the number one donor of food aid, as illistrated in U.S. Food Aid: We Pay for Shipping. The Business Week article highlights the effect of sending products over funds, which can significantly add to the detriment of food shortages. Can we afford to take such bureaucratic approach?

The harsh reality is that every five seconds a child dies because she or he is hungry. For many the problem seems distant, but in the wake of the growing food crisis the problem is coming closer and closer to home for many across the globe.  The resources needed to end hunger and malnutrition do exist, however children are still not getting the adequate nutrition they need. While child survival has improved in the last twenty years, the progress remains slow, leaving children to continue to suffer needlessly.  The effects of malnurished mothers are passed onto thier children, as infants are born underweight, under five child mortality rates remain high, and malnurishment and undernurishment are responsible for stunting and mental underdevelopment.

Just this week we saw the World Bank revise poverty figures, to show a substancial increase in the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty, putting the new figure at 1.4 billion.  The Bank’s new numbers come following an adjustment in the deep poverty measure from $1 per day to $1.25 (Times). The World Bank urged the international community to expand the fight against poverty. 

As World Food Day approaches on October 16th, people are left asking what needs to be done and how do we ensure we are on the right road to end hunger for millions of children?  The question remains; Does the International community pick favorites, just as we would when faced with deciding who to help? And if so, how does playing favorites on a global scale affect those waiting for someone to help them? One can only hope that the Committee on World Food Security, which is meeting in connection with World Food Day, from 14 to 17 October 2008, will find answers and solutions to end global hunger.

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Links:
Hunger Facts
World Food Program (WFP)
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
World Food Day
World Food Day USA
Global Crisis in Food Prices Increases Vulnerability of Children - Save the Children

One rarely thinks that Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is a game to be played when looking at the global food crisis, let alone when staring into the eyes of malnourished children. Therefore when you’re faced with immense amounts of people in need, but you can only help a few, who do you, choose to help?

The scale of poverty is global, while the dilemma however is becoming more local and even more personal, as illustrated in the Guardian article today; In a time of famine, who should be saved?. The article illustrates the Ethiopian nations growing disparity and almost seemingly prejuditual food price scale. The questions raised in a time when the food crisis continues to spread across the globe, thus leaves one to ask the very personal question; Could I choose who should be saved?

No one wants to be the savior so to speak, but the reality of it is you cannot save everyone…can you? It brings me back to my first time in Russia in the mid-late 90’s, I was a struggling student I had surely seen people in need and begging on the street, but it was different, I knew they had no other option there was no pension, most I saw were elderly and disabled….and I began to give a bit here and there…all I could think of was how cheap it was (6,000 rubles to a $1, it was less than $3 to get a bottle of good vodka), then one day a friend stopped me and said stop, what are you doing you cant save them all and your going to run out of money over guilt. So I did I stopped, they were right I couldn’t save them all. But if I had begun and had to choose one who would I have chosen? the guy with no legs or arms that marveled me just be the shear fact he managed to get around, the old woman who looked near blind with the small disabled child, the old man who tried to sing sweet songs but was never on key?

Thinking back I am not sure I could have picked and if I had begun that way maybe I would have never even tried to save anyone so to speak. So if I were lined up in front of a bunch of starving children would I be able to choose if I were forced to play favorites?

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