Feast or Famine

After having woken up in a rotten mood (I didn't get enough sleep from the night before) I stumbled to my computer with cup of coffee in hand and checked my email. Little did I know the HUGE wake up call that awaited me there, in form of Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize Winning Photo shown on the right.

My first instinct was very maternal: I wanted to run with every bit of life within me and scoop up the dying child, carry her to safety and spend my entire life's savings on saving Darfur from hunger. What would that solve, politicians now argue? How would your sponsorship help millions of starving, hungry, dying children? It would solve the issue for one child. What happens, however, if I talk my loving neighbor, Mary, into sponsoring just one child for a year? And then what if she tells her mother and her mother sponsors just one child? That would save the lives of three children. Three children born into poverty and famine--three children that could have been my own if I were a female of child-bearing age in Darfur during this day and age of atrocities, genocide and civil war.

Oprah, I appreciate your three percent of your net worth. I am sure it helped, but three percent? These are your people---your blood. Do more, please! If I had your money, I'd had given at LEAST 15 or 20 percent! Bill Gates, I am ASHAMED at your less than three percent gift to Darfur! But if each of us sponsored one child each year, imagine, just IMAGINE what we could do in Darfur! When this picture was printed in the NY Times Magazine in 2004, next to it was a very juxtaposed ad of Cartier with some glaring diamond or set of jewels most of us could never afford. It only costs $150 per year to sponsor three children! So for the obvious 10 grand worth of a Cartier rock seen printed next to the dying girl who probably never even saw a fraction of that obscene amount of money some corporate big wig spent on his mistress's birthday rock, imagine how much we could do for Darfur if we really chose to do so! Why are we turning our heads, America?

We're getting fatter and fatter, richer and more avaricious than any growing country in the world. Why let children like this starve? My heart cries for Darfur. I beg each and every one of you, today, to consider all I've said and reach your arms out to sponsor a child in Darfur today. It costs less then your daily newspaper or cup of coffee. Together, we can make the biggest difference.