This statistic I found the other day still has me reeling.
- In Africa 266,000 children are orphaned due to AIDS every month. – July 2005 – UNAIDS Report
What do you do with 266,000 children a month who lose their parents? What can you possibly do with 1.2 Million children a year? The fact that these children are probably not only losing their parents, but their extended families as well is staggering. This problem is so large that there is no traditional solution we can possibly turn to. We need to start thinking out of the box.
First off, the problem seems wide spread across a very large region. If you were to house fifty children per orphanage, you would need (does some quick math) 24,000 new orphanages every year. With two people (volunteers) running each orphanage you would need 58,000 long term volunteers every year. That seems like a big number.
What about starting a new city. A sanctuary where children could make their way to. A safe place of learning and work where you would need less volunteers (teachers, builders, administrators) on a shorter time frame, and rotate the management load across fewer people. A place where you take children from grade school through trade-school or college. Trade schools could be used to run the city itself. I think you could you run such a place with 5800 volunters? It doesn't seem as impossible when you look at that number. That's 206 children per volunteer (assuming 1.2M children total) which seems manageable when think that many of the older children could be called upon to take up some of the duties. Where would you start in such an endeavor? Does anyone else have any other ideas?
It sure seems to me that educating these children is going to be the only long term solution. What if you could build such a city which turned out 260,000 college graduates every year? A diaspora back to their homelands where they then rebuilt the infrastructure and educated the next generation. An educated Africa would be an amazing achievement.
From everything I have seen, these kids want to learn. They want to do math. They want to be productive. Even in the most appalling of situations (
Invisible Children) where you see kids doing math home work in a sewer at night while they hide from militants. If we can just give them that opportunity, in a safe environment, and allow them to change their own future I think we could turn the tide from red to green.
