Here’s an email I sent to World Vision:
The response…
Over 10 million children die per year from “preventable deaths”. While this is more believeable than 10 million dieing from starvation, is it really true? It just seems so shockingly high to me, and why haven’t measures been taken to correct it?
Well, a million of those will be from malaria, and I imagine a fair percent of the 2 million that die each year from TB are young–TB in Africa, at least, is an teen disease. Another million die from Shigella infection (dysentry), 330,000 from AIDS . . .there are lots of diseases out there.
Very believable. Hell, maybe even a bit low. The number one kills of children are malaria and dysentery, both of which are fairly preventable and easily treated. And these things are everywhere.
In Cameroon, most women I knew had around ten kids. Most expected to lose 2-3 of them. But I know people who have lost eight kids. Children died all the time. Mostly malaria. Everyone gets malaria- usually their first round will be at around two years old. Malaria is a very fatal disease and wreaks hell on the body. If you survive it, you’ll probably survive the subsequent bouts that plague people for their entire lives in malarial zones. But a good chunk of people don’t survive their first bout. So really, when people have kids, they don’t consider them to be a permanent thing until they’ve got through their first bout of malaria.
Malaria can be controlled by sleeping under mosquito nets and controlling insects. Most countries have mosquito net programs, but it can be hard to convince people to use them because they are hot and annoying, and malaria seems so inevitable. DDT is making a comeback for controlling insects, but the moment is pretty much gone. We lost our chance to eradicate malaria, and it has been getting worse and worse with each decade. If we want to make any real progress we will need a massive and expensive worldwide effort.
Dysentery is just diarrhea. In a kid, that can kill you in a day if it’s not managed right. You get it from dirty water. If you do get it, it is essential to keep hydrated. Unfortunately this often means you end up drinking more dirty water and get sicker. There are effective treatments (like oral re hydration salts) but most people don’t know how to use them or where to get them.
Once again, there are countless NGOs working on creating clean water supplies, teaching people water safety and basic care. But the people who have these problems are often remote and poorly educated and it is damn hard to get the message through.
As for starvation, next to nobody dies from direct starvation. But millions of children have massive and chronic malnutrition that makes them much more susceptible to other diseases. Usually because they don’t get enough protein or other high-quality foods in their diet- most kids I knew in Cameroon subsisted 80% off millet, and the rest was just the random occasional treat.
Sad world, huh?
What’s amazing to me is that you sent a note with a specific question, and they actually came back with an answer to the specific question you asked.
I looked up child mortality on Wikipedia, and the numbers are worse than I would have guessed. The one that struck me the most was that 1 in 6 children in Sub-Saharan Africa die before age five.
Sad. Know what’s also preventable? Having children. I admit I harbor some cultural ignorance regarding sub-saharan Africa and therefore can only speculate on why the breeding continues in the face of such horrific odds, but many of these preventable child deaths are also preventable by not having the kids in the first place, I think.
The horrific odds may be why the breeding continues…sometimes in those kinds of conditions people have large families in hopes that a few will survive.
Yes. These people don’t have pension plans for their old age: they hope that their (surviving) children will support them when they are too old to work.
Because voluntary extinction just isn’t a very popular philosophy? I hope you realise that your idea is equivalent to telling the people of (for example, since it was mentioned) Cameroon that they should stop existing, that they should just allow their culture(s) and ethnicity(s) to cease existing. It might seem like a good idea to you, but I doubt you’re going to convince much of anyone.
It’s a bit like abstinence only sex education, actually: while it is 100% true that if teens just wouldn’t have sex, they wouldn’t get STDs or unwanted pregnancies. But they’ll still have sex. It’s also true that if poor people wouldn’t have children, said children wouldn’t die. But they’re still going to have children.
In a sustenance farming society, having more children dramatically raises the standard of living. The more people you have to work the fields, the better everyone eats. One person can barely raise enough food for one person, but ten people can raise the food for twenty. Furthermore, if you can raise one child who goes on to find a job with a real income, the whole family will benefit. There are no IRAs in these places. Your kids are your only hope for being able to survive in your old age. To be childless in these societies has the same drastic effects as choosing not work in our society. It would doom you to a life of poverty and dependence.
As people move into urban settings, having many kids goes from being a benefit to being a liability. And people’s behavior reflects that within a generation or so. Many of the people of my slowly developing city expressed the desire to have less children than their parents had. One of the big problems in much of Africa is that they are in a time of transition, and the thing that used to work well don’t work well now, and the newer things aren’t quite making life better yet.
Anyway, our ancestors did the same thing when they were dirt-poor farmers.
People have children because they have sex.
Here’s a chart for under-5 mortality from WHO.
All true enough. I hadn’t considered the farming angle, but I’m not sure that’s exactly germane to the Africa issue, seeing as there’s not a lot of farmable land, but as far as hunting and gathering, the more the merrier, so to speak.
I don’t mean to come off as crass and of course I’m not in the situation so I can only provide an outsiders view, but if hundreds of generations have passed without much cultural improvement or evolution, is there truly a reason to sustain that culture simply because it’s always been that way? Of course, life is life is life, but there has to be something more to it than that.
As humans evolve, we grow, change, move on, it seems like the rest of the world has changed but Africa has stayed its course, taking only the worst of western influences (guns, drugs, money) and generally ignoring (by lack of knowledge or lack of desire) the positive influences of the west such as medicine, infrastructure and commerce.
It frustrates me that the cradle of humanity hasn’t come in some 10,000 years as far as the rest of the world has come in the last 2,000. I suppose though if Africa were a rich, fertile, and relatively safe place, it would be wall-to-wall Taco Bells and Costco’s, except for the occasional elephant in the cooler at quiznos, everything would be the same as it is here, and on some level, I’m not sure that’s better.
That’s remarkably germane to the Africa issue. Most Africans make their living from subsistence farming.
From Wiki:
Africa has LOTS of arable land.
Thanks for the responses, guys.
Why has the world community failed these children so badly? Is the task too great? Is it logistically impossible?
Consider my ignorance fought. Thanks.
Well, there are a few ways to think about this. One is time. Sixty years ago, Europe was a mass of starvation, genocide and war. One hundred years ago, child labor was common, infectious plagues swept through the land, and life in general sucked for most people. It’s not like this stuff is unknown to us. But through industrialization we’ve pretty much eliminated it. Some places haven’t industrialized yet- for a variety of reasons. Hopefully in the future they will industrialize or will find some other way to develop. But most of Africa only achieved independence in the 1960s. These things take time.
Another is governments. A lot of these countries just have crappy governments that have no interest in raising the living standards of their people. Why these governments continue is a matter of debate, but it’s well proven that a good government can do a lot to fix these things, even in a short time. The number on thing holding development back is bad governments.
Another is scope and will. It is a big problem, and really not a lot of the people that matter (governments, etc.) care much. Foreign aid gets used as a diplomatic tool and often never reaches the poor. Businesses like having places they can operate outside of the laws of developed countries. In the end people do stuff that benefits them, and to some degree having impoverished nations benefits some important powers.
Regarding family planning issues: Please note that, if memory serves, the Bush government pushed for pulling funding to some organizations, internationally, if they encouraged certain types of education for family planning in Africa and other developing nations. Thanks, G’dub et al!
This is also true of many Christian/Conservative “relief” organizations working there. It causes significant problems. Groups like Doctors Without Borders, at least, go out there trying to educate people (women especially) about caring for their babies, birth control, and for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HEALTHY AND HOLY, the use of condoms to hopefully help prevent the further spread of the AIDS virus in sub-Saharan Africa.
I hate to be the one to defend Bush, but actually Bush’s record in Africa is one of the few things he can be proud of (well, besides sending the CIA to Timbuktu- really!- but you can’t win them all.) This article explains a bit about why is so popular, even among Muslims in Africa. Everyone I knew hated the war in Iraq, and loved Clinton for his personality, but had to admit that Bush did more for African than any serving American president.
Yeah, the abortion thing is dumb. But in practical terms it means next to nothing. People whose kids die from a lack of three dollar malaria meds are not going to go get a surgical abortion, even if the idea was remotely a part of their cultural world (which, in general, it’s not.)
Where I lived, there was moderate access to birth control. All young people knew how to use condoms and several NGOs worked to make sure they were widely available. I was surprised when I gave my first condom demo and asked for a volunteer to try it on the banana, and a 15 year old girl in Muslim veils came up and put it right on with well rehearsed commentary. The Catholics, surprisingly, were the most with it. Everyone had heard this as often as American schoolchildren heard “Just say No.”
In more remote villages, it was a bit harder. It’s hard to emphasize how slow information moves when you don’t have books, newspapers, school or television. Although there was free or reasonably priced access to other forms of birth control, many people either didn’t know about them or couldn’t afford the week’s salary and days of transport it’d take to get to the nearest hospital. There were tons of NGOs dedicated to getting the message out, but we are talking about places that are just so spread out.
My area had around 300,000 people in it, but most of these lived in remote homesteads that were easily five hours on a dirt motorcycle path from the nearest thing that could be called a town. And on top of that they probably speak a language that doesn’t even have words for AIDS and condom. Nobody has the resources to really reach all those people. But there are people trying. The local anti-AIDS youth club I worked with personally knocked on the door of over 20,000 households to give basic presentations and do surveys on malaria prevention. Most of the missionaries I knew were genuinely good people who put their community above their beliefs. There are a lot of good people- mostly Africans- dedicating their lives to this stuff.
Anyway, the saying is that children are Africa’s wealth. A lot of people don’t have careers (they grow their own food and make everything else they need), vacations to look forward to, books to read, movies to watch, fancy food to eat, or really much to look forward to at all. But they do have their children. Their children are their worth, their pride, their security, their income, their dreams and their life. This will change. But you know, I kind of think the world will lose something when it does.
I disagree. If the only thing that’s worthwhile in your life is the idea of children, you may as well just kill yourself now, because those children will in turn grow up and all THEY have to look forward to is their children, and so on and so on in a never ending cycle. If lifes only purpose is to perpetuate itself despite all the suffering that ensues because of that perpetuation, what’s the point? Are we just salmon, living to spawn and die?