Friday 24 October 2008

Black History month - Oct '08



What does it mean to be black?


black is beauty



black is pain



black is respect



black is dicipline



black is intelligence



black is people



black is our genes



black is who we are



BLACK- words can't encapsulate that!



© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.

Thursday 16 October 2008

Kick Poverty out!.


Poverty


What is it?

It is deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, and may also include the deprivation of opportunities to learn, to obtain better employment to escape poverty, and/or to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens.


And the effects:

*Those living in poverty and lacking access to essential health services, suffering hunger or even starvation, experience mental and physical health problems which make it harder for them to improve their situation.
One third of deaths (that is 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day)- are due to poverty-related causes.*


Every year nearly 11 million children living in poverty die before their fifth birthday.

800 million people go to bed hungry every night.

There are over 100 million street children worldwide.



*About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes according to the United Nations.*




"Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. They lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families."


AIDS is now second only to the Black Death as the largest epidemic in history.

It kills over 2 million people a year, or about one person every 15 seconds.



Organizations that promote poverty reduction....




© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Poverty


How can you say we are rich,

when we have no food?

we scurry about and shriek

like rats in search of water.


Our bodies are dry,withered branches

our skin has become pale like the grey sky

we no longer since and dance

for we live in poverty


Our ancestors have always said

"we are blessed by the gods"

where are they now? have they no mercy?

bestow on us some affluence


Is it not true that we once glowed

under the shimmering sun?

we sang and rejoiced and grew fat.

but now our riches have disappeared

and we live in poverty.



© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.

Sunday 12 October 2008

Blog Action Day: Poverty '08





© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.

Poverty: what it means in pictures











...homeless children playing in the dump


dying from starvation...


a child with hardly anything to eat...





an impoverised area ...











a female child suffering kwashiokor ...




YOU CAN TAKE ACTION!!!
join the campaign against POVERTY





























why should a third of the world's population suffer?

There's no reason at all....


© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.

Saturday 11 October 2008

The many faces of POVERTY

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.




here are the facts in detail:

■ 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.


*(TB= tuberculosis)



■ 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.



■ 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.



■ 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.



■ 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 or childbirth.
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.


- www.unmillenniumproject.org

© The poets voice~~~ October 2008, All rights reserved.