The Absolutely Worst Example of Human Treatment of other Humans Unfolding in Yemen

85,000 Children in Yemen May Have Died of Starvation

The aid organization Save the Children said the number was a conservative estimate of those under age 5 who may have died.

Experts say Yemen has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and 14 million people could soon be on the brink of starvation,according to the United Nations.

‘It’s entirely preventable’

“For every child killed by bombs and bullets, dozens are starving to death — and it’s entirely preventable,” Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children’s country director in Yemen, said in the statement. “Children who die in this way suffer immensely as their vital organ functions slow down and eventually stop.”

What can you do to help?  Contribute to any of the following organisations, write to you government, fund raise in your neighborhood for starters.

https://foundationbeyondbelief.org/give

https://www.charityweb.net/

https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org

https://www.unicef.ca/en

These are just a few of the many charities working towards better world for children and families. You can help today.

Evil Perpetrated on Children and their Families

There is no greater evil than that perpetrated on the weak, the innocent and defenseless;  children, animals, the mentally ill and women in godforsaken places where they are treated no better than chattels and beasts of burden.

Those with power who impose on children, forced separation from their mothers and fathers, siblings and families must at some point be accounted for. I liken it to war crimes. The other members of the ape family treat their children better than many human apes. And to make matters worse, they justify their actions by claiming it to be ordained by some holy book comprised of superstitious nonsense, human dogma, human designed commandments and created to place in bondage and enslave massive members of the human race.

The hypocrisy and sheer ignorance of these people knows no bounds. All humans at some point in time have been refugees. We all come from somewhere. Every person living outside the Great Rift Valley is a refugee or an immigrant. 

To quote the now infamous line of the uber ignorant Peter Navarro in his wholly unjustified and downright stupid criticism of Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, "there should be a special place in hell for these people".  Unfortunately and contrary to the "holy" books, there is no hell. Even Pope Francis of the rapidly becoming irrelevant Catholic Church reportedly told an Italian journalist hell does not exist. 

Of course in today's world of borders, nationalism, terrorism, need for national security and protectionism, there has to be rules and regulation and a degree of security for established citizens of the various countries around the world. However, this regulation should not be to the detriment of the weak, innocent and defenseless. Shame on all the extreme right or left wing, power hungry, dollar chasing, divisive, narcissistic, misogynistic elite who pander to the whims of the ignorant, the superstitious, the fearful, the bigots and the racists of any religion, belief or creed who refuse to believe we are all descendant from the same common ancestor and we all have a duty as humans to protect the weak and defenseless, particularly children.

Let the children go!!!

THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY

Oxfam says the wealth of worlds richest 1% is now equal to the other 99%. 

The richest 1% now have as much wealth as the rest of the world combined, according to Oxfam. It uses data from Credit Suisse from October 2016  for the report, which urges world leaders  and world business leaders to take action on inequality.

These 8 Men Control Half the Wealth on Earth

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/meet-the-8-men-who-control-half-the-worlds-wealth.html

Every 10 seconds, a child dies from hunger. Poor nutrition is responsible for nearly half of all deaths in children under the age of 5—about 3 million children die each year because their bodies don't have enough of the basic nutrients they need to function and grow.

Now read this.

 http://www.businessinsider.com/outrageous-ways-the-super-rich-spend-their-money-2015-7/#they-can-fly-luxury-underwater-planes-1

0e53472aff332f4cbfd6ba0b84ae152fea652d28676fd01249

The 3 Worst Countries in the World to be a Child

Zimbabwe

The problem: One in eight kids will die before the age of 5, according to the United Nations.

The cause: AIDS and poverty. Zimbabwe once had one of the best healthcare systems in Africa, but skyrocketing inflation caused by Robert Mugabe's misguided economic policies and a 3,000 percent increase in healthcare costs in recent years have destroyed Zimbabwe's hospitals. 

Today, food shortages, lack of medicines, and a failing education system leave Zimbabwean kids with tragically bleak futures, and thousands make the dangerous trek to South Africa each year in search of a better life. To make a miserable situation even worse, one in five children has been orphaned by AIDS.

What needs to be done: Zimbabwe needs more resources for HIV education and prevention efforts that encourage long-term change in risky behaviors, along with new investments in hospitals. Sane fiscal policies to stop the hyperinflation that has destroyed Zimbabwe's economy wouldn't hurt, either.

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

The problem: Child soldiers. About 40 percent of all soldiers in the DRC are kids, half of them young girls who have been forced into sexual slavery.

The cause: The legacy of war. Guerrilla and paramilitary forces kidnapped approximately 30,000 children for use as fighters, guards, and sex slaves during the countrys second civil war, which ended in 2003. Despite a formal end to the conflict, the use of child soldiers persists, as groups opposed to the government continue to force children to fight. Those who have escaped the fighting often find it extremely difficult to reintegrate into society, and many wind up on the streets. More than 20,000 street children live in Kinshasa, the capital, where they suffer from malnutrition and physical and sexual abuse.


What needs to be done: The DRC, after decades of war, needs to make permanent peace and establish programs to rescue child soldiers and reintegrate them into normal life. As for the street children, the government and international aid organizations have launched a campaign to make the public more aware of their plight, and they are targeting their abusers. Law enforcement officials, instead of throwing these kids into prison with adults, are working to rehabilitate dilapidated juvenile detention centers.

India

The problem: Child labor. An estimated 12 million Indian children toil in hard labor instead of attending school.

The cause: Economic growth and urbanization. As economies throughout Asia have grown dramatically in recent years, the demand for cheap labor has exploded. In many cases, children meet that demand. The problem is most acute in India. Most child workers there are migrants from rural areas, and they work shifts as long as 16 hours for pittances, generally less than $2.50 a day. The government has gone so far as to ban the practice, but it has had little success in combating it. Police generally ignore the problem, and even when a factory exploiting child laborers is shut down, another appears in its place.


What needs to be done: The Indian government recognizes the problem, and last year amended its Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act to expand on what constitutes child labor. However, without enforcement, the practice will continue unabated.

SIGN THE PETITION

Protect Children in War Zones: Tell Estonia to Join the Safe Schools Declaration

THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON CHILDREN

http://www.warchildholland.org/effects-war-children

War affects children in all the ways it affects adults, but also in different ways. First, children are dependent on the care, empathy, and attention of adults who love them. Their attachments are frequently disrupted in times of war, due to the loss of parents, extreme preoccupation of parents in protecting and finding subsistence for the family, and emotional unavailability of depressed or distracted parents. The child may be in substitute care with someone who cares for him or her only slightly – relatives or an orphanage. A certain proportion of war-affected children lose all adult protection – “unaccompanied children,” as they are known in refugee situations.
Second, impacts in childhood may adversely affect the life trajectory of children far more than adults. Consider children who lose the opportunity for education during war, children who are forced to move into refugee or displaced person camps, where they wait for years in miserable circumstances for normal life to resume, if it ever does. Consider a child disabled in war; they may, in addition to loss of a limb, sight, or cognitive capacity, lose the opportunity of schooling and of a social life. A girl who is raped may be marginalized by her society and lose the opportunity for marriage. Long after the war has ended, these lives will never attain the potential they had before the impact of war.
Copyright © 2006 by the Croatian Medical Journal. All rights reserved.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright © 2006 by the Croatian Medical Journal. All rights reserved.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Fifteen years ago a highly paid engineer in the Philippines gave up his job to live in a bamboo hut in western Thailand. He is now known as “Dada” to the 40 orphans he takes care of at Baan Dada in Huay Ma Lai, near Myanmar.

Baan means “house” in Thai and Dada is Sanskrit for “brother.” For the past three years, small volunteer groups have visited his home deep in the woods. It’s part of the Neo-Humanist Foundation and is referred to officially as Ananda Vidyadharma

Where is it?

The nearest landmark on a map is the Three Pagoda Pass, which is now a shrine commemorating an attempt by the Japanese tried to build a railway from Singapore to India.

This was the area where it was to have crossed from Thailand to Burma (now Myanmar). Baan Dada is about 45 minutes away from this in a town so small it’s not on any maps.

The nearest well known city between Baan Dada and Bangkok is Kanchanaburi (kahn chan a buu D). Even if you’ve never heard of the city itself, you’ve heard of one of its landmarks, the bridge over the River Kwai.

If you would like to help out with this wonderful story, just log into http://www.baandada.org and make a contribution.

A volunteering stint is on my bucket list for next year.

POVERTY

I thought this Ted Talks was worth re-posting. Just click.

THE HIDDEN REASON FOR POVERTY

CANADA DOES NOT HAVE A NATIONAL POVERTY REDUCTION PROGRAM

There is something deeply wrong in British Columbia and with our government that thousands of children are hungry and school districts are forced to beg private donors for food on their behalf.

The Vancouver school district feeds breakfast and lunch to 5,000 elementary and secondary school children every day. But it says there are another 2,000 who are going hungry. It would cost $1.7 million to feed those 2,000 kids. It’s money the district doesn't have.

How many kids in other school districts are hungry and going unfed is an open question because most others haven’t done a detailed school-by-school analysis as Vancouver has. But it’s definitely not just a Vancouver problem.One in five B.C. children is growing up in poverty, according to 2012 Statistics Canada data. That’s 169,240 children.

And, while there are pockets of extreme poverty in Vancouver, the Central Coast Regional District has the highest rate with 54.8 per cent of children living in low-income families.Hungry adults can be hard to identify because they often try to hide it.

But children? They’re visible, especially to teachers.

Many are young enough not to be ashamed to say that they’re hungry and they’ve had no breakfast and there’s no food for lunch.But even if they don’t, their hunger shows up in other ways: poor marks, the inability to focus, the anger and frustration that are manifest when the body screams out for nourishment. The Vancouver school district spends $4.4 million on food programs. Of that, the $300,000 for breakfast programs already comes from by private donations either directly or through charities like The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-a-School.

The provincial government provides $2.4 million in Community Links grants for lunch programs, while parents who can afford it provide another $1.7 million.Yet it’s clearly not enough if 2,000 kids are still without food.

Canada is one of the few developed countries without a national poverty reduction program. So, as poverty in Canada has increased, it’s charity — not taxes — that has filled the gaps.

Before 1981, there were no food banks in Canada. Since then, their use has risen exponentially. Since 2008, the number of British Columbians using food banks has increased by 25 per cent since 2008.

Of the 97,000 B.C. citizens reliant on food banks, one-third are children.

WANT TO READ MORE?: CHILDREN AND POVERTY IN CANADA

Canadian Politicians (Fat Cats) Forgotten Promise to Canadian Children in poverty

TORONTO – A new report finds a lack of progress in reducing child poverty in Canada, despite a commitment from members of Parliament more than two decades ago to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000.

Released Monday, the Campaign 2000 annual report release also marks five years after the entire House of Commons voted to develop an immediate plan to end poverty for all in Canada.

 25 years ago this week, in the House of Commons, MPs agreed unanimously to try to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000. Today, there are roughly the same amount of kids living below the poverty line. ‘There’s no question we failed': MPs commitment to end poverty is 25 years old

“More children and their families live in poverty as of 2014 than they did when the House of Commons unanimously resolved to end child poverty more than 25 years ago,” read the report.

The report gathered Statistics Canada tax-filer data and found that child and family poverty has increased to 1,331,530 children in 2014 from 1,066,150 children in 1989.

While public policies such as the Canada Child Tax Benefit/ National Child Benefit Supplement and the Child Disability Benefit have made an impact to families, the report said those policies do not make a “big enough difference to dial down the child poverty rate substantially or to sustain less child poverty.”

Introduction to the Greanwold Foundation

Greanwold’s philosophy on children is; it is possible to capture a glimpse into the future when we look into their faces. The environment in which children live is shaping this world's future generations. Adults today have to ask themselves the questions - is our environment nurturing children into become caring and productive citizens?

Are we really doing enough for the children, not just in our country but in all countries?

Are there better ways to provide support and assistance particularly for those children with mental and physical handicaps for whom there are no social safety nets ? The Greanwold Foundation is being developed with a plan to provide funding to children in need around the world, regardless of class, race, colour, religion or nationality. There are many definitions of special needs. In the "well off" countries of the western world such as Canada, the United States, England or Australia, a special needs child can be autistic, physically handicapped, mentally handicapped, suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, be a victim of sexual abuse, to name just a few.

In the Latin American countries and most of the Third World countries, you can add the horrors of malnutrition, homelessness, sexual slavery and sweat shop laboring.

Many third world children are without parents due to warfare or having been abandoned for no other reason than the parent or parents had too many children to support. The destiny of all countries and all people on the planet Earth depend on the support, care and development of children. When we attend to the physical, intellectual, and moral growth of our children, we give them the skills, values, opportunities, and confidence necessary to succeed as adults, earners, parents, citizens, and leaders.

There are many children's foundations in the world today. Some focus on offsetting the misery of poverty and hunger. Some support education, medical needs, clothing and shelter. All are doing a small part to provide help and assistance to needy children. Sadly however, there are always more needy children than there are helping hands. There is every reason to believe that many of the needy children in the poorest countries will not live through childhood.

Greanwold wants to change that. Simple.