What Our Ignorance Does

    Today as I sat watching our built-in television on our high-tech surround sound system in my dad’s air-conditioned Toyota with large, cumbersome shopping bags in the middle of the commercial shopping district in Gulshan, I felt nothing but pure repugnance.

    What I was actually watching was not the television, but a poor, tattered man with three missing fingers on his right hand holding a young girl who was obviously blind and suffered form Down syndrome at the same time. We were in the middle of usual traffic jam and since our car wasn’t moving, this almost disabled man and his daughter were pleading our uncle for 5 taka, which is only worth about 13 cents in America. This beggar had clearly asked several other people in luxurious looking cars for the money, but looking at his empty palm, I realized he was turned down. And now asking my uncle, he was turned down again as my uncle said, “Shoren bhai! Amar somoy nai”( Move man! I don’t have time!), and asked the driver to roll the car forward. As the traffic started to move again, the man reached his hand out inside the car, but our car quickly moved on, leaving on the poor man behind. But as we left, the man’s gaunt and hopeless face stared at mine, filling me with solid disgust about the world.

    To a foreigner, this incident is something that only happens in movies, but in Third World countries, we know it happens all the time. A poor man asks a rich man for money, but the rich man with pocket full of cash keeps going. As our car kept going, we picked up my cousins at Dhanmondi. I told them about the sad incident, but their only response was, ‘Oh, you know it happens all the time’, and went back to their conversation about Casino Royale and how cool Daniel Craig looked. I don’t know if my cousins knew, but almost 30-40% of he people in our country are in poverty, or in danger of dying from starvation.

    This also means that there are almost three million other people just like that beggar man. We all know that some people in our country earn only about three hundred taka a month, while some of us spend 30,000 taka (about $500) for saris.

    I tried to shrug off the incident, considering it was such an ordinary event, but somehow, the face of that poor man kept floating before my eyes. That night, as I turned on my TV, there happened to be news on another poor street man, a ‘fakir’, who was ran over that day by a man driving Toyota RAV-4, very much near where we are. As I changed the channel, I came across a segment on the National Geographic channel detailing the forced marriages of Sudanese girls as young as eight years old. I hoped it would be distraction for my mind, but what I saw in that program made me hate myself even more. These unfortunate girls usually suffer days of childbearing labor, often resulting in stillborn babies. What’s worse is that in many cases the labor wreaks havoc with the girls’ body and all too often results in the condition called ‘fistula’. Avoided by many through Caesarian sections, fistulas are holes that develop in birth canal and bladder that occurs because the mother’s body is too small or the baby is poorly positioned. Without surgery, fistulas constantly exude body waste, leaving a smell. Hundreds of thousands of girls in Africa are plagued with this terrible stigma, and unable to stand the disability, husbands and parents lock these women in huts or turn them in the streets, only to die.

    Also detailed in that program were the levels of poverty and horrendous living conditions in third-world countries. Villages in Thailand are made of shacks lining muddy roads; schools almost non-existent; AIDS takes millions of lives due to the lack of education and knowledge. We say the average income of a man has been going up each year since 21st century. But what about the poor? Are they any better off? The number of people in poverty in the world still remains at a record high, growing each year. Children lose their parents due to disease and malnutrition, and in many cases, are forced to be parents themselves. Little girls in Indonesia are sold for their bodies and used for profit, some as slaves, while others are trying to put food on their families’ plates. But you don’t have to actually travel thousand miles to see poverty. It’s right beneath your luxurious flat, sitting on the street, counting down to death.

    So why is the world this way? Clearly, we have all overlooked something. Surely fine, proud countries like US, Britain, Japan with GDPs hundreds of times larger than Sudan can help. But the big question is still why we are in the 21st century with I-pods, PDAs and Laptops while the world around us is in such a bad shape? Why in our own country, people have multiple cars and flats, which make me wonder what’s wrong with us when we only think of how we look or what our class rank is. And of course, in US, it’s common to see advertisements, for lottery jackpots over $100 million. In some countries $100 is the average salary per annum. So why does only a single person who obviously doesn’t have mutilated body parts or living on the streets get all this money from the jackpot? And the answer: because most of us are selfish and ignorant. If enough people buy enough lottery tickets so the jackpot is over $100 million, couldn’t this money be put to better use than have our jackpot winner use to buy a chateau in a private island? It’s calculated that more than 60% of the world’s population has enough money to give a dollar. If everyone donated this small amount of money to helping Third World countries, a huge amount of money could be raised. Instead of one person being the winner, a third-world country could receive the winning. The ticket-buyers would also surely win by saving human beings.

    I know it may sound sort of hypocritical when I ask like why are wealthy countries giving more to third-world, considering I’m the one whose parents drive a Toyota and watch Mission Impossible III, living in heaven compared to those people. I’m not recommending that everyone goes to rural Thailand or Africa to stop child-trafficking, but maybe that we could all make some changes. Maybe we could donate instead of buying that new DVD that we could easily watch it on TV. It’s really important that we don’t forget what’s happening, because one of the biggest problems is our lack of awareness, or ignorance. Yes, all of us see a desperate poor child on the TV, but as you change your channel and go on with your life, you forget.

    I know it makes us uncomfortable when we talk about girls getting pregnant at the age of nine, but are all those girls ever comfortable? What of a mere 10 minutes a day were devoted to reading stories about suffering and poverty?

    Then would you be able to forget those people? What if instead of celebrity magazine taking up shelf space, there were magazines filled with pictures of emaciated people and orphaned children with no hope? After all, a person who doesn’t know what’s going on can’t be held truly accountable for not trying o make it right, but a person who knows and does nothing holds just as much blame.

    I mean, some people do not even know what child-trafficking is. So next time you feast on ‘polao’ and ‘biryani’ at a grand party, at least you can do is take a moment to think about those children in Sudan who die for a drop of water. After all, awareness is the first step to solving any problem.

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