Abigail Lucas
10/16/09
1:21 pm
Poverty and drought are challenging to international aid agencies and the governments of East Africa in efforts to help save the lives of so many malnourished victims. The rain has been scarce for the past three years causing lake beds to dry up. The Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said “There are always malnourished children somewhere in Ethiopia every year.” Every day nurses see new cases of malnourished patients, they treat the ones they can and send the severely ill patients to hospitals. Ethiopia is rapidly expanding a network of community health centers, which according to Ted Chaiban are saving 40,000 lives a year. But Supplies for these centers are currently short. The World Food Program estimates that it needs an additional 120 thousand tons to meet the nutrition needs through the end of the year; the government estimates that 6.2 million people will need food aid in the next few months. Tadesse Bekele Ethiopia’s disaster relief agency chief says that children are dying of complications of malnutrition including TB but they will not accept that children will die of simple malnutrition. “There may be deaths because of health issues but no one should die because of lack of food” says Bekele.
After taking a break from this story for a couple of weeks I was interested to see if it had rained yet. While this has been a sad story to follow in has been encouraging to see the organizations that are trying to help, however with the amount of people being affected growing it is getting harder to get enough supplies to help everyone that has been affected. I definitely agree with Tadesse Bekele’s statement “There may be deaths because of health issues but no one should die because of lack of food”.
http://english.cctv.com/program/worldwidewatch/20091013/104478.shtml
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-10-15-voa37.cfm
3 comments:
I wrote on a similar issue, that 1 billion people are in hunger around the world. During hard times, such as this economic crisis, we need to face who it is really hitting the hardest. Governments have stopped investing as much money in foreign aid and are pouring it back into their own country which is just hitting those developing countries even harder. Its a very sad situation.
This is a very sad situation and I agree that we need to refocus on helping those that are really being affected the most. With all of the money circulating around this world, no one should have to go hungry.
Joy Weems
I agree wsith the quote also. Why are people deing becaused of lack of food, I feel as though that should never be a cause of death. Not when there are other nations that have obesity as a problem. If governments across the world can stop focusing on trying to control other terrotories and worry about their own countries maybe some of these issues could not only be addressed but takin care of.
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