A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born. – Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) American author and poet. It is undoubtedly true that a child’s education begins well before that child is even born, for it is what we leave a child that they will learn from. The lessons of […]
LESOTHO: Cash for kids This month, 5,000 orphans and vulnerable children in three districts of Lesotho will start benefiting from a new government scheme to alleviate the poverty preventing them from going to school, having enough to eat and staying healthy. About 55 percent of the estimated 180,000 orphaned children in the tiny mountain kingdom, […]
In yesterday’s post Iraq’s Forgotten Refugee Children, the need to ensure that those displaced by the Iraq war are adequately meet. Humanitarian aid is with out a doubt needed, as are other infrastructures to ensure that some symbolance of normality and daily life is given to refugee families. Adequate, food, shelter and sanitation are still […]
The war in Iraq has taken its toll on all sides, but those left to suffer disparagingly are the children who are quite literally caught in the cross fire. Children are left wounded, disabled, or even worse dead. Those who escape harm from the violence of the conflict are often left nothing short of hanging […]
“There is a ”sanctity” involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.” – James Baldwin (1924-1987) African-American writer. So often we take for granted the power and fragility of life, for the power and miracle of birth is often quickly overshadowed by the power of destruction […]
I came across the following post, Is it Child Abuse if a Parent Rejects their LGBT Child?, and it got me thinking, that while over the last years society has definitely changed and progressed in a positive manner regarding gay rights and acceptance, this issue is still a sensitive one. Most can clearly remember the […]
SOUTH AFRICA: A need to redefine “orphan Child-headed households certainly exist in South Africa, but the commonly held wisdom, reinforced by the media, that extended families cannot absorb any more orphans, and the number of child-headed households has been rising steeply in recent years due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, has never been backed up by […]
“Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) U.S. poet. Children hold the world in their hands, but what kind of world do they hold? The world, in which children are given for […]
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), the awareness month was established to raise awareness of sexual violence, and thus increase prevention. Every April events take place across the county, over the course of this month the goal of all of these events is to highlight the use of sexual violence, and its effects as […]
The other night I spent the evening screening two documentaries on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which were focused on the extensive use of rape as a weapon of war in the countries long going conflict. The evening was centered around one of the DRC’s woman’s activists, Sylvie Maunga Mbanga, a trained lawyer, who […]
With resources stretched thin, aid agencies struggling to contain a cholera outbreak across all but one of Mozambique’s 10 provinces hope the approaching end of the rainy season will bring some relief. Over 12,000 cases and 157 deaths have been recorded since 1 January 2009. The latest Southern Africa Regional Cholera Update, compiled by the […]
“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” – Jimmy Carter Those who suffer disproportionately from all violent conflicts are women and children. War not only kills children […]
Yesterday, March 25th, the UN marked the second annual International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The story of the end of the slave trade deserves to be told here at the United Nations. Indeed, the defense of human rights is at the heart of this Organization’s global […]
Sri Lanka’s conflict is now longer breaking headlines or shocking news in the mainstream media, but the crisis is far from over, in fact the humanitarian crisis is headed for a catastrophe, especially in the northern Wanni region. The Wanni region according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) an estimated 150,000 civilians continue to be […]
More than 1 billion people live without access to safe water and 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation. Today is World Water Day, and as was stated in post earlier this month, Life or Death in Each Drop, that while we in developing nations take each sip of life saving water […]