We can all do our share to end poverty
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
My first real encounter with poverty was with Angie Calis in a tiny shack on a hillside in the Olongapo cemetery in the Philippines where I was a newly-arrived Irish missionary.
One day, I was called to bless a dead baby and comfort the mother. There, in a hovel of misery and despair, I found the most unforgettable sight that changed me profoundly.
Angie fled the hunger of her village to the city and was forced into prostitution. Once pregnant, she was thrown out of a sex club onto the street when she refused to abort her baby. The only people who accepted her were the dead. Angie wept over the decaying corpse of her three-year-old child, dead from malnutrition.
The child was laid in an empty carton a makeshift coffin; her white dress was made of crepe paper the only shroud of dignity her mother could give her. I was greeted in the darkness of the hovel by a candle and a flower plucked from the cemetery, a jam-jar with a few coins from her equally poor neighbors.
I was shocked. I was expected to bless the baby but not question the reasons for her death. There and then I vowed to question everything and learn what caused such suffering and fight it however I could.
That was 35 years ago. Now poverty rules the world and 25,000 people are dying every day from poverty and related sickness. And yet there is far greater wealth, more food, and medicines in the world than ever before. It is not available for those who need it most because they cant pay for it.
Greed is the master of millions and none exemplifies it more than pharmaceutical companies. They charge astronomical prices and block cheap versions of drugs that could save lives.
Despite all the public promises of the rich leaders to do right, secretly they are doing the opposite. The EU is about to dump hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar on the world market at such low subsidized prices that the income of the poor sugar farmers of Central America and the Philippines will collapse.
African farmers produce the highest quality cotton in the world but cannot sell it because subsidized US cotton is dumped below cost price, wiping out the poor. That's how the poor get poorer. On top of this, these poor countries have been lured and corrupted into taking out huge loans to build useless infrastructure with the help of international contractors and foreign consultants. And what aid the rich give the poor? Usually too little, too late.
Can we live decent lives if we allow this terrible situation of injustice and human suffering to continue? We can all do our share to persuade our politicians to do justice to the developing world and drop the subsidies and really cancel the debt.
They must share the incredible wealth they control but have no right to own alone. All of us can do our bit by helping charities with their great work of saving the poor and opposing the causes of poverty. [End]
