The Worst Place In the World To Be A Kid
Read Time:1 Minute, 8 Second
This country is filthy rich, yet most people live in crushing poverty.
by TakePart News Editor Shaya Tayefe Mohajer. Reprinted here with permission.
Getting inside Angola is no easy task for a journalist. It took five years for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to get the appropriate visa, but the rare trip proved worth the wait. In this video, Kristof reveals that most people there struggle with poverty even as the country is awash in oil wealth.
Angola—a country Kristof describes as “laden with oil, diamonds, Porsche-driving millionaires and toddlers starving to death”—is the world’s worst country in which to grow up.
One in five children doesn’t live to see his or her fifth birthday in the Southern African nation of 19 million. That’s the highest child mortality rate in the world.
What’s killing these kids, figuratively speaking, is corruption. There is money in Angola, but it does not appear to help the people. Officials pocket health care funds, leaving clinics ill-equipped for basic treatment. Even at the clinics, the corruption continues: Doctors and nurses have been known to steal medicine to sell on the black market. Kristof encountered antimalarial medicines being sold on the street and had them traced to learn that they had been donated to Angola by the manufacturer, Novartis.
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Oh Bill, what a pessimistic worldview :-(, possibly right, but pessimistic nonetheless!
On the other hand, I would like to hope that although nature and history are against it, we can use those “smart brains” to overcome! I am hoping that the currency of greatness will become that of a great brain and intelligence which have helped us get to where we are amongst animals of the world! We clearly still have an awful lot to do! We still have a lot of training that we need to do our brain and intelligence, to help us become what we want to (and think we deserve to) be! That seems to be where the US was going in the 60s and 70s (although possibly for the wrong reasons) but that was hijacked by greed and money and power! And we still have a lot of inherent and instinctive things to fight, not the least of which is religion combined with superstition (okay, it’s redundant…). But we need to stop thinking about “who’s the strongest in muscle or money”, and start thinking about “who has the potential to help us?” For the most part, that means kids, younger people! We need to stop worrying about whether a couple of cells are human, and start fighting for the actual children of society!
I know, I am more than just an optimist, in a lot of ways I’m an idealist, but I like to think that I am also a realist. We CAN do this, but it’s awfully slow! Worldwide starvation and poverty are at record lows, but they’re still way too high! And the US appears to be doing its best to make things worse, but that’s probably just a prejudiced statement (because I detest most things about our current government, and at least 4/9 of the Supreme Court, but I won’t get into that!!) We definitely need to come together, as a worldwide community, and start supporting PEOPLE!
I think we’ve had ample opportunity to come together and we’ve squandered them. I firmly believe it’s too late. Now that’s pessimism 🙂
I find it interesting that, here late in the day on Sunday, we have no comments at all. Of course it does not surprise me. We, in this country and around the world have become accustom to stories involving the masses of people living on a thread because of the monstrous greed of only a few. It no longer has any shock value and though the majority of people in this country, and perhaps the world, would like to change this situation we know we cannot. Because we cannot correct these problems we have become numb to these pictures and stories of the starving children in Africa and, indeed, starving children in America as well. It is such a sharp contrast to the hopes and dream of those who settled this land that the America that was once dreamed about will never exist. It was just a pipe dream anyway.
It is ironic that people wish to hearken back to the earliest days of America and our so called founding fathers and their dreams and aspirations, all the while they were here to grab free land and become wealthy. There was every intent to have a tiered class system from the beginning. This was not because of evil thoughts on their part, it was because they were following somewhat of an instinctual pattern of behavior. I am not sure anyone knows exactly when it started for sure but the development of humans, like the development of other animals, called for an some orderly structure and groupings. Most all animals tend to some type of social or herding structure. Members of our closest Animal relative, the Great Apes have almost exactly the same type of social structuring that humans do with one minor difference. The Great Apes allow their leader to be self appointed if he is strong enough to conquer the current leader. We mimic that in a way these days but allowing money to take the place of brute strength. So in many ways we are like our animal cousins. Greed and money becomes the brute strength and power and those with less of it fall down to the bottom and become the starving people. In between are the workers who actually keep the process going, sort of like worker bees.
So, for all that we believe that we have accomplished with our superior intelligence and technology, were are still, at our base, just following the same natural pattern of nature. Become strong or useful to survive or die.
This story got virtually no activity on FB either Bill. I think it’s as you said: people have become inured to the sight of starving children. How sad.