Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter from between the lines
Originally published: November 2006
Dear Friend,
You probably noticed the many news stories the day after Thanksgiving about the official start of the Christmas shopping season, now known as Black Friday (because it is traditionally when retailers begin turning a profit, or operating in the black), and the almost unimaginably long lines waiting for the midnight openings of doors at Best Buy stores and other retail outlets. There were even some frightening stampedes caught on tape as malls racked up a record $9 billion in sales. Most of the news anchors closed out their broadcasts with a wisecrack or shook their heads good naturedly, but there was also something a bit unnerving about the sight.
For some reason, it nagged at me all weekend. I thought about how others around the world would process what they saw and how they would make sense of it. I also thought of the times I’ve seen lines like that elsewhere in the world and realized that in most cases they were lines of women in Africa walking or waiting for clean water.
My most vivid memory from traversing famine struck Ethiopia’s dusty, rutted roads in a bouncing Landrover, is how life in Ethiopia and the quest for water in Ethiopia, are one and the same. It is not a seasonal quest but daily. Women walk hours a day to bring home their family’s water, not just on market days, or rainy days, but EVERY day, day after day, week after week, for months, years, decades. The task keeps them out of school and their role becomes self-perpetuating.
More than 1 billion people around the globe lack safe drinking water, a factor in 80% of disease in the developing world. Diarrhea, malaria, and malnutrition kill more children than all of the world’s wars combined. The weight of water that women in Asia and Africa carry on their heads is equivalent to the maximum baggage weight allowed by airlines – 20 kg, or 44lbs, and they don’t get to put it down in a nearby parking lot like the bargain hunters we saw on the news with their plasma TV’s.
Most of us live our lives more calmly and safely somewhere between these two very different lines, but close enough to notice the inequities that plague our planet and make hard lives hardly bearable. Without begrudging anyone the pleasures of flat screen TV’s and video games, one can hope the spirit of the season includes reflection on those lines half a world away desperate for resources that aren’t luxuries but rather the difference between life and death.
The developing world’s needs are vast and much is beyond our control. We have neither the resources nor the responsibility to solve every problem. But we shouldn’t shirk the moral obligation to share what we do have in abundance: the knowledge, expertise, technology, and talent to make a huge impact on global health issues like clean water, malnutrition, malaria and HIV/AIDS. Last year the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine issued a report called Healers Abroad advocating the establishment of a Global Health Service Corps of full-time salaried professionals who would volunteer to go abroad and work side by side with medical professionals in developing countries. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Frist, a surgeon, introduced legislation to make this a reality but Congress has not acted on it and the necessary catalyst may need to come from private philanthropy.
A Global Health Service Corps is another powerful example of how Americans can share strength to reduce what may be the greatest of all inequities. It might not make us less materialistic. But improving the living conditions of those in extreme poverty by addressing the most basic of needs like medical care and clean water could bring more stability to a perilously unstable world, and thereby make us safer, stronger and more secure. At least it’s something worth waiting in line for.
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