Why should we help Darfur?

Question

For the record, I'm a Darfur activist in Canada.

However, people have told me point-blank that they aren't willing to do anything / don't care because the killing in Darfur doesn't affect them.

Obviously, I didn't become involved with the Darfur movement so that Canada can gain from something from it. It was more out of frustration that so few people were taking action.

But why should people take action on Darfur? What is your response to the attitude that we should only act in self-interest on Darfur?

Answer 1

What are we doing to help these people is my question? I know Spielburg has boycotted working with the Olympics, but what are we as a society able to do to help these people.

It seems such a shame that this kind of genocide is able to keep happening all over the world. We dont hear about until at least 300,000 people  have already died.

On this earth a child dies every 6 seconds from not having drinkable water. The WORLD BANK and the INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND has made it easier not harder for the world to stay in poverty. They pick who stays sick and who gets fed.

I agree that as part of the human race we need to help and help now. We need to bring about change so this canot continue to happen anywhere in the world. Below are statistic that I found about Africa. I want to know where do we go to help these people? Our world is really disconnected in more ways than one.

More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year eleven million children die-most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.

In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under 20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate

Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.

More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.

Everyday HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.

Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria-more than one million child deaths a year.

Each year, approximately 300 to 500 million people are infected with malaria. Approximately three million people die as a result.

TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of Africa, 75 percent of people with HIV also have TB.

Hunger

More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day...300 million are children.

Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.

Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.

Water

More than 2.6 billion people-over 40 per cent of the world's population-do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.

Four out of every ten people in the world don't have access even to a simple latrine.

Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.







Agriculture

In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.

More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.

Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.

For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.



The devastating effect of poverty on women

Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.

More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.

If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.

Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.

AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.

The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.

A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.

Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day-an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.

Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.

Answer 2

The answer is the age old question about if they come for this group or that one and no one tries to stop it, who will stop it when they come for me? (Paraphrased, of course.)

So, I would ask folks, "What if this was happening here to you? Would you want someone to come help?"

Thank you for your efforts.

Answer 3

We are all members of the human race and as such have a moral obligation to look out for our fellow man. I admit at times we are remiss, but the more we realize we are becoming a global community the more we understand we truly are our brothers keepers.

Answer 4

From more information on darfur or to help visit . . .

http://www.savedarfur.org

Answer 5

Africa is an economic basket case.

  it 's pouring money down a black hole.

Let then help themselves first.

Answer 6

We should help Darfur simply because they're SUFFERING and DYING. More than 400,000 people have already died and 2.5 million have been displaced. Is this turning into the Rwandan Genocide? Women and children (and men) are dying brutally. It's not a clean death. Women and children are being raped and they're also being horribly mutilated. One story: Gunmen came to an all girls school in Darfur. They tied up all of the students and teachers and burned them alive. Shouldn't that be an explanation enough? People say we're going to get in another war with them. . . How are they going to declare war on us if we help them? They want help; their representative in the UN came to a meeting and asked for help. They want the help, the need the help, and they will get the help. I don't understand how a fourteen year old can grasp this but a bunch of adults can't.

Answer 7

Because we are obligated to.  After 6 million people died during the Holocaust, we pledged "Never again."  Then Bosnia happened.  And Cambodia.  And Rwanda.  Time after time, we have failed to respond effectively to genocide.  We owe it to all of these victims.  In fact, we're already late in taking action in Darfur, considering 400,000 have died and 2.5 million have already been displaced.

Answer 8

Because we are good people.

We should donate time and money, the government should not steal from us to give away our resources.

If we want to help, it should be on our terms, and by our pens writing the checks willingly.

We should also be aware that when we give aid, it often becomes weapons used against the very people it was ment to help.

Answer 9

My response is that these are selfish people who happen to be very lucky, and if they're too cold and thick-headed to think that the innocents in Darfur who barely have as simple an opportunity as staying alive, I don't see how any amount of convincing would make them understand that it is utterly heartless to care only about oneself.

Answer 10

More people do need to become aware of the situation.  I'm just worried about solutions that don't actually help the people on the ground there.

Answer 11

What? get involved in another war? Hillary and Obama would not like it. Besides, let those peace loving Europeans handle that one. They are forever shedding crocodile tears about the poor people in Darfur, while loudly condemning those war mongering Americans.

Answer 12

I wonder if they feel that way more because they feel trying to help is hopeless, rather than the utter lack of humanity their remarks imply.

What's going on in Darfur is a tremndous amount of human suffering, that's why.

I don't know if there's any way to get through to those who reject that concept.

I suppose you could talk about all the mangled humans resulting from it, who then go on to either be disfunctional (and a burden), or go about mangling others. That's taking the self-interest tack (though then you have to make the connection between the shere amount of mangled people, and everyone else's life and well being.