There is a discrepancy in the world, a dischord between the have’s and the have-not’s. While we sit comfortably in our homes, with our biggest worry whether our hockey team will win the next game, there are billions around the world suffering.

Did you know that one in four children living in developing countries are considered underweight and at a risk of having a blighted future because of long-term effects of undernourishment? Meanwhile, there are an estimated one billion people who are overweight, according to the World Health Organization. One in four kids starving, while one billion people eat more junk food than their bodies can handle.

According to the United Nations, more than 500,000 prospective mothers in developing countries die annually in childbirth or of complications from pregnancy. But in the United States alone, The U.S. Centre for Disease Control conservatively estimates there were more than 800,000 abortions in one year. A child born in a developing country is over 13 times more likely to die within the first five years of life than a child born in an industrialized country, yet hundreds of thousands of children in North America are killed before they even have a chance to live.

These types of statistics bother me. It bothers me that I can complain about the temperature of my coffee being not quite right while around the world, people drink unclean water just to survive.

It bothers me that I can choose to have or not have children, in clean safe sterilized hospitals, while around the world more than half a million women die because they do not have the same options for safe preganancies and birth.

It bothers me that while me and my fellow countrymen grow fat, children die of starvation.

It bothers me.

So, I am doing something about it. How? God has gifted my husband and I with photography and writing skills. We are preparing to travel and document the changed lives and changed communities that happen when people who are bothered take time out of their lives, and bother to stand up and make a difference.

In less than 48 hours, we fly to Haiti. I’m bothered by that too.

Tags: Culture

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.