Issue and Action: Child Survival

Today I received a link to the 2009 letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have been consistently impressed with the types of projects the Foundation takes on--and I love their motto, "All Lives Have Equal Value"--so I enjoyed reading Bill Gates's open letter describing the Foundation's successes and failures over the past year. You can read the full text of the letter here.

I was especially interested in the segment on preventing childhood deaths. This is a big deal to me. Some days I wake up and look at my one-year-old daughter and feel overcome with gratitude that she is still here with me; I often feel hyper-conscious of the nearly 11 million children who die before reaching the age of five every year. That's 29,000 children a day (21 children every second) who die, mainly of preventable causes. Every one of those children is as real and warm and tangible to their parents as my daughter is to me. This graph (from the letter) gives a breakdown of the causes of these childhood deaths:



As you can see in the graph, more than half of the child deaths are caused by diarrheal diseases and dehydration, pneumonia and malaria. All these illnesses are preventable and treatable. Sometimes Westerners are surprised to hear about the gravity of diarrhea, in particular, in less-developed regions of the world, but for children who are undernourished and continually exposed to risk factors (like unclean water supplies) these diseases can be death sentences.

Here's some good news: Child mortality rates is one area where great progress has been made over the past 50 years. Here's another graph from Bill Gates' letter:



Amazing, right? The rate of childhood deaths has been cut in half, thanks to fifty years of hard work by many individuals, communities, organizations and entities. What this statistic says to me is that we have the technology and experience to completely eliminate preventable childhood deaths. Diarrheal dehydration can be eliminated when communities have access to clean water supplies, when breastfeeding is encouraged, and when simple rehydration strategies are employed for children who have diarrhea. Pneumonia can be prevented through adequate nutrition and improved sanitation, and the treatment for pneumonia is well-established, which makes it a question of making that treatment easily accessible for all the world's families. And malaria can be prevented with the use of treated mosquito nets and antimalarial medications, as well as vector control. Treatment for malaria exists but needs to be made more widely available in order to save more people's lives.

One of my favorite initiatives to decrease child mortality rates is UNICEF's "I Believe in Zero" campaign. The idea is that with adequate resources and political will, we can improve distribution of existing technologies to ensure that ZERO children die of preventable diseases. Visit the website to sign a petition to President Obama, donate to the cause, and recruit your friends and associates (by putting a collection canister on your desk at work, or putting a banner or widget on your website or Facebook page, or getting the word out to your local media).

Please click here to sign a petition indicating your support for a Presidential Initiative to Accelerate Child Survival.

Then click here to access information about the Global Child Survival Act (introduced in the House and the Senate, H.R. 2266 and S. 1418). From the website you can send letters to your Senator and Representative.

And while you're at it, why not click here to access information about a host of other children's issues that you can become involved in? The U.S. Fund for UNICEF website makes it easy to lobby your officials and speak our on issues that are important to you because they are important to children.

I believe in zero. I hope you do, too.

Book Review: Hungry Planet

I have a new obsession: the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio. I had seen these photographs before: families from countries around the world photographed with a week's worth of food. They include photos like this one, from India:

This one, from the United States (Texas):

And this one, from Mali:


You can see more of the photos here and here.

But I really recommend getting your hands on the book; check your local library. In addition to the photographs and captions--which break down the total amount of money spent on food weekly, by food groups--the book also includes essays about each family included in the book and statistics about each country. There are also essays by such luminaries as Michael Pollan, plus recipes from each of the countries.

On one level, this book is a visual feast, a foray through countries and cultures. (In addition to the photographs of individual families, there are tons of gorgeous photos from each featured country.) But on a deeper level, this book is also a dip into some big and crucial global issues: global inequity in the distribution of resources, the very real existence of hunger in people's daily lives, the global coexistence of malnutrition and overnutrition, and the way changing eating patterns and food-marketing patterns are contributing to an increase in diseases like diabetes and cancer. It's eye-opening to think about where each of us would fit into this global portrait, and what that really means.

Book Review: Mountains Beyond Mountains

I have a new hero; his name is Paul Farmer. After reading this book by Tracy Kidder (the full title is Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, I have a sense of Paul Farmer as being a kind of edgy, smart-alecky Mother Teresa. With his medical degree from Harvard and a lifelong interest in liberation theology and social justice issues, Farmer established Partners in Health, a non-profit dedicated to providing a preferential option for health care for the poor. Farmer also founded Zanmi Lasante, a health clinic in a poor rural area in Haiti. He is this incredibly intense, focused, and passionate character who has literally given all he has to improving health in less-developed countries. Plus--and I love this--the book describes his efforts to merge medicine and anthropology, in the quest to provide improved health outcomes while still respecting cultures and identities and beliefs. Farmer has done more in his lifetime than I can even comprehend, and Mountains Beyond Mountains takes you around the world with him, from Peru to Russia.

After reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, I am definitely planning on reading some of the books that Farmer has authored (like this one and this one), but I recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's a good introduction to public health issues (particularly tuberculosis and AIDS), and provides a really compelling picture of the way economic inequality translates into increased risk of illness and death for the poor.

By the way, if you live in the Boston area, Dr. Farmer will be speaking at Boston University on January 19 for Martin Luther King Jr Day. Click here for more details about the event. Maybe I'll see you there...

Blogroll

I'm adding a new feature to the already-overly-cluttered sidebar: a blogroll (finally). Let me recommend a few great blogs that focus on international/cultural issues (or just do a really great job of evoking empathy):

Woman Stats. The Woman Stats Project, headed up by Valerie Hudson, one of my favorite and most influential college professors, is "the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world." The whole website is a fantastic resource for information about women's issues around the world, and the blog highlights specific issues and stories from the researchers.

Globo Diplo. This blog, written by Cory Leonard, another faculty member who provided me with lots of guidance and support during my college years, focuses on current events and issues related to international diplomacy.

(How) Culture Matters. Another of Cory's blogs, but this one deals more with culture: cultural sensitivity, cultural communication, and current events related to why and how culture matters.

UNICEF Field Notes. This one contains reports from UNICEF's global field operations on issues related to child survival, health, protection, etc. Really extensive and really important.

Raise Hope for Congo Blog. Updates from Enough's programs on what's happening in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and what you can (should) be doing.

K. Anane Poku's Blog. This one belongs to a classmate of mine who is getting his Masters degree in Intercultural Relations. Thoughts on culture, race, and intercultural communication.

Story Corps Blog. If you're not familiar with NPR's Story Corps program, read more about it here. Then check out this blog for up-close and personal, deeply humanizing glimpses into the lives of strangers.

If you know of another blog that is relevant to Fissures in Reality, please leave a comment with the URL so that I can include it on the blogroll. Eventually I'll be constructing some kind of a links page, with links to organizations and government pages, but for now let's just stick with blogs. One thing at a time :)

Book Review: A Long Way Gone

This week I read Ishmael Beah's book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I really recommend it; it is hard to read, but I think the international community owes it to Beah to read this book, get sensitized, and then get passionate and angry about the fact that children are being used as soldiers in numerous conflicts around the world.

This book provides an up-close look at the plight of child soldiers in the civil war in Sierra Leone (which ended in 2002). The conditions described can probably be generalized to many other child soldiers as well. In the 1990s, Sierra Leone was embroiled in a brutal civil war that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and displaced more than one-third of the country's population. Both government forces and armed rebel groups recruited and forcibly conscripted children into their armed forces. (This practice continues in a number of ongoing conflicts today--see here, here and here for examples.)

When Beah was thirteen years old, he was conscripted into the national army, and went through "training" to become a soldier. Aside from the training in weapons, the children received a steady diet of drugs and Rambo movies (something that makes me feel really ashamed of Hollywood), and then they were thrust into combat and instructed to kill "anything that moved." Symptoms of post-traumatic stress were treated with cocaine and marijuana. For several years, Beah traveled with the army, attacking villages and rebel camps, and killing people in brutal ways. I can't imagine how painful it must have been for Beah to revisit these events in order to write the book. He doesn't flinch. He tells the truth.

At age 16, Beah was removed from the army by UNICEF and placed in a rehabilitation center. After a challenging rehabilitative period, Beah's path took him to testify before the United Nations, meet with international conferences of youth, and ultimately live in the U.S. and attend college here. It's clear, reading the book, that Beah is a naturally gentle and forgiving spirit, and one of the messages of the book is that under certain circumstances, all people are capable of great acts of brutality. Also, under certain circumstances, we are all capable of reclaiming our humanity.

In the end, A Long Way Gone is a harrowing look at the horrific treatment of children involved in conflict situations --and a graphic and heartbreaking look at war in general-- but it is also a story about hope and the power of rehabilitation. In Beah's words, from an occasion when he spoke before the UN Economic and Social Council: "I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experiences is that revenge is not good... If I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end."

You can read more about Beah and the book on his website. I was also interested to read the perspective of the New York Times book review.