Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Africa : the problem

Africa is the worlds second largest and second most populated continent, yet it is underdeveloped and some what ignored by the rest of the world. They provide fine countries, (like the U.S.) with diamonds, gold, copper, and col tan while their people are starving and dying from war and disease. Africa has many problems within it, but I think one of the major and most important issues is their ever growing number of orphaned children. Without parents or guardians to help them, how can they be expected to become educated, caring adults who can try to make their home a better place. Their minds are corrupted from an early age to becoming soldiers or slaves and they just don't know any better or have any other choice. There is currently 45 million orphans just south of the Sahara desert. So why are there so many orphans and how come they don't all get taken care of? The biggest reason is that parents are dying from diseases, particularly from aids. This website tells many peoples personal struggles with being HIV positive and how many of them were pregnant when they found out. http://www.avert.org/africanstories.htm. 80% of all children orphaned by aids live in Africa. Some of the reasons why Aids is still spreading so rapidly in Africa is because even if the people are being educated about the problem it doesn't mean they are going to change their behavior. The cultural block is that many men practice dominance over women, not giving them any choice, and many men still believe in polygamy( having multiple sex partners during marriage). So the disease keeps on spreading because the reluctance to change. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2872/is_/ai_98009196 The other causes of people dying, including parents, are starvation and malnourishment, Malaria, and the civil war that still continues today. Different ethnic groups are at war because Africa is dependent on their natural resources and it goes through economic decline which are prime conditions for civil war. Malawi is facing its worst food crisis in 50 years. The hunger and malnutrition inflicting some 20 million Africans is the result of severe droughts that dried crops and floods that destroyed much of what survived in countries already struggling with the economy.In the last decade, malaria has been increasing at an alarming rate, especially in Africa. it ranks third among major infectious disease threats in Africa after pneumococcal acute respiratory infections . So this is the problem, What is the solution?