Up until just over a year ago, before I was given the great privilege of becoming a volunteer for UNICEF, I used to be overwhelmed by a sense of desperation and helplessness when watching television and reading about the indescribable misery of the developing world’s children and their mothers. If I feel less helpless today, it’s because I have seen what can be done and what is being done by UNICEF, by all the other agencies, by the churches, by governments and, most of all, by people themselves.
The effect of the monstrous burden of debt has made the poor even poorer and has fallen most heavily on the neediest, and those whom it has damaged the most are the mothers and children. We must do more about the alarming state in which the children in the developing world are only just surviving, especially when we know that the finances needed are minimal compared to the global expenditure of this world; when we know that less than half of one percent of today’s world economy would be the total required to eradicate the worst aspects of poverty and would meet basic human needs over the next 10 years. In other words, there is no deficit in human resources. The deficit is in human will.
The question I’m most frequently asked is: “What do you really do for UNICEF?” Clearly, my task is to inform, to create awareness of the needs of children. To fully understand the problems of the state of the world’s children, it would be nice to be an expert on education, economics, politics, religions, traditions, cultures … I’m none of these things, but I am a mother and will travel.
There is, unhappily, a need for greater advocacy for children—children haunted by malnutrition, disease, and death, and you don’t have to be a financial whizz to look into so many little faces with glazed, diseased eyes to know that this is the result of critical malnutrition, one of the worst symptoms of which is vitamin A deficiency, that causes corneal lesions resulting in partial or total blindness, followed by death within a few weeks. Every year, there are as many as 500,000 such cases in countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and Ethiopia. Today there are in fact two hundred million children at risk of going blind. Little wonder that I and many other UNICEF volunteers travel the world to raise funds before it’s too late, but also to raise awareness and to combat a different kind of darkness—a darkness people find themselves in through lack of information on how easy it is to reach out and help these children. It costs eighty-four cents a year to stop a child from going blind—the price of two vitamin A capsules.
I have known UNICEF for a long time. In fact, almost 45 years ago, I was one of the tens of thousands of children in war-ravaged Europe to receive aid from UNICEF immediately after our liberation, a liberation that freed us from hunger, repression, and constant violence, and we were reduced to near total poverty, as is the developing world today. It is poverty that is at the root of all their suffering—not having the means to help themselves, and that is what UNICEF is all about: helping people to help themselves, giving them the aid to develop, and thereby allowing them to become self-reliant and live in dignity.
Unlike droughts, floods, or earthquakes, the tragedy of poverty cannot easily be captured by the media and brought to the attention of the worldwide public. It is happening not in any one particular place, but in slums and shanties and neglected rural communities across two continents. It is happening not at any one particular time but over long years of increasing poverty, which have not been featured in the nightly news but which have changed the lives of many millions of people.
UNICEF’s business is children, not the workings of the international economy. In its everyday work in over 100 developing nations, UNICEF is brought up against the face of today’s international economic problems which is not seen in the corridors of financial power, not reflected in the statistics of debt service ratios, not seated at the conference tables of debt negotiations. It is in the face of a child. It is the young child whose growing mind and body is susceptible to permanent damage from even temporary deprivation. The human brain and body are formed within the first five years of life and there is no second chance. It is the young child whose individual development today and whose social contribution tomorrow are being shaped by the economics of now. It is the young child who is paying the highest of all prices.
If we are meant to “love thy (your) neighbour as thyself”, then surely we should love these children as our own. Children are our most vital resource, our hope for the future. Children cannot wait. They are too fragile to wait for an economic crisis to pass. Their time is running out. We must help them now not only to survive, but to hope and perhaps even to dream. Every child has a right to health, to tenderness, and to life.
Thank you!