Resolved to Help the Children

YESTERDAY 40,000 children under the age of five died in developing countries. Another 40,000 will die today. Another 40,000 tomorrow. Most of these deaths could be prevented.

For years this situation has been called the “silent emergency” or the “quiet catastrophe,” meaning that it has largely escaped world attention. “If 40,000 spotted owls were dying every day, there would be outrage. But 40,000 children are dying, and it’s hardly noticed,” lamented Peter Teeley, a U.S. spokesman at the UN World Summit for Children held at UN headquarters in New York in 1990.

The summit, some feel, may eventually change all of that. Top officials, including 71 heads of State, attended from 159 countries. Together they represented 99 percent of the world’s population. The mood was summed up by Mikhail Gorbachev, who said: “Mankind can no longer put up with the fact that millions of children die every year.”

In the days leading up to the summit, the world showed its support. Literally hundreds of national and community meetings, seminars, workshops, and debates focused on the plight of children. Over a million people in 80 countries lit candles to symbolize their hope that despite the problems and dangers ahead, the world could be made a better place.

The final day of the summit was hailed by UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) as “perhaps the most momentous day ever for children around the world.” Why such enthusiasm? Because world leaders had adopted a concrete “Plan of Action” to reduce the suffering and death of youngsters throughout the earth.

Admittedly, the history of conference diplomacy is rife with broken promises. Yet, many sensed a new spirit of sincerity and cooperation as a result of the end of the Cold War. James Grant, UNICEF’s executive director, enthusiastically stated: “The heads of State and Government took, in effect, the first step toward establishing the well-​being of all people​—of ‘grown-​up children’ as well as children—​as the central objective of development in a new world order.”

Indeed, within a year following the summit, most nations had already drawn up national plans to implement the summit resolutions. This prompted Director Grant to say: “We now see a very realistic prospect that health for all children will be achieved by the year 2000.”

But just what is the plight of the children, the world’s shameful family secret, that has been exposed by the international media? Is there now, in the post-​Cold War atmosphere of international cooperation, sound reason to believe that the United Nations will spearhead a marvelous new world order? Can we realistically hope for a bright future for our children? The next two articles will consider these questions.

Children in Crisis

A boy, age 12, toils 11 hours a day breaking rocks in a quarry in India. He earns 85 cents (U.S.) a day.

A girl, ten, sells her body in a Bangkok brothel. She is not there because she wants to be. Her father sold her for $400.

A young soldier, ten, helps to man a roadblock in an African country. A machine gun hangs from his shoulder; he passes time smoking marijuana.

SUCH situations are all too common in the developing nations. Children in crisis number into the millions. Seven million languish in refugee camps; 30 million wander the streets homeless; 80 million between the ages of 10 and 14 labor at jobs that cripple their normal development; well over 100 million face death in this decade for want of food, clean water, and health care.

Consider just a few of the problems facing children around the globe.

Disease

About 8,000 children die each day because they have not been vaccinated against such diseases as measles and whooping cough. An additional 7,000 die daily because their parents do not know how to deal with the dehydration that results from diarrhea. Every day another 7,000 children die because they are not given a dollar’s worth of antibiotics to fight against respiratory infections.

For years medicines and therapies have been available to prevent or cure many of the illnesses that have long scourged the human family. But they have not reached millions who need them. As a result, during the past two decades, about a hundred million children perished from diarrheic and respiratory diseases alone. “It is as if a cure had finally been found for cancer but then little used for 20 years,” bemoaned UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 1990.

Despite the grim situation, progress has been made. For example, UNICEF and WHO (World Health Organization) have pursued a vigorous campaign of immunization. In 1991 it was announced that 80 percent of the world’s children had been immunized against the six vaccine-​preventable diseases​—measles, tetanus, diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, and whooping cough. Together with parallel efforts in the control of diarrheic diseases, this has resulted in the saving of several million young lives each year.

But in recent years another disease​—AIDS—​has emerged to threaten and possibly even reverse all the progress made in African child survival over the past decade. During the decade of the 90’s, as many as 2.7 million youngsters may die from AIDS in Africa alone. By the year 2000, an additional three million to five million children in Central and East Africa may be orphaned because their parents died of AIDS.

Malnutrition

All of us are painfully familiar with the tragic pictures of starving children with skeletonlike bodies, bloated bellies, and dull eyes staring at nothing. Those pathetic youngsters represent just the tip of the iceberg of malnutrition. Throughout the developing world, about 177 million children​—1 in 3—​go to bed hungry. And their number is increasing.

Persistent malnutrition prevents children from reaching their full mental and physical potential. Most malnourished children are frail, listless, lackluster-​eyed, and apathetic. They play less and learn slower than well-​fed children. They are also more susceptible to infection, a major factor that contributes to about a third of the 14 million child deaths in developing countries every year.

Just as modern science has produced medicines to fight disease, so it has also made it possible to produce and deliver more than enough food to feed everyone on earth. But there are no quick fixes for malnutrition. It cannot be eliminated by food shipments and vitamin pills. Its roots lie in relentless poverty, widespread ignorance, unclean water, unsanitary conditions, and lack of farmland in poverty-​stricken areas.

Environmental Problems

As the global environmental crisis deepens, it is children who are most vulnerable. Consider air pollution. Under age three a child at rest inhales proportionally twice as much air, and with it twice as much pollution, as does a resting adult. And since children do not yet have fully developed kidneys, livers, and enzyme systems, they are not able to process pollutants as efficiently as adults can.

Children thus suffer more harm than adults do from lead additives in gasoline and from gases such as carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, and sulfur dioxide. This vulnerability contributes directly to the death of the more than 4.2 million children under five years of age who die of respiratory infections each year in developing countries. Many of the survivors grow up with respiratory diseases that plague them for the rest of their lives.

Since they are still growing physically, children are also more vulnerable to the effects of improper diet than are adults. In country after country, children are the big losers as forests shrink, deserts grow, and overworked farmland erodes, becomes tired, and produces less and less food. In Africa alone about 39 million children have had their growth stunted because of poor nutrition.

Adding to the problem is the severe shortage of good water. Throughout the developing world, only half of the children have access to clean drinking water, and even fewer have access to sanitary waste-​disposal facilities.

War

In times past, most war victims were soldiers. No longer. Since the second world war, 80 percent of the 20 million killed and 60 million wounded in various conflicts have been civilians​—mostly women and children. At one stage during the 1980’s, 25 children in Africa were dying every hour as a result of such conflicts! Countless numbers of children have been killed, wounded, abandoned, orphaned, or taken hostage.

The millions of children who are now growing up in refugee camps are often deprived of identity and nationality as well as of adequate food, health care, and education. Many find it impossible to acquire skills that will earn them a place in society.

But children are not merely victims of wars; they are also fighters of wars. In recent years 200,000 youngsters under 15 years of age have been recruited, armed, and trained to kill. Among them were those who lost life or limbs as they obeyed orders to open pathways through fields of land mines.

Child Exploitation

Throughout the developing world, poverty causes parents to sell their children for next to nothing in order to stave off hunger or to pay their debts. What happens to these youngsters? Some are forced into prostitution or into slavery in squalid sweatshops. Others are resold for up to $10,000 by middlemen or Western-​based adoption agencies.

Indications show that child prostitution is on the increase and involves ever younger children, both boys and girls. In Brazil alone, there are thought to be as many as 500,000 teenage prostitutes. Child pornography is also thriving and has been given a boost by easily available video equipment.

Priorities

It is difficult to comprehend the pain and the anguish behind the statistics. Mercifully, we cannot grasp suffering by the millions or by the thousands. Yet, many of us are aware of how terrible it is to observe the suffering or the death of just one child​—a person with his or her own unique personality, a soul precious to God, an individual with just as much right to live and thrive as anyone else.

Without spending much time considering the unpleasant question of why the situation of children is in its present state, the delegates to the World Summit for Children spoke confidently about the future and vowed to tolerate the situation no longer. Their “Plan of Action” resolved, among other things, to achieve the following goals by the year 2000:

◻ To reduce the under-​five child mortality rates of the year 1990 by one third.

◻ To reduce severe and moderate malnutrition among under-​five children to one half of 1990 levels.

◻ To provide universal access to safe drinking water and to sanitary means of excreta disposal.

◻ To protect children in especially difficult circumstances, particularly in situations of armed conflict.

The additional cost of programs to bring about the goals that could prevent the deaths of 50 million children in the 1990’s has been estimated at $2.5 billion per year.

That is not big money in global terms. In one year American companies spend $2.5 billion on cigarette advertisements. In one day the world spends $2.5 billion on the military.

Presently, military expenditures​—conservatively estimated by the United Nations to be over $1 trillion annually—​exceed the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity. The diversion of even 5 percent of this vast sum would be enough to speed up progress toward reaching the summit goals. For example, the price tag of a single F/​A-18 fighter jet (over $30 million) is equal to the cost of enough vaccines to protect 400 million children against killer diseases.

The nations are able to meet the ambitious goals set out at the summit. They have the knowledge, the technology, and the money. The question remains, Will they?

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Combating Malnutrition

Six Points Parents Should Know

1. Breast milk alone is the best possible food for the first four to six months of a child’s life. It provides complete nutrition and immunizes the child against common infections.

2. By the age of four to six months, the child needs other foods. Introducing solid foods earlier increases the risk of infection; introducing them later leads to malnutrition.

3. A child under three years of age needs to be fed twice as often as an adult, with smaller amounts of more energy-​rich food.

4. Food and drink should not be withheld when a child is ill or has diarrhea.

5. After an illness, a child needs an extra meal a day for a week to catch up on the growth lost.

6. At least two years between births is essential for the nutritional health of both mother and child.

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Source: United Nations Children Fund

UNICEF/​C/​91/ Roger Lemoyne

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Only half the developing world’s children have access to clean drinking water

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UNICEF/​3893/89/ Maggie Murray-​Lee

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Each child, with it’s unique personality, is precious to God and has as much right to thrive as anyone else

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Photo: Cristina Solé/​Godo-​Foto

A Bright Future for Children

AT THE World Summit for Children, many world leaders spoke confidently about the future. They predicted “a new era” for children, “a new dedication to the needs of the child.” They spoke of “‘a new solidarity’ giving ‘life to a united and determined world coalition’” to help the children.

Those are noble words. But just how far the nations will go toward achieving their goals remains to be seen. It is worth noting that within five months of the summit, the nations fought in the Persian Gulf a war that proved to be one of the most expensive​—$61 billion—​and environmentally destructive ever. In its aftermath hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Kuwait were displaced. Thousands perished​—at one stage hundreds of people every day—​from starvation, exposure, malnutrition, and disease. About 8 in 10 were women and children.

Woes Foretold

Students of God’s Word are aware that the problems afflicting the world’s children were foretold nearly two thousand years ago. The Bible prophesied of these “last days”:

◻ “There will be . . . pestilences.” ​—Luke 21:11.

◻ “There will be food shortages.” ​—Matthew 24:7.

◻ “[Men will be] ruining the earth.”​—Revelation 11:18.

◻ “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.”​—Mark 13:8.

◻ “Critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, . . . having no natural affection.”​—2 Timothy 3:1-3.

The Bible also foretold that the time is soon coming when the nations will think they are making enough headway in patching up mankind’s problems that they will proclaim: “Peace and security!”​—1 Thessalonians 5:3.

A Bright Future

That proclamation, however, will actually signal the time for God’s intervention in the affairs of mankind. By means of his heavenly Kingdom, God will remove this present system of things and usher in a new world of true peace and lasting security, for children as well as for adults.​—Proverbs 2:21, 22; Daniel 2:44; Matthew 6:10.

Under God’s magnificent Kingdom arrangement, “no resident will say: ‘I am sick.’” (Isaiah 33:24) Malnutrition will be a thing of the past: “There will come to be plenty of grain on the earth; on the top of the mountains there will be an overflow.” (Psalm 72:16) Even war will be no more, for the Bible promises: “[Jehovah] is making wars to cease to the extremity of the earth.”​—Psalm 46:9.

But what of all the children​—and others—​who have already died from malnutrition, disease, or other causes? God’s inspired Word declares: “There is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous.”​—Acts 24:15.

When he was on earth, Jesus Christ demonstrated that the resurrection to life on earth in God’s new world would include young ones. For example, when a girl about 12 years old died, “people were all weeping and beating themselves in grief for her.” But then, taking the hand of the youngster, Jesus said to her: “Girl, get up!” The historical account relates: “She rose instantly, and he ordered something to be given her to eat.” What was the reaction of her parents? The Bible reports: “They were beside themselves with great ecstasy.”​—Luke 8:40-42, 49-56; Mark 5:42.

On another occasion, Jesus met a funeral procession involving a widow whose only-​begotten son had died. Jesus “approached and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still, and he said: ‘Young man, I say to you, Get up!’ And the dead man sat up and started to speak, and he [Jesus] gave him to his mother.” Those who were nearby “began to glorify God.”​—Luke 7:11-16.

Thus, under the righteous rulership of God’s Kingdom government, children, including those resurrected, will have the brightest future possible. They will be able to grow up in a world of righteousness and peace so beautiful, so secure, so prosperous, that Jesus quite aptly calls it “Paradise.”​—Luke 23:43.

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In God’s new world, children will grow up secure, healthy, and happy