Starving in Niger

Published in Waking Up on the Planet

Wake-Up Call: Starving for Attention

by Karen M. Jones

Last night I watched an hour-long news report on the famine in Niger. The video of skeletal infant children with flies obscuring their faces, the lucky ones hooked up to webs of medicinal tubing in the tented hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, their mothers long past worry, instead looking weary and resigned, was hard to bear. Even more shocking, though, was the news that Niger had been pleading for help as far back as November of last year, and that the world did not respond. Why? Not because Africa is a poor continent that we don't care much about, and not because we were too squeamish or jaded to pay attention. It's because, a month later, the tsunami hit countries surrounding the Indian Ocean, and our compassionate energies were marshaled to respond to that crisis instead. While millions began the painful, unfolding journey into starvation in Niger, we were pouring all we had into another region in crisis.

U.S. citizens never even knew about Niger until recently. Imagine the media's decision-making as its executives pondered what to cover. If the public were asked to contribute to aid in Niger, would that divert resources from Indonesia or Thailand? Would it have diverted enough to substantially jeopardize the recovery of tsunami survivors? Is one crisis more worthy of response or coverage than another? If we were confronted with more than one mass tragedy at a time, would we simply throw up our hands in hopelessness and not act on behalf of either?

These are interesting questions, and I invite your thoughts; email them, or post them on our new message board. In the meantime, I'd like to suggest that we act now to help, if only indirectly, those long-suffering children and their parents in Niger. Watching that news program, I was deeply grateful once again for the work of Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam. Their daily experience is nearly unimaginable, and yet they deliver hope in south Asia, Africa and wherever human suffering seems to know no bounds. Here are some simple ways you can support them:

> Sign up for long distance phone service with Working Assets and choose Oxfam as your preferred charity; they'll automatically divert a percentage of your monthly charges to Oxfam. It costs you nothing extra.

> Do your online shopping -- with well-known merchants you normally shop with directly -- at iGive.com or BuyforCharity.com, and designate Doctors Without Borders or Oxfam as your benefiting organization. They'll automatically receive a percentage of your purchases -- at no additional cost to you.

Write a letter to relief workers expressing your gratitude for what they do, and send it in care of the agency's headquarters. Or send an appreciative email using their websites' Contact option.

Find more ways to help Oxfam here; ways to introduce your community to Doctors Without Borders, here.

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