What do children really need? Toys? New designer shoes? Electronic gadgets? Attention? Empathy? Love? I guess depending on your own social, political and economic status in the world, you might answer with all of the above. But it's not until you walk out of the developed world box that you see Children really need Equality!! Equal access to clean sanitation, safe housing, quality education, and basically the individual recognition of potential!!!!
Children's innocence in what they have to what they don't have amazes me. As I think of the 5 year olds from my middle-class world in Canada, to the 5 year olds I greatly admire and respect in impoverished rural Nepal, I see how much "richer" these local children are.
Their certainly rich in their joy of the simple. The way all Nepali children laugh, explore, investigate with limited fear of strangers, any creature great or small, is utterly blissful!! Baby goats and puppies are all part of the local "gang" to sing with, dance with, dress up in towels and hats, as everyone rolls around in the grass between rice patties, cattle stalls, pig styes and concrete or adobe walls of their "modern" humble homes. Their possessions are very few. One or two causal outfits, to one or two school uniforms will be all they wear for some years. Expected school shoes are enclosed, but most children (and adults for that matter) live in hard plastic sandals, or nothing at all. Toys are few. Electronics non-existent.
And yet, these children are some of the poorest in all the other ways that qualifies developed nations as "developed". Many schools have limited running water, let alone separate bathrooms for boys or girls. All sanitation is outside of course, and there is no environmentally safe/appropriate waste system anywhere in rural Nepal. Schools are in various states of construction or crumbling, qualifying many classes to be conducted outdoors all year through. There are no Health & Safety rules or regulations here in Nepal.
Children however, are incredibly resilient in this nation of 30 million people (roughly the same as Canada). The statistics for child-hood disease and death rates are still alarming, but of those children I engage every day... I routinely sit in awe of their urchin-like smiles, their unadulterated giggles and their captivating sense of innocence.
Children's innocence in what they have to what they don't have amazes me. As I think of the 5 year olds from my middle-class world in Canada, to the 5 year olds I greatly admire and respect in impoverished rural Nepal, I see how much "richer" these local children are.
Their certainly rich in their joy of the simple. The way all Nepali children laugh, explore, investigate with limited fear of strangers, any creature great or small, is utterly blissful!! Baby goats and puppies are all part of the local "gang" to sing with, dance with, dress up in towels and hats, as everyone rolls around in the grass between rice patties, cattle stalls, pig styes and concrete or adobe walls of their "modern" humble homes. Their possessions are very few. One or two causal outfits, to one or two school uniforms will be all they wear for some years. Expected school shoes are enclosed, but most children (and adults for that matter) live in hard plastic sandals, or nothing at all. Toys are few. Electronics non-existent.
And yet, these children are some of the poorest in all the other ways that qualifies developed nations as "developed". Many schools have limited running water, let alone separate bathrooms for boys or girls. All sanitation is outside of course, and there is no environmentally safe/appropriate waste system anywhere in rural Nepal. Schools are in various states of construction or crumbling, qualifying many classes to be conducted outdoors all year through. There are no Health & Safety rules or regulations here in Nepal.
Children however, are incredibly resilient in this nation of 30 million people (roughly the same as Canada). The statistics for child-hood disease and death rates are still alarming, but of those children I engage every day... I routinely sit in awe of their urchin-like smiles, their unadulterated giggles and their captivating sense of innocence.
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