| I didn't know what the word "genocide" meant until
I got to college. Somehow during high school lessons about the Holocaust the
word had either not been mentioned or had failed to attract my notice. During my freshman year at the University
of Oklahoma, I was walking to class
when I saw a banner proclaiming, "Stop Genocide in Darfur."
I didn't know where Darfur was, much less what was going
on there, so even if I had known what genocide was I didn't know what I could
do to stop it.
But as soon as I got back to my dorm room I sat in front of my computer and
googled genocide. Wikipedia informed me that it is "the deliberate and
systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group." I found
out that genocide is the word for what Hitler did in World War II. I read, for
the first time in my life, about what happened in Rwanda
in 1994. Wikipedia even told me a little bit about the conflict currently going
on in Darfur, Sudan.
Before college Africa was simply a continent on a map, a
place where my older brother had gone on a safari, where lions roam free, but
otherwise it held little significance to me. From the moment I saw that sign on
my way to class, blindly asking for someone to stop the genocide in Darfur,
I became aware of a world outside my own. Up until that point I had been told
virtually nothing of modern third-world countries, where poverty is the norm,
diseases run unchecked, and people have known little peace. But over the course
of the next few semesters my eyes were opened wide to the plight of Africa.
Soon after seeing that sign I wrote a series of papers on HIV/AIDS. When I
chose this topic for my papers I had no idea that it would largely lead me to
the same region the banner did. I discovered that 63% of people living with HIV
are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006, 2.8 million adults and children in
Sub-Saharan Africa were newly infected by HIV on top of the 24.7 million in the
region already living with the disease. More than 12 million children have been
orphaned by AIDS.
The prevalence of the disease in other countries is hardly comparable to the
size of the epidemic in Africa. The problem in Africa is
exacerbated by poor government infrastructure that provides little in the way
of health care or knowledge and prevention techniques the people affected by
the disease need.
In doing research on my HIV/AIDS papers, I found out more about the general
poverty in Africa. The bottom 25 spots of the United
Nations quality of life index are regularly filled by African nations. There is
a lack of clean drinking water or sufficient food, and no way for the people to
get it.
That same semester I was learning more about war and disease in Africa,
I was introduced to an organization called Invisible Children. A friend invited
me to go to a screening of a documentary called "Invisible Children."
I didn't know what it was about. My friend was not able to give me a
clear idea either, but I went anyway.
I discovered there is a civil war going on in the Acholi region of Uganda.
The war began as one fought among adults, but all too quickly children got
caught in the middle. Tired of the war and disillusioned with the cause, adults
stopped joining the rebel army. The rebels then began to abduct children and
force them to fight and kill, specifically males seven to twelve years of age,
because they are old enough to hold a gun, yet young enough to be forced into
submission.
As I watched the documentary, with its unforgiving images of hundreds of
children huddled together hiding from the rebel armies, and brutal first-hand
testimonies of children who were captured but escaped, I was touched in a way
none of my research and statistics and facts had managed to affect me. I also
discovered a basic truth: every child should have the simple freedom to grow up
with hope, and without fear.
I realize there are children in America
who live in poverty and fear. I know that many do not have the opportunity for
a decent education and hundreds live without real shelter. But the fact is we
cannot wait for the United States
to become a wholly educated, uniformly wealthy nation, where children know only
peace and happiness, because it will never happen. We cannot wait for things to
get better here before we try to help others.
As humans, we simply cannot continue to ignore the plight of Africa.
The wars, genocide, disease, and poverty barely skim the surface of its
problems.
There is no easy solution for any of the problems raging in Africa,
or the rest of the world. But I believe that many of us living in the relative
comfort of our first-class, industrialized society are simply ignorant to much
of the world. People need to be made aware of what is going on, and until they
are nothing is going to be done and no aid is going to Africa.
This is not the job of Americans alone; it is the duty of mankind. But as a
world-power and one of the most respected countries in the world, the United
States is in the best position to do
something about it. Until the American people let the governments know they
care, the American government and United Nations will largely ignore the plight
of Africa.
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