Ed: How many times do our children ask us this question?
Have we ever wondered what it would be to answer[laa Qaddar Allaah]: nothing?
Alhamdulillaah that we are capable of giving our children what they ask for. Alhamdulillaah for His endless favours, alhamdulillaah 'ala neamah.
The next time our children ask for a treat, please spare a thought and a duaa for the malnourished, hungry,starving and dying children of our ummah.
The immediate cause of their suffering is a man-made disaster ...war
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Afghanistan
Evidence from recent nutritional surveys in various parts of the country suggests that the nutrition situation for children in
Afghanistan is characterized by an extremely high prevalence of chronic malnutrition, also referred to as stunting (45-59%) and widespread micronutrient deficiency diseases.
Accurate information on maternal malnutrition is limited, but results from surveys suggest that mothers, as well as children between the ages of six months and 24 months, are at particular risk of malnutrition
[Ministry of Health, Public Nutrition Policy and Strategy: 2003-2006]
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Darfur
It is very disturbing to be a me or a you and to see what is happening in Darfur.
To see humanity stripped to its barest bones. To see people so traumatised that they stutter from their memories, or wail at night, and now so destitute that they simply have nothing.
Not a blanket, not shelter, not water, not food, not basic health. Nothing. And the prospect of things getting worse.
I spoke to so many displaced Darfurians that my notebook is jammed with endless identifying scribbles like woman in red headdress; starving child with crinkled face like old man; pathetic-looking child leaning against mother - and next to them name after name.
Stories that relay horror piled on horror. And stories that are all very similar. Out of all of them, the first displaced woman I spoke to in Darfur sticks in my mind, though her name is lost to me. She sat on a small mat with her nine-month-old boy who was gaunt and famished. His name was Abdul Rahim.
One morning, before dawn at 0400, Abdul's mother was sleeping in her village - Shattay - when they came. The Janjaweed. A word that carries tremendous fear. It is a play on the local, roughly spoken Arabic and translates as "evil men on horseback with guns".
This was the dawn when the so-called evil ones set fire to her village. She heard chaos breaking out and ran with her children. The Janjaweed were firing, killing men and, so she and others said, shooting and hurting children too.
Her husband fled also. She does not know if he was killed.
The next day, children in tow, she began her three-day journey to Kalma, in searing Saharan heat. On her way to the camp her seven-year-old child could not cope - and he died. She told this part of the story in a matter-of-fact sort of way. I suppose she knows that Abdul, her youngest, might die of hunger - and she has no house now, no shelter, no blanket.
"How do you find it here?" someone asked her.
She answered without hesitation and quietly. "It is better than dying," she said. Perhaps you have to have seen the horror of death in Darfur to make a statement like that.
For outsiders it is hard to see anything redeeming about life for the displaced people. In the past two weeks I have met families with no food at all in their shacks. It makes you want to scream to see it. I have seen a family's one bowl of rotting food crawling with insects. Seen a starving child being washed in water dirtied with his own blood. Seen stick-thin infants covered in excrement and throwing up their food because they are too weak to eat it.
Starvation is a horror. It is a slow and painful way of dying.
Mothers have to watch their children suffering terribly in the process. It makes you want to scream to see it. Except you cannot because it is not your trauma, it is someone else's and they do the screaming.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspond ent/3840427.stm
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Palestine
Palestinian families have had to resort to severe measures just to ensure their survival, according to recent studies.
Such coping mechanisms have ranged from forgoing medical needs, to decreasing the numbers of meals per day.
The new Johns Hopkins study has found that two-thirds of the population is not paying or paying less on utility bills in order to purchase food. More than half have given up buying clothes for their children, and 20% forgo buying medications needed for chronic diseases.
And according to Ard al-Insan's annual report, nine per cent of families in Gaza eat only one meal a day, and another 40% rely on money borrowed from relatives in order to buy their food. Dairy intake has decreased by more than 80%, due to the rising cost of milk.
Some 46.8% of all Palestinian households receive food assistance from agencies. In Gaza, the number is a startling 72%.
Greenough says the situation will not improve in the long-term unless the underlying cause is addressed: poverty.
"I've been in some homes and all I've seen is water, parsley, and bread," he said. "The problem isn't the food - there's food out there, but people just can't buy it. It's very, very sad." [aljazeera.net]
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Iraq
* 4,500 preschoolers, toddlers and infants die each month because of the scarcity of food and medicine.
The Infant Mortality Rate rose 100%; The Under 5 Mortality Rate rose 5 times from 1991 to 1996.
This increase is a result of two synergistic factors -- poor nutrition and increased pevalence of disease -- compounded by inadequate health services." CESR (Center for Economic and Social Rights, formerly the Harvard Study Team)
* One-third (32%) of children under 5 are chronically malnourished (in Central and Southern Iraq)this represents a rise of 72%
* 12% of children under 5 in Baghdad are 'wasting' (emaciated to the point of requiring urgent care). This represents a tripling from 1991 to 1995.
"After a child reaches two or three years of age, chronic malnutrition is difficult to reverse and damage on the child's development is likely to be permanent." UNICEF and WFP (World Food Program)
*"The majority of the population is on a semi-starvation diet." WHO 3/96 (World Health Organization) "There has been irreversable physical and mental damage from malnutrition ." FAO 95
*"Most (hospital) incubators are not working due to the lack of spare parts." CESR 1996 (Center for Economic and Social Responsibility, formerly the Harvard Study Team)
"The long-term effect, in the view of UN humanitarian aid experts, is likely to be an entire generation of Iraqi children stunted in their physical and mental development." Chicago Tribune 3/24/98
*"There has been a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases including polio, diphtheria and measles." UNICEF 4/93 "Children, War, and Sanctions" report
Increase in preventable infections such as diarrhea, pneumonia, whooping cough, typoid. Many Iraqis are now dying from diseases that were easily treated prior to sanctions." CESR 96
*Iraqi school buildings are falling apart, and there is no money for school books or other materials. So a generation of Iraqi children faces the threat of growing up with adequate education." Chicago Tribute, 3/24/98
"A side effect (of sanctions) ...is the...intellectual isolation in the scienfic and medical community. This is due, in part, to the non-availability of journals, periodicals, and textbooks." FAO 93 Sanctions prohibit textbooks, paper, pencils, pens, ink, chairs, desks.
[These are statistics from before the occupation. The magnitude of the Iraqi children's current misery is unrecorded, unimaginable.]
http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sanctions/sarticles/stats.html
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May Allaah have mercy on all suffering Muslims and forgive us our shortcomings and excesses
