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Where the Spotlight Shines

Yesterday I received an email from a friend in Rwanda. She's an Australian nurse and is both administering medical care and training community health workers in neighboring states. It's an essential role in an area with high medical needs and severely limited medical input.

Her news that she was being reassigned to Haiti brought me to a question, not about her circumstance, but a general trend to redirect resources in a crisis away from long-term crisis areas.

As someone who moved to the Indian 'Tsunami Coast' to help rebuild, I have a high value for responding to human need in a crises. How can we not respond when there is such catastrophe and suffering? At the same time, I'm also aware that the dramatic effect of a sudden disaster oftentimes redirects resources away from other areas facing crises of far greater magnitude.

Approximately 200 000 people were killed and 1.5 million were made homeless by the January 12th quake in Haiti. We all have the responsibility to help. Yet at the exact same time 25 000 children (aged 0-5) die per day because of poverty in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

UNICEF comments: They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”

Whilst schools have been destroyed by earthquakes and floods and tsunamis in recent years, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world don't get to go to school at all.

Disasters reap sickness and disease which requires medical care. At the sames time treatable diseases in some of the world's poorest places wipe out generations. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria worldwide, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide. Two thirds of the number of homeless in Haiti are equivalent to the number who die needlessly of malaria every year.

Access to clean water and adequate sanitation is desperately needed in the aftermath of disaster. At the same time elsewhere, some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. There are approximately 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea.

For all those left in extreme living conditions after disasters, 640 million children elsewhere are also without adequate shelter.

And the list goes on...

Is this a reason to not help in times of crisis and disaster? Of course not. It's our nature and our responsibility to help. But we must also realize that crises of greater magnitude are going on every day in long-forgotten corners of the planet and every time we redirect resources away from them towards highly visible sudden need, we are making a choice between people's lives.

It's our privilege and responsibility to help in times of unavoidable disaster. It is also our privilege and our absolute responsibility to help with ongoing crises that are absolutely preventable.

Maybe we need to increase our monthly giving to see an end to poverty and injustice, maybe we need to support a child, or campaign parliament, or reduce our contribution to climate change, buy fair-trade-organic or even give time and skills to go and build infrastructure. We need to be as committed to helping ongoing crises as we are to those that show up in the headlines.

Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child on earth into school by the year 2000. It didn’t happen.

Sarah Bainbridge is a vital part of the Living Generously team. She liaises with Charities, writes articles and develops the project! Sarah has spent time in India working with communities impacted by the Tsunami  and is passionate about social justice. Currently living in California, Sarah loves life, lakes and coffee...not necessarily in that order!

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