The Facts of the Matter

I have these thoughts that have been jacking my world up lately, so much that I'm having trouble sleeping tonight. It is unbelievable the things that we take for granted daily. For example, water. We have the ability to have a drink of water whenever we want... clean water at that! Did you know that the majority of people in Africa die daily because they don't have clean water?! Every day over 4,000 children die from water or sanitation related diseases. The lack of clean water is one of the key reasons thousands of children throughout the world succumb each day to wholly preventable diseases! WOW!!... and here we are complaining when our favorite Starbucks drink isn't made just the way we want it. When did we adopt this attitude? James 1:27 says: Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. ... That's God's command to us! To look after, take care, and LOVE these people! WE ARE BLESSED SO THAT WE MAY BE A BLESSING! It's also are job to educate ourselves on these issues so here are a few stats:

Health Care and Nutrition
-Measles, malaria and diarrhea are three of the biggest killers of children — yet all are preventable or treatable
-More than 30 million children in the world are not immunized against treatable or preventable diseases

-95% of all the people who get polio are under the age of 5

-HIV/AIDS has created more than 14 million orphans — 92 percent of them live in Africa
-Six million children under five die every year as a result of hunger

Education
-134 million children between the ages of 7 to 18 have never been to school.
-Girls are more likely to go without schooling than boys — in the Middle East and North Africa, girls are three times more likely than boys to be denied education
-For every year of education, wages increase by a worldwide average of 10 percent
-Educated mothers tend to send their children to school, helping to break the cycle of poverty
Exploitation
-In the last decade, more than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflict
-More than 300,000 child soldiers are exploited in armed conflicts in over 30 countries around the world
-2 million children are believed to be exploited through the commercial sex trade
-Approximately 246 million children work
-171 million children work in hazardous conditions

Water

-At any one time, it is estimated that half the world's hospital beds are occupied with patients suffering from waterborne diseases.

-There are 1.6 million deaths per year attributed to dirty water and poor sanitation, well over half in Africa.

-2.5 billion people around the world do not have access to adequate sanitation and 884 million people do not have access to clean water.

Those are just a few of the facts... the list goes on and on!

There are several ways to get involved and make a difference. (http://www.onemillioncan.com/ ... http://www.one.org/ ... http://www.bloodwatermission.org/ ... http://www.thewaterproject.org/ ... http://www.410bridge.com/ ) ... I encourage everyone to check these sites out, and if you can, GIVE!!