World Hunger @ MindSay 
Have a few moments on your hands? Want to help end hunger and support the UN World Food Program? Then please hop on over to www.freerice.com/
It's a win win situation. You get to play a vocabulary game, increase your vocab and show yourself just how smart you are, and as you're doing that you're supplying rice to hungry people the world over. This is perhaps the easiest way to be a do-gooder. It's quick and painless and even fun (and quite possibly addicting!).
Freeerice has been up and running since Oct. 7, 2007 and have donated over 33 billion grains of rice so far. Be a part of something larger than yourself...and help people who don't have the means to help themselves.
Thanks for taking the time to read this
In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:
"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2]
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.
He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was accidentally shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]
"The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined."Egads! Isn't that an alarming figure? I believe that the three richest people's combined net worth is well over 120 billion dollars.
"The world’s billionaires come from 49 nations. Two countries are home to more than half of them."I just thought it a bit funny that the world's billionares come from what amounts to another quarter of the world's countries. I'm guessing there isn't much overlap between these two groups of countries.
Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.That's a lot of people, isn't it? That is like the entire population of Indiana dying every year simply because they couldn't get enough to eat. Have you been to New York city? Imagine it without 75% of it's population. Of course, extreme poverty like this doesn't even exist in the United States. What you see on the street corner is merely relative poverty. As in, people that are relatively poor according to the standard of living most people take for granted.
I can't say this is shocking, but it is rather unfortunite. Those 22 countries probably add up to about $40 trillion dollars. $200 million is a drop in their gigantic inground swimming pool.At the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in 2002, world leaders pledged “to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7%” of their national income in international aid. In today’s dollars, that would amount to almost $200 billion each year.
In 2005, total aid from the 22 richest countries to the world’s developing countries was just $106 billion—a shortfall of $119 billion dollars from the 0.7% promise. On average, the world’s richest countries provided just 0.33% of their GNP in official development assistance (ODA). The United States provided just 0.22%.
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.
How bad is it to be malnurished and slowly starve to death? Can anyone reading this fathom the suffering of those 300 million children? The worst part about this is that this is completely preventable.
"Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent US economist and a special adviser to the UN secretary general, argues in a new book that extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025.
In an excerpt from his book published in Time magazine, he says there is little evidence that corruption has been the main obstacle to development in Africa, where extreme poverty is concentrated.
Rather, he blames the geographical and climactic conditions that have contributed to drought and disease.
He quotes World Bank figures showing that more than a billion people suffer extreme, or life-threatening poverty, and sets out nine broadly defined steps that should be taken to address the problem.
One is: "Redeem the US role in the world."
He writes: "The richest and most powerful country, long the leader and inspiration in democratic ideals, is barely participating in global efforts to end poverty and protect the environment, thus undermining its own security."
Yes, I do believe that we can make such a big difference in the world if we are but committed to the goal. Consider what eradicating severe poverty means to the world, and compare that to all the trivial things our countries pursue. We are talking about dramatically changing the lives of over a billion people.
I would buy the technology from Star Trek to produce synthetic foods and with that technology I would also buy a conveyer belt that would stretch from house to house feeding the hungry right into their mouths.
I would pay the guy who runs the ozone layer to keep it at a minimum dilation, keeping us safe from radiation and allowing us to continue to throw trash on the floor.
I would buy Time/Warner, and AOL, and Wal-Mart, and Microsoft.
I would buy Popular Mechanics, Star Wars Insider, and T.V. Guide, so I'll know what's on!
I would buy all the religions and all the gods, and melt them all down into one united almagam creature thingy that sorta resembles an Autobot, except for the third head, the Celtic knotted apron, and the butterfly wing coming out of the chest, so everyone can worship together in peace.
Obviously, I would buy a night with Paris Hilton.
I would also make it so every drinking fountain spews forth Barq's Root Beer.
And I'd get some new tires for my truck.
Note: This is the first time I used tags. I think they're horrendous.