At the beginning of the course, I was admittedly ignorant about the effect of poverty around the world. My most frequent reminder that poverty abroad was unfathomable and exponentially worse than I could imagine was the reminders from my grandmother to finish my food because there were starving children in Africa. I also saw Sally Struthers parading her cause on the infomercials of late night television. Being the American Cynic that I prided myself to be, I assumed that the latter was a sensationalized description of one small part of the world in a place so far away that I could comfortably focus on more local issues if any at all.
Session five discusses globalization, the far reaching impact of poverty and the goals set up to reduce poverty in the year 2015. My comfortable lifestyle permits me to be apathetic to the needs away from our shores to date. This education removes the blissful ignorance that I had previously about the global effects of poverty. I could not have even imagined a village devoid of whole generations wiped out by the AIDS pandemic. Neither could I have imagined that Malaria is such a wide scaled killer in a modern society. I realized that it was only foolishness to think that our strong, seemingly civilized society could passively stand by, despite advances in modern medicine, and act as a witness to something as passé as Malaria. This is a disease that is otherwise easily treatable and preventable in other parts of the world. For very few cents on the dollar, providing people with Mosquito netting and inexpensive treatment could be a very easy answer. Drinking water doesn’t seem to be unattainable for the worst of our poverty stricken homeless population in the United States but it remains a commodity in the poverty stricken parts of the planet. It too seems that our reactions to some of the past disasters have been remarkable and worthy of recognition. The world gave enough money to aid in relief during the most recent Indian Ocean Tsunamis to show that the average citizen around the world’s richest countries care enough. However, the care and relief cannot be so instant that we haphazardly ignore long term relief. A long term investment into infrastructure will have the most bang for our buck as we combine monetary charity and scientific consideration to our donations. Science can help the regions agriculture come up with sustainable improvements of the soil, irrigation, livestock, eco-systems, etc so that those impoverished lands can become self sufficient.
Self reliance is one of the first steps to developing and continuingly building a local economy. That local economy can help provide a means to providing adequate medical care, localized education, electricity and locally grown food to name a few.
I am now left with a more accountable view of the world’s poverty situation and the government’s, private sector’s and individual’s responsibilities to respond to it.
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