Imagine being all alone, watching your parents and siblings die painfully of treatable diseases, your friends being raped and then murdered and going days without sleep for fear that you'll be kidnapped in your sleep and tortured. There are countries in the world where over half the children born each year die before they reach the age of five. There are corners of the Earth that go unnoticed by even the most zealous and far-reaching humanitarian aid programs.
The movie "Hotel Rwanda" is just a taste the way people are currently living in countries like Sudan, Uganda and Niger. Upon seeing the movie, I haven't found one person who was not appalled that nobody helped the people there. We would expect someone to come to our rescue if we were experiencing mass genocide, because we like to think that we live in civilized times and humanity unites us more than race and class divide us. Does it? The general opinion in western civilization is that the people who live in the remote places in the world deal with crisis every day; they must be used to dealing with it by now. They are thought of as having inferior intelligence because they do not have college degrees or proper hygiene. It's terrible what's happening to them, but what can we do in the end anyway? The problems are too big.
The United States has raised millions of dollars between government and charity organizations to help victims of last year's tsunamis. This is commendable, and it was a horrible tragedy. Around 200,000 people died during that disaster. More than 4 million people have died in the Congo alone from easily treatable diseases, murder and sexual violence. Nearly 40,000 people have fled the northern region of the Congo in the past five days because of recent outbreaks of combat between the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups, according to BBC World News. This is happening right now, and there are no benefit concerts, no fund raisers, no discussion at all.
In Uganda, a civil war has claimed the lives of and displaced almost 1 million people, and the Lord's Resistance Army---a rebel group---is kidnapping children by the thousands. President Museveni of Uganda told the BBC he called for assistance from the U.N. to help end the conflict during the 1990s, and no help ever came.
In Niger, more than 8 percent of the population is enslaved. Despite the outlaw of slavery last year in Niger, child slavery and human trafficking are still staples of everyday life. The BBC reports that there are cases of slaves being stripped naked in front of their families as punishment, women being raped by their masters and men even being castrated by their masters.
More than 2 million people in Sudan have fled their homes and over 100,000 have been killed since a conflict began two years ago. Arab rebel have attempted "ethnic cleansing" to eliminate black African ethnic groups from the area.
The United States invaded Iraq when it did not ask for help. Some of these countries are in dire need of help and nobody is listening. No doubt Iraqis deserved to be freed from a repressive government, but if mass genocide doesn't indicate a repressive government, I don't know what does. When we discovered there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq, it became all about the advancement of freedom. It is admirable that the United States has taken such action, if that is indeed the cause for occupation in Iraq, but there is so much more to be done. I know we can't do it all, but I think we could do more.
I'm not sure how to save people in remote African countries, but I do know that now you know about it. You're informed, and maybe awareness is the first step in taking action. Maybe if we stop desensitizing ourselves and start thinking of these people as fellow human beings that have favorite colors, favorite foods, nicknames and like to play hide-and-seek as kids, saving their lives might be a higher priority for us. After all, we'd want to be saved.
Write to Alyssa at akmiller@bsu.edu
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