Report to the People
17th July 2006
Good Enough for Yours?
Last
Wednesday’s talk in the Wellpark Mid Kirk on the Executive’s partnership
with Malawi was described by participants as “humbling”.
Indeed,
listening to Executive Minister, Patricia Ferguson, describing what she found
during her visit to what is one of the world’s poorest countries, it was hard
to feel anything else.
A
child under five in Malawi is 27 more times likely to die than one born in
Scotland. They live without running
water, walk miles to receive the most basic education and 500,000 are AIDS
orphans.
Too
often, though, we let news of hardship in Africa wash over us.
Perhaps it’s too far removed from our own lives to relate to.
So I try to imagine if this was the life facing my children.
Would I accept it? And if
it’s not good enough for my children, why should it be good enough for theirs?
The
same applies to children living in squalor and danger closer to home.
It’s equally difficult for most of us to relate to the life of a child
living with drug addict parents. It’s
only when you hear these children recounting their experiences - being dangled
over a veranda by a dealer demanding repayment of a debt, waking up alongside a
parent's corpse - that it hits home.
Would
you leave your child in a house like that?
So why on earth should we accept it for others?
We
have a responsibility to rescue these children and I am determined that this
moral duty will become a legal one.
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