TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/10081010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 88 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 40

COVER STORIES

Suffer the Little Children


The world's leaders gather for an extraordinary summit and
listen at last to a crying need


    Just how much is a child worth? To a father in northern
Thailand, 10-year-old Poo was worth $400 when he sold her to a
middleman to work in Madame Suzy's Bangkok brothel. To Madame
Suzy, Poo is worth $40 a night while she's still young and
fresh. But her price will soon come down.

    To a quarry owner outside New Delhi, 12-year-old Ballu is
worth 85 cents a day, the amount the child earns breaking rocks
in an 11-hour shift. "I wanted to become an engineer," says
Ballu. He glances sadly at his callused hands. "But now I have
crossed the age for studies and will be a stonecutter all my
life."

    To local bosses in Mexico City, children are worth about
$2.80 a  day for scavenging food, glass, cloth and bones from
three vast municipal dumps. The walls around the dumps enclose
homes, families, even a church and a store. Many of the 5,000
children living there attend school in the dumps; they are not
tolerated on the outside because of their smell.

    Just how much is the very life of a child worth? A 10 cents
packet of salt, sugar and potassium can prevent a child from
dying of diarrhea. Yet every day in the developing world more
than 40,000 children under the age of five die of diarrhea,
measles, malnutrition and other preventable causes. An extra
$2.5 billion a year could save the lives  of 50 million
children over the next decade. That is roughly equal,
children's advocates note, to the amount that the world's
military establishments, taken together, shell out every day.

    Last weekend George Bush joined 34 other Presidents, 27
Prime Ministers, a King, a Grand Duke and a Cardinal, among
others, at the United Nations for a meeting unlike any in
history: the World Summit for Children. The leaders came to
discuss the plight of 150 million children under the age of five
suffering from malnutrition, 30 million living in the streets,
7 million driven from their homes by war and famine.

    Shamed into action, the leaders endorsed a bold 10-year
plan to reduce mortality rates and poverty among children and
to improve access to immunizations and education. For once,
this was more than a political lullaby of soothing promises:
the very existence of the extraordinary summit held out hope to
those who have fought to make children's voices heard. To lend
support, more than a million people held 2,600 candlelight
vigils earlier in the week -- in South Korea's Buddhist
monasteries, in London's St. Paul's Cathedral, in Ethiopia's
refugee camps, around Paris' Eiffel Tower, in 700 villages in
Bangladesh.

    As the whole world directs its attention, however briefly,
to those to whom the earth will soon belong, what kind of
leadership can the United States offer? Americans cherish the
notion that they cherish their children, but there's woeful
evidence to the contrary. Each year thousands of American babies
are born premature and underweight, in a country torn by neither
war nor famine. The U.S. is one of only four countries -- with
Iran, Iraq and Bangladesh -- that still execute juvenile
offenders. And nearly 1 in 4 American children under age six
lives in poverty. Congressmen wrestling with budget cuts,
policymakers musing about peace dividends, voters weighing their
options -- all would do well to wonder what sort of legacy they
will be leaving to a generation of children whose needs have
been so widely ignored. And those needs go far beyond vigils and
poignant speeches.