Reposting: Ironic

If I am to believe my FB feed, people are more saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs than the effects of the Typhoon that just passed, all the people it killed & have left homeless. It’s a weird world we live in, where we have more sympathy for the smart man who sold us expensive (but useful) products than the poor people in a state of calamity. I felt really guilty when a friend said “Porke ba walang Cristine Reyes na stranded sa bubong hindi na big deal ang Bulacan?”. Indeed.

-RB

aww :)

Repost ☺

  Why Women Cry

A little boy asked his mother, "Why are you crying?" "Because I'm a woman," she told him.

"I don't understand," he said. His Mom just hugged him and said, "And you never will."

Later the little boy asked his father, "Why does mother seem to cry for no reason?"

"All women cry for no reason," was all his dad could say.

The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why women cry.

Finally he put in a call to God. When God got on the phone, he asked, "God, why do women cry so easily?"

God said, "When I made the woman she had to be special.

I made her shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world,

yet gentle enough to give comfort.

I gave her an inner strength to endure childbirth and the rejection that many times comes from her children.

I gave her a hardness that allows her to keep going when everyone else gives up, and take care of her family through sickness and fatigue without complaining.

I gave her the sensitivity to love her children under any and all circumstances, even when her child has hurt her very badly.

I gave her strength to carry her husband through his faults and fashioned her from his rib to protect his heart.

I gave her wisdom to know that a good husband never hurts his wife, but sometimes tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.

And finally, I gave her a tear to shed. This is hers exclusively to use whenever it is needed."

"You see my son," said God, "the beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair.

The beauty of a woman must be seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart - the place where love resides."

Author: Unknown

repost

This is a true story of Mother’s Sacrifice during the Japan Earthquake.
After the Earthquake had subsided, when the rescuers reached the ruins of a young woman’s house, they saw her dead body through the cracks. But her pose was somehow strange that she knelt on her knees like a person was worshiping; her body was leaning forward, and her two hands were supporting by an object. The collapsed house had crashed her back and her head.

With so many difficulties, the leader of the rescuer team put his hand through a narrow gap on the wall to reach the woman’s body. He was hoping that this woman could be still alive. However, the cold and stiff body told him that she had passed away for sure.
He and the rest of the team left this house and were going to search the next collapsed building. For some reasons, the team leader was driven by a compelling force to go back to the ruin house of the dead woman. Again, he knelt down and used his had through the narrow cracks to search the little space under the dead body. Suddenly, he screamed with excitement,” A child! There is a child! “
The whole team worked together; carefully they removed the piles of ruined objects around the dead woman. There was a 3 months old little boy wrapped in a flowery blanket under his mother’s dead body. Obviously, the woman had made an ultimate sacrifice for saving her son. When her house was falling, she used her body to make a cover to protect her son. The little boy was still sleeping peacefully when the team leader picked him up.
The medical doctor came quickly to exam the little boy. After he opened the blanket, he saw a cell phone inside the blanket. There was a text message on the screen. It said,” If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” This cell phone was passing around from one hand to another. Every body that read the message wept. ” If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” Such is the mother’s love for her child!!

Desperate Move

Mothers, especially, bind their stomachs to lessen hunger pangs: ‘Only the rich around here don’t tie a rope in times like this,’ says Zippora Mbungo (above) of Makima, Kenya…

“I tie this rope around my waist to hold my stomach in and avoid feeling hungry. Most of the time we have very little food, so I give it to my grandchildren first, leaving little or nothing for me. That is why I tie this rope around me. Only the rich people around here don’t tie a rope in times like this.This is one of the worst droughts I have ever seen in my life.”

-86-year-old grandmother from Makima, Kenya, told the agency’s workers..

“This practice shows just how desperately hungry women are. But it can be lethal – women have died after suddenly untying their stomachs once food is available.”

-Philip Kilonzo, of ActionAid Kenya..

Somalia Famine

 

from: aljazeera

UN urges massive action for Africa drought | Aid agencies discuss “catastrophic” situation in Horn of Africa amid calls for urgent aid at emergency meeting in Rome.

Reblog: (csmonitor)

PHOTO: A newly arrived refugee girl walks into the Baley settlement near the Ifo extension refugee camp in Dadaab, near the Kenya-Somalia border, Wednesday. The first in a series of UN famine relief flights is scheduled to land in Somalia’s capital Wednesday. (REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya)

The first UN plane in two years is scheduled to go into the Somali capital’s airport Wednesday carrying food aid. Some 3.7 million people, including more than 2.3 million children under age 5, in Somalia alone need help.

The chartered aircraft will be the first United Nations plane into Mogadishu’s international airport since Islamists banned the organization from working there two years ago. It is loaded with Plumpy’nut, a patented high-nutrition, peanut-based paste designed to help children so malnourished that it is often too late for ordinary food to make any difference.

Negotiations continue between Western humanitarian organizations and Al Shabab, the pro-Al Quada Islamists who are refusing access to several UN agencies and international charities.
READ: International groups accelerate effort to relieve East Africa’s famine

Libyan children suffering rape, aid agency reports

• Libya

Children as young as eight have been subjected to sexual assaults, according to accounts given to Save the Children

Benghazi, Libya, where children who have fled from sexual abuse are living in temporary camps. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
Libyan children as young as eight have suffered sexual assaults, including rape, amid the worsening conflict across the country, a British aid agency has warned. Although Save the Children said it could not confirm the reports, the charity said the accounts by children were consistent and they were displaying signs of physical and emotional distress. The allegations come from 200 children and 40 adults who have fled from Misrata, Ajdabiya and Ras Lanuf and are now in temporary camps in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. The families told the charity's staff that children as young as eight had been sexually assaulted, sometimes in front of their relatives. In one reported case, mothers claimed a group of girls had been abducted, held hostage for four days and raped, and were unable to speak when they were released. Michael Mahrt, Save the Children's child protection adviser, said: "The reports of sexual violence against children are unconfirmed, but they are consistent and were repeated across the four camps we visited. "Children told us they have witnessed horrendous scenes. Some said they saw their fathers murdered and mothers raped. They described things happening to other children, but they may have actually happened to them and they are just too upset to talk about it – it's a typical coping mechanism used by children who have suffered such abuse." Mahrt said some children were displaying signs of physical and emotional distress: being withdrawn, refusing to play and waking up crying in the night. The charity, along with other agencies, is conducting a 13-day assessment of the situation. It called on "the international community to ensure that all parties respect children's right to be protected from violence and abuse". The charity said it was increasing its child protection work in Benghazi, training social workers to provide youngsters with psycho-social support
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/23/libyan-children-suffering-rape

have Less. . . do More. . . be More.

this reminds me of how blessed I am :)

--that certainly, life taught me to appreciate every lil' thing I have :)

South Sudan

Children in Unity State: communities already struggling to find enough food need help if former child soldiers are to be reintegrated successfully.

As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html?_r=1&ref=world

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Malnutrition in India is worse than in many African nations, stunting the growth of children like this girl in Shivpuri, photographed in November 2008. 

NEW DELHI — Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge — “a national shame,” in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.

India Struggles With Hunger

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Vivek, a malnourished boy, on a scale last November at 23 months old at a feeding center in Shivpuri. India runs the largest child feeding program, but experts say it is inadequately designed.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Children eating at a center in Delhi last December.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

A malnourished 21-month-old boy named Satish and his mother, Leela, at the Shivpuri feeding center last November.

China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent. Malnutrition makes children more prone to illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth for a lifetime.

There are no simple explanations. Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here. India’s public expenditure on health remains low, and in some places, financing for child nutrition programs remains unspent.

Yet several democracies have all but eradicated hunger. And ignoring the needs of the poor altogether does spell political peril in India, helping to topple parties in the last elections.

Others point to the efficiency of an authoritarian state like China. India’s sluggish and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy has only haltingly put in place relatively simple solutions — iodizing salt, for instance, or making sure all children are immunized against preventable diseases — to say nothing of its progress on the harder tasks, like changing what and how parents feed their children.

But as China itself has grown more prosperous, it has had its own struggles with health care, as the government safety net has shredded with its adoption of a more market-driven economy.

While India runs the largest child feeding program in the world, experts agree it is inadequately designed, and has made barely a dent in the ranks of sick children in the past 10 years.

The $1.3 billion Integrated Child Development Services program, India’s primary effort to combat malnutrition, finances a network of soup kitchens in urban slums and villages.

But most experts agree that providing adequate nutrition to pregnant women and children under 2 years old is crucial — and the Indian program has not homed in on them adequately. Nor has it succeeded in sufficiently changing child feeding and hygiene practices. Many women here remain in ill health and are ill fed; they are prone to giving birth to low-weight babies and tend not to be aware of how best to feed them.

A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.

Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood.

So far, so good. Except that at one nursery — known in Hindi as an anganwadi — the teacher was a no-show. At another, there were no children; instead, a few adults sauntered up with their lunch pails. At a third, the nursery worker, Brij Bala, said that 13 children and 13 lactating mothers had already come to claim their servings, and that now she would have to fill the bowls of whoever came along, neighborhood aunties and all. “They say, ‘Give us some more,’ so we have to,” Ms. Bala confessed. “Otherwise, they will curse us.”

None of the centers had a working scale to weigh children and to identify the vulnerable ones, a crucial part of the nutrition program.

Most important from Ms. Menon’s point of view, the nurseries were largely missing the needs of those most at risk: children under 2, for whom the feeding centers offered a dry ration of flour and ground lentils, containing none of the micronutrients a vulnerable infant needs.

In a memorandum prepared in February, the Ministry of Women and Child Development acknowledged that while the program had yielded some gains in the past 30 years, “its impact on physical growth and development has been rather slow.” The report recommended fortifying food with micronutrients and educating parents on how to better feed their babies.

A World Food Program report last month noted that India remained home to more than a fourth of the world’s hungry, 230 million people in all. It also found anemia to be on the rise among rural women of childbearing age in eight states across India. Indian women are often the last to eat in their homes and often unlikely to eat well or rest during pregnancy. Ms. Menon’s institute, based in Washington, recently ranked India below two dozen sub-Saharan countries on its Global Hunger Index.

Childhood anemia, a barometer of poor nutrition in a lactating mother’s breast milk, is three times higher in India than in China, according to a 2007 research paper from the institute.

The latest Global Hunger Index described hunger in Madhya Pradesh, a destitute state in central India, as “extremely alarming,” ranking the state somewhere between Chad and Ethiopia.

More surprising, though, it found that “serious” rates of hunger persisted across Indian states that had posted enviable rates of economic growth in recent years, including Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Here in the capital, which has the highest per-capita income in the country, 42.2 percent of children under 5 are stunted, or too short for their age, and 26 percent are underweight. A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.

Back in Jahangirpuri, a dead rat lay in the courtyard in front of Ms. Bala’s nursery. The narrow lanes were lined with scum from the drains. Malaria and respiratory illness, which can be crippling for weak, undernourished children, were rampant. Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.

In another alley, Ms. Menon met a young mother named Jannu, a migrant from the northern town of Lucknow. Jannu said she found it difficult to produce enough milk for the baby in her arms, around 6 months old. His green, watery waste dripped down his mother’s arms. He often has diarrhea, Jannu said, casually rinsing her arm with a tumbler of water.

Ms. Menon could not help but notice how small Jannu was, like so many of Jahangirpuri’s mothers. At 5 feet 2 inches tall, Ms. Menon towered over them. Children who were roughly the same age as her own daughter were easily a foot shorter. Stunted children are so prevalent here, she observed, it makes malnutrition invisible.

“I see a system failing,” Ms. Menon said. “It is doing something, but it is not solving the problem.”

About three million children at risk in Africa: UN

from: http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/About-three-million-children-at-risk-in-Africa-UN/358130/

Almost three million children across the Horn of Africa are at risk of death, disease and malnutrition due to a combination of drought, rising food prices and conflict, UNICEF said on Saturday.

The children are among the more than 14 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti that are critically affected, and the numbers are on an ‘alarming upward trajectory,’ UNICEF said.

The agency said some experts are predicting that million more children and families could be affected across the Horn of Africa if steps are not taken immediately.

“Strong national leadership is needed at this critical juncture, and more international funding must be quickly mobilised," UNICEF's Regional Director for East and Southern Africa, Per Engebak, said in a statement.

"The risks to children and their families are immense and we are running out of time to reverse them."

Relief efforts in the troubled region have been hampered by weak governance as well as attacks on aid workers by armed groups. 

"Security is a major complication in responding to the needs of affected people in many parts of the Horn at this time," said Engebak.

He also underscored the difficulties of lack of access, along with the soaring cost of food grains and cereals worldwide. Food prices have risen by as much as 200 per cent over the past eight months in some of the worst drought-affected countries, making it nearly impossible for many families to purchase much-need items. 

 

Libya: 1M children @ Risk

i read this article and just wanna share it to those who doesn't know yet. . .

More than 1 million children in western Libya are in serious danger as government forces vie with protesters for control of key towns and cities, including the country's capital Tripoli.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

A child holds a "Kindgom of Libya" flag while anti-government demonstrators listen to a speech in Benghazi, Libya.

We have gathered testimony from families and children in Tripoli and nearby towns, who have spoken of their fears of death, injury and arrest as Libyan security forces continue to crack down on opposition protesters. It is estimated that over a million children live in the area.

"The danger posed to children in Libya by political violence and its consequences, such as shortages of essential goods, is massive," said Gareth Owen, Save the Children's emergency director.

"The situation in Libya could quickly spiral out of control, and that would be a disaster for hundreds of thousands of children, who could be forced to flee their homes, or worse, get caught up in serious violence."

A thirteen year-old boy from Tripoli interviewed by Save the Children described the climate of fear in the city. "I'm terrified, scared, not feeling safe, and I'm afraid I'll be an orphan," he said. "I've heard that fathers of my friends are being taken and 'disappeared.'"

700,000 children are believed to live in Tripoli, where the humanitarian situation remains unclear due to difficulties in gaining independent access to the civilian population.

Reports from the city suggest that schools are closed, with many people staying at home rather than risking attracting the attention of security forces patrolling the streets.

Meanwhile, in the opposition-controlled town of Zawiya, Save the Children spoke to a mother who described fears of her family being caught in violence if government forces, currently surrounding the town, tried to retake control.

"I have heard that mercenaries are surrounding the area and preventing any supplies coming in," she said. "I am worried that there is going to be a shortage of food as a result of this siege. When I hear a bang, I think that the house has been hit."

The fears of families living in the west of the country reflect a deeply volatile situation that has already caused more than 100,000 people, mainly migrant workers, to flee Libya to Egypt and Tunisia.

There are reports that Libyan families trying to leave the country are being harassed by security forces on their side of the border.

reblog if you have a heart!

::Children at Risk. . . they're all over the world,
if you'll just open your eyes wider, you can actually see them. . .
if you'll listen closely, you can really hear them --whining, screaming from within. . .
if you'll extend your hands, you can wholly feel them. . .

help them. . .

reblog if you care enough. ..

 

never too late. . .

--we hold the change. . .

--we can make things change. . .

--we can reach for a better CHANGE. . .

--you know, it's never too late, help to stop child hunger. . .

share. . . share. . . share.

YOU CAN!!!

awaken

::join me to end chiLd hunger. . .

awaken your eyes, especially your heart.

>.<

on bended knEes

 

::when things go wrong--Look up!!!

:>