Everyone can help kids avoid preventable deaths

by Catherine Glenn Foster, 1L
Law Weekly
April 7, 2009

“I learned in my childhood in Africa that a child may be born in poverty but poverty is never born in a child. The worst aspects of poverty are not the deplorable outward conditions, but rather the erosion and eventual destruction of hope and therefore dreams.” Too Small To Ignore, Dr. Wess Stafford

Thirty thousand. That number could be considered huge … or quite small, depending on your perspective. If you are talking about population, that is the size of a small town. In regard to time, 30,000 seconds is actually only a little over eight hours.

Thirty thousand grains of sand wouldn't get you very far in building a sand castle. However, if you received a $30,000 raise, you might go out and celebrate. But here's another perspective: 30,000 is the number of children under age five who die every day from a preventable cause.

That's right … every day. That's like thirty large elementary schools disappearing from the face of the earth on Monday … and again on Tuesday … and so on — weekends, too. That’s twenty-one a minute, and nearly eleven million a year.

What's stealing the future from so many children? It's not some mysterious plague or natural disaster. We're talking about things like malaria, diarrhea, measles and unclean water. Malnutrition accounts for more than 8,000 of them.

What's unconscionable is that nearly every one of those deaths could be prevented for as little as $1 per child. Yes, Washington DC (and America in general) has issues that monopolize the news, like the rising cost of housing, politics, and traffic delays. But we rarely hear about something as devastating as tens of thousands of children dying in suffering every day as we go about our daily routines.

Most of these poverty-stricken children live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Of the 1.8 billion children in developing countries, 600 million of them (1/3) live in poverty: on less than U.S. $1 a day. UNICEF defines “extreme poverty” as “two or more deprivations in the areas of health, education, nutrition, shelter or other needs critical to survival and development,” and that certainly applies to these children, of whom one in three lacks adequate shelter, one in five lacks safe (and adequate) water, and one in seven lacks health care.

As Dr. Stafford wrote, “Some people think the earth can’t keep up with the food needs of its population. That is not true. In fact, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declared at a World Food Summit in Rome that the planet could produce enough food for every one of us to have a daily diet of 2,720 calories.”

But many people just don’t have access to this food.I’ve seen some of these children in extreme poverty; I’m sure that many of you have, too. I’ve seen a crippled father struggling to put a roof (any roof, even one with holes) over his boys’ heads at night. I’ve seen beautiful children wandering among filth, with dirty clothes and blank stares. The family in panic, facing eviction from their home, which most closely resembled a rotted shed. The mother with her babies, huddling on the street under a blanket.

And I’ve seen the pride in a father’s eyes as he spoke of his children’s achievements and of the long hours, the eighteen-hour days, he worked to provide rice for them. I remember holding children’s hands and showing them how to play, and the kiss from that homeless mother when I gave her my bottle of water.

Studying and working at Georgetown Law, it can be easy to limit ourselves. Many of us tend to think in broad terms, addressing issues through policy or trials – and they certainly have their place. But we as individuals are capable of doing more, of taking a holistic approach, of tackling these issues head-on, of changing the life of one child, or two.

We’re capable of giving a child, and a family, hope. Dr. Stafford wrote that “[t]he likelihood of a little Haitian child making it to his or her fifth birthday is so small that many parents do not even entrust their child with a name until then. They refer to the toddler as ti chape, ‘my little escapee.’ In other words, this little one has dodged death up to now, but who knows if he will actually survive? So why bother giving him a real name? We can always do that later, if needed.”

You can help that child, giving him or her a fighting chance of seeing a fifth birthday.

It's time we started demanding more of ourselves. I would like to urge the Georgetown Law community to educate themselves beyond the issues within our borders. Find out what's going on in the rest of the world and then take a step to do something about it. A good place to start is compassion.com/youcan. There are practical ways we can all get involved in the fight against poverty. Thirty thousand. What does that number mean to you now?