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EDITORIAL Millions of the worlds children are
desperate
Christians regard the birth of a
child into poverty some 2,000 years ago as one of the pivot points of human
history. As such, followers of Jesus have reason to feel a special solidarity
with todays children of poverty, a sensitivity that should be most acute
in the Christmas season.
In that light, the most recent annual report on children and
poverty from the United Nations Childrens Fund -- UNICEF -- deserves to
be at the heart of Christmas reflection in Christian churches and homes. It
concludes that in 1999, 11 million children under the age of 5 died from causes
traceable to poverty, most in Africa, and many from illnesses easily
preventable with the right combination of hygiene and medicine. The numbers are
harrowing: 30,500 children under 5 die every day, representing 1,270 child
fatalities every hour, 21 every minute, or one every three seconds.
Malnutrition retards the growth of 177 million children in this
world, and some 2.4 billion people, including roughly a billion children, do
not have access to safe drinking water.
According to the UNICEF report, the countries with the highest
rates of child mortality are almost all in Africa: Sierra Leone, Angola, Niger,
Afghanistan, Liberia, Mali, Malawi, Somalia, Congo and Mozambique. Not
coincidentally, several of those countries are currently locked in wars that,
while reflecting local causes, are also to a significant degree sustained by
Western economic and political interests. In Angola and the Congo, for example,
large swaths of both countries are under the control of rebel forces largely
financed by the illegal sale of diamonds to Western consumers.
UNICEF concludes that in 1998, 1.2 billion people lived on less
than a dollar a day, including 500 million children. In many developing
nations, funds needed for public health, education, and improvements in the
infrastructure are instead absorbed in debt repayment. Despite the mythology
that Africa drains Western resources, the fact of the matter is just the
opposite: When one combines debt repayment and trade imbalances, for every one
Western dollar that flows into Africa, three move from Africa to the West. In
real dollars, between 1980 and 1996 Africa paid off more than double its
external debt, and yet found itself three times as impoverished.
AIDS is making child poverty more acute. There are currently 1.3
million HIV-positive children under 15. By the end of 2001, there will be 13
million children in the world orphaned because of AIDS (there are already 10
million who have lost at least one parent to the disease).
War is also part of the picture. Today there are 20 million child
refugees generated by armed conflicts. In the last 10 years, 2 million children
have been killed in war, 6 million gravely injured, and 12 million made
permanently homeless.
While the worst problems are obviously in the developing world,
the United States is not immune. According to the UNICEF report, 17 percent of
the child population in America lives in poverty.
In presenting the report, UNICEF officials argued that for every
dollar invested in the physical and cognitive development of children,
societies eventually recoup seven dollars they do not have to spend on
emergency health care, social services and prisons. In that context, UNICEF is
launching an effort to raise $207 million to assist children in zones of crisis
such as Afghanistan, where only one child in three goes to school on a regular
basis, and Angola, where three in 10 die before reaching the age of 5.
This UNICEF effort is urgently needed and merits support. But one
hopes that its cost/benefit analysis will not be necessary to jar the Christian
conscience, shaped as it should be by the memory of a lone, fragile child born
into a working-class family on the edge of a vast global empire, quickly made a
refugee by political upheaval. If faith calls Christians to anything in this
world, it should be to action on behalf of todays holy
innocents.
National Catholic Reporter, December 22,
2000
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