I chose South Asia. I looked at a few different regions and I felt strongly about reading more about this region after learning about the hardships that the children have to endure.Children in this part of the world have many challenges. This area has the largest number of children living there in the world. Poverty and deprivation in South Asia are among the worst in the world. One of the challenges is that only a small portion of children go to school. So the majority of children lack a proper education. Their intellectual development is directly effected and the experiences that school has to offer is not available for these children.
Another challenge is the high portion of children who have HIV. Not only is there a high portion who have HIV, but the medicine that can help them is not available to almost all of the children. I would imagine that this has a strong effect on them. Emotionally, they may know that they may not live very long without the medicine, so they may give up hope and not care if they accomplish anything.
There is still a great deal of disregard for females. Many times, if a fetus is a female, the mothers have an abortion. I think that the self-esteem of females would be low, because they are not treated very well and not looked upon as important members of society.
Another issue that the children have to deal with is many of their births are not registered. This makes it difficult to get services made available to them that would help their well-being. Also, there are many areas that lack food and water. So these children do not have their basic needs met. This would mean that they must have these needs met before they can begin to grow emotionally.
After reading about this, I was very sad. I always hear about poverty in other countries and the way children are treated, but when I actually read it and reflected on all of the issues, it was heartbreaking. These children have so much to deal with just to get their basic needs met. It also makes me realize that some of these issues occur close to home. There are children that are living with HIV and poverty. There are children right here that have heartbreaking stories, also. It is important to understand the challenges of all children.
Source:
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html
It does saddens me to see that even after all of these years and with all of the programs that we have that we still have people out here starving. The education system and their disregard to girls is deplorable. At this rate, I predict that women will always be treated as second class citizens.
ReplyDeleteYou would think with all the advances in medicine, technology, etc we would not have so many places where children suffer. It is true in order for us to be effective we have to understand the challenges even our students face daily.
ReplyDeleteIt is truly heartbreaking to hear about these conditions all over the world. I did not know or realize that the population of children were so high in this region, and still so many needs not met. So sad. Thank you for sharing your findings, very enlightening, but very sad. Makes you wonder what ever could we do to help these conditions all over the world, even at home.
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