143 Million Forgotten People

HIV/AIDS, wars, and poverty have birthed a population of unpopular people. According to the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), there are about 143 million orphans world wide. In addition, eighty percent of all the world's children orphaned by HIV/AIDS reside in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not easy to put this massive number into perspective. Basically, it is about half the population of the United States.

The closest we can get in trying to put such an enormous figure in perspective is by using basic models. The Bird's Nest, the stadium where the 2008 Olympics were staged, has a seating capacity of ninety thousand. Using simple arithmetic, it would require 1,590 kinds of that kind of stadium to house all the orphans. In fact, using the Rungrado May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea - the biggest stadium in the world with a capacity of 150 000, would take 954 stadiums of that magnitude to house 143 million people.

Furthermore, it would take a single person four and half years to count 143 million people at a rate of one person per second non-stop - that is not considering the fact that it would take more than five seconds to say all the numbers in the hundreds of millions. If the latter is taken into consideration, we are talking of roughly 6 years.

Imagine being at the Olympics, you expect the crowd to be cheering for Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps but instead, the noise coming out the stands is of agony and pain. Give me a chance! Give me a chance! Give me a chance! The cries resonate in the stadium with unison. When you look in the stands, the people in the stands have holes in their shoes, they are wearing old clothes with holes in them, their bodies are frail from hunger and dehydration, and their faces exhibit loneliness, fear, and above all desperation. If you were running in the stadium, it would not be long before you stopped to render one of these victims a smile and hope for a better tomorrow.

Thousands of children become orphans everyday. The scourge of HIV/AIDS has exacerbated the problem of orphans. This is evident especially in sub-Sahara Africa- which has the highest cases of HIV in the world. The number is also increasing in places like India, China, South America and other parts of the world.

The life of an orphan can be a very lonely life. Waking up and having no parental supervision, no hope of a meal, no hope of shelter, and other basic necessities, is definitely an excruciating experience. Some orphans in third world countries can be found sleeping in sewer tanks, in market places, on the street, and mostly under bridges without blankets. Rainy and winter seasons can be nightmares for these Impecunious group of people.

Life for many of these orphans is not about prowess or anything but of survival. They will do anything to put food in their bellies. Scavenging in garbage fields and trash cans become ways of survival for children who have not figured out ways to make money- mostly, those under the age of eight.

The only thing these kids would want in life is a place to call home, an embrace from someone who cares, and a hope for a better tomorrow. With seven billion people living on the planet, if everyone would commit to becoming a solution to this social malaise, the world would be a better place. It will take more than Bob Geldoff, Bono, and the World Vision just to mention a few, to bring about hope to the 143 million forgotten people.