Prabha Thacker

Kathmandu:

According to old adage, no news is good news. But in the New Millenium this should sound quaint or even stupid For the world seems to have forgotten to relax and has pushed us onto the very edge of a frenzied information era! Bombarded as we are with good news, bad news, sad news, stupid and sundry news, our appetite for information and news seems to sap us of all our energy to want to act on the news that we read, even in situations that call for serious thought and action. And if news is of any value at all it should be more than mere reading value. It should call for action to set things right or at least put us in a contemplative mood with a desire to know more and act wherever possible.

What can be more saddening than daily news about the worsening plight of children- the future of the world of tomorrow? Children are becoming victims of slavery, sex abuse, hard labour and domestic violence. The old order of slavery and bondedness has found new avenues in today’s world where violence continues within homes and spills onto the streets . In our own capital we increasingly witness children begging strategically on streets that are most frequented by tourists or in downtown areas where a buck or two is a sure bet! Running after tourists for dollars and asking for money in French, German, English, Spanish, Japanese, etc. — apart from the embarrassment it causes to any passerby with a conscience, also tells of the resilience of these children that live in poverty .

More often than not, the surprisingly cheerful look on their faces unwearied by the dust that sweeps Kathmandu streets in this dry season, is a reminder of the common destiny that they share — at least for the time being — of life on the streets. There may be some amongst us that would say — well there are child beggars everywhere even in countries richer than us. See India where it is worse. Or look at USA where more than 4 million children go to bed hungry. Or look at Brazil, etc., etc. Many of us enthused with a sense of national pride need perhaps to accept the truth rather than look across to catch others in the act to justify ours is yet a manageable problem. If so- then why have we not yet been able to fix it?

Yes, indeed ours is not the only country where children suffer disparities of caste, color, class, ethnicity, social status, access to education and other opportunities. But we have also had foreign aid galore and other sympathetic individuals from abroad that have pitched in sufficient amounts to curb the exodus of kids on to the streets and still they come.

The recent statement by Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF is an alarm of things worse to come as the world scrambles for power and money at any cost to fling away family, community and individual values long nurtured by the wisdom, experience and patience of those gone by. According to her statement despite the unprecedented economic gro-wth of the East Pacific Region in the last 14 years, increasing disparities between countries indicates that there is no fairness in the distribution of that prosperity. For there are many that have been left behind — that includes the most vulnerable — the Region’s 600 million children. This left behind syndrome has distanced them from access to education and food and more worrying are concerns with vulnerability to trafficking.

This concern for those children left behind speaks of the tremendous task ahead and courage to call a spade a spade when corruption rears its head, instead of maintaining a stance of “why should I rock the boat and jeopardise myself for after all who knows who needs who and when”. This might be a smart saying in this age of smartness for many with huge shopping lists. But surely if corruption can be kept at bay - children left behind could get a chance to see the light of day.

When great philosophers from the East taught tolerance, patience and wisdom, little did they anticipate miseries of a kind unforetold of children yet unborne into the New Millenium - an Age full of news, bad and sad, of children in the Ivory Coast, for example, forced into slavery on the cocoa farms, subsisting on corn paste and banana, less forgiveable being the fact that chocolate lovers in the West are kept in the dark about these harsh realities. The social responsibility of media would be to give them information that most of the cocoa beans that go into Nestle, Mars and Hershy candy bars come from Ivory Coast where thousands of enslaved children work in the most squalid brutal conditions that would embarras even a poor Easterner. Closer home, there is already much reporting about children being trafficked to be used as prostitutes, for organ transplant, drug smuggling, and to feed the banned slave trade of camel jockeys in the Middle East. At home it is about sexual abuse of children, internally displaced children, hard labour and domestic violence.

Let us not resort to the good old excuse of poverty as the cause as we always do but also examine our national conscience and global conscience in search of common values, a challenge, indeed, in this age of Globalisation and corporate supremacy ! But faith in humankind in essence works. With the realisation that trafficking in people is fast emerging as the third largest illegal trade after guns and drugs, the world seems definitely perturbed over this growing menace. We can then hopefully expect to read more encouraging news about strident measures in this newly emerged era of free capital flow, technology flow and people flow.