A Day in the Life....

Africa through the eyes of a child....many of us here in the USA take for granted the access to clean drinkable water.  In certain villages in Africa children have to walk for miles every morning just to get water for their families.  It is usually girls that are required to go fetch the water for everyone else.  Alot of the water is not really safe to drink and causes sickness and infections.

I can't even imagine doing this every day, let alone getting it straight from the source.

Education is another obstacle for many African children.  They are poor and often can not afford the luxury of learning to read and write.  If their parents can afford to send their children to school, the children usually have to walk for hours just to get there.  Really? In this day and age?  We really do not know just how good we got it here in America.  There are 46 million school age kids in Kenya, and only about half are able to go to school despite the fact that the tuition has been waived but not the cost of transportation, extracurriculars, and uniforms. It seems those type of things still stand in the way for many.

Something else we take for granted is internet access.  We can connect almost any place, anytime we want to.  In Africa fewer than 1 out of every 250 people on the entire continent actually use it.  All the major cities/capital cities have access.  Places like Egypt, Nigeria, Morrocco, and South Africa, it is popular.  The reason that it is not so popular is that most children do not learn how to read, it is too expensive to have, and electricity is not always readily available.

Many African children grow up surrounded by war and conflict.   In places like Liberia children as young as 7 have been found in combat.  They don't even have an understanding of what it is all about and they are given weapons.  In Rwanda, 300,000 children have no Mom or Dad because they were killed in war.  In the Congo 7 out of 10 kids die before they reach the age of 2. That is just crazy.  Instead of having the war and conflict played out on a video game like most American kids they are fighting real life battlefields.