Gifts
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By MARGARET LARSON
[Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in The Seattle Times]
The thread of humanity that binds us all together seemed somehow stronger and more visible in the days after the horrific South Asia tsunami. An unprecedented outpouring of compassion from countries across the globe, we all hope, signals an ability to rise above the conflicts of our time to respond to such enormous need.
The question now is how to harness this collective energy and guide it toward solutions for the other "tsunamis" that go unchecked around the world. It is the challenge of our generation.
Arriving in Indonesia on New Year's Eve to work with the aid agency Mercy Corps and marking the beginning of 2005 among the ruins of Banda Aceh, the "ground zero" of the tsunami, I couldn't find words to describe the scope of destruction, the loss of human life, the grief and trauma.
Holding hands with a mother who'd lost her 7-year-old and 9-year-old in the horrific onslaught of the sea, I struggled for even the smallest way to offer consolation. The pain in her eyes was searing and unforgettable, and is multiplied thousands of times over by the survivors of this calamity in 12 countries on two continents.
And still, every day we are reminded that this level of suffering is all too ordinary. Most notably, international inattention to the acute poverty, disease and conflict on the continent of Africa is what British Prime Minister Tony Blair has called "a scar on the conscience of the world."
Half of the people in sub-Saharan Africa live on less than a dollar a day, one in five children dies before their fifth birthday, and about a third of Africa's population goes hungry.
With only 10 percent of the world's people, Africa is home to more than 60 percent of the world's AIDS victims. Largely ignored conflicts in the Congo and Uganda have killed millions of people, displaced millions of others, and feature rape, sexual slavery and forced child-soldiering as the spoils of war. What the U.S. has called genocide rolls on in Sudan. There aren't enough tears in the world to measure up to the horror.
Last November, during a trip organized by the Federal Way-based humanitarian organization World Vision, I visited Uganda and Tanzania, to document programs there for HIV/AIDS patients and child soldiers.
In Northern Uganda, where an 18-year-long civil war has raged, I met former child soldiers who had escaped from the rebel insurgency. More than 20,000 children have been kidnapped and forced to fight over the years by the troops of a quasi-religious/political leader named Joseph Kony. Those fortunate enough to run away bear the physical and emotional scars for a lifetime.
I will never forget the 14-year-old former "commander" who dispassionately described beating to death two men with a piece of wood, the 11-year-old with a leg missing from combat, a toddler expertly playing with a stick as though it were a rifle.
In our world of Amber Alerts and exhaustive efforts to find missing children, we know little of the thousands and thousands of Ugandan children who have died, been abducted, and to this day suffer incomprehensible cruelties in a hideous war they are forced to fight.
In both Uganda and Tanzania, as elsewhere in Africa, thousands of traumatized children are raising themselves because of AIDS. The epidemic has wiped out a generation of adults who would have been the farmers, teachers, parents, providers. Now, it is common to see small children as heads of households. World Vision estimates that children in Africa are orphaned by AIDS every 14 seconds.
In the Rakai district of Uganda, I met 11-year-old Peter. He'd cared for his mother until her death of AIDS last October. Now he lives in a 10-by-14-foot mud house with his 14-year-old mentally disabled sister, trying to attend school when he can and scraping enough food from the ground to keep them both alive. Peter is a beautiful kid, fragile but astonishingly brave. His world is cruel beyond words.
It's tempting to turn away from such overwhelming problems, but as the saying goes, "failure is not an option." Our humanity is on the line, as well as the world's security and prosperity. We must broaden the goodwill of the world toward the tsunami survivors to the cause of the millions who suffer silently.
That will mean a greater commitment of aid in general, not just a reshuffling of dollars from one tragedy to another. The United Nations World Food Program says donors have given nothing for food aid in Southern Africa since the tsunami crisis. We must do better than that. Our generation's critical challenge is to recognize that thread of humanity that binds us all, honor it, and never lose sight of it again.
Margaret Larson is a veteran broadcast journalist, formerly with NBC News and KING-TV, now a communications consultant for international aid agencies and nonprofit and public-policy groups.
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