Global Poverty Monitor

The nurse explained to us that the babies are fed milk, but if they have diahorrea, they are given milk without lactose if it is available (it was not available today), but otherwise they are given a fish broth with rice. The mothers are also educated about nutrition for their babies, and are encouraged to go back to traditional foods, like giving fruit after every meal, to provide their babies with the essential vitamins and minerals to order to combat malnutrition.

The reality of the situation is that these children will not survive to leave the hospital. It was plain to see the children today that were nearing death, with their weights so far below the normal healthy weight range that they could never recover. In Australia we call this palliative care – aimed simply at making life more comfortable for the patient and the family while the patient dies. This was more severe than palliative care in Australia, since in Australia we have the equipment and medicines available to attempt to combat the disease, or at least painkillers to make life more comfortable. These children had no access to machinery or drugs – the hospital was more like a hostel for dying babies.

The confusing part about the visit to the hospital is that these was no clear answer for me about what can be done to help the situation. In the case of child sponsorship, is it plain to see what sponsorship does to the life of a child. I have noticed such an enormous change in Kantet since I began sponsoring him: even just by his letters I can tell that his confidence is soaring along with his education, and that he had clear goals for life and a strong belief that he can attain them – and he’s only 11. I then started sponsoring Gift because I couldn’t stand the thought of this 13 year old boy becoming 14, 15 and 16, and then being too old to be part of the sponsorship program, and never knowing that there is someone out there, in a totally different world, who cares about what happens to you and wants to make your life better. The confusing and frustrating thing about the hospital is that there really is nothing we can do to help the situation. We threw around ideas like sending toys from Australia, buying toys while in Mozambique, sending money for toys, even sending money for paint for the walls. But what does this really do? These children are still going to die from HIV/AIDS, even if we succeed in doing all of those things. Clearly the hospital has needs that we can supply, and that I feel I have a duty to supply since I have seen it with my own eyes. So I’ll save up and fundraise and send money for toys, blankets, milk without lactose, and everything else the hospital needs. But these needs are almost superficial, in that they do nothing to solve the problem, not even in the smallest of ways. They only work to solve *our* problem – that we’ve seen this most horrific sight and want to do something to make it not seem so horrific, to make us feel better about ignoring the real problem. If anything, the start to the real long-term solution would be to leave the hospital exactly as it is, and get every person in the world to spend a day there, or even only an hour like we did. Maybe we all need shock treatment to finally understand that there is an enormous problem that we must deal with. But what we can say is that we, the study tour winners have seen it, and that we have the most supreme duty to do something about it. I wish we could have taken pictures in the hospital – its images like we saw today that the world needs to see to understand what we are being forced to understand. So what can we do, we who have seen it and who now have a moral duty to act? Is it educating the people at home, in the first world countries, about the problem? Is it educating the people in the affected countries about how to protect themselves and their children? Is it working towards making ARVs available and affordable for everyone, and making AIDS testing a regular part of everyone’s life? Whatever it is, it needs to be started now, and we need to understand that there will be no short term satisfaction as there is with child sponsorship, but it still desperately needs to be done.