There’s been a huge amount of talk in our media recently about drought and hosepipe bans and so on. And it’s true that it’s been very dry, particularly in East Anglia over the last couple of years. (Not in the last couple of months however, but that’s just typical really.) Reservoirs are depleted, and although this is a good arable region, it’s difficult to know how the crops are going to go this year. And what’s more, we’re having the wrong kind of rain. Go figure.
But we won’t starve. We’ll end up paying a bit extra for food to be bought in, and although many families are stretched at the moment, our children won’t be malnourished, and all will eventually be well.
But in the post this morning we received our World Vision child sponsorship pack. Amadou lives in Niger, an area of Africa that quite frankly, before today, I knew very little about. Today I learnt hard facts that in some ways, I didn’t want to know.
In Niger, 259 children out of 1000 die before their fifth birthday. That’s just over 1 in 4. Life expectancy is 45, compared with 78.1 in the UK. Liz Scarff from World Vision is out there now, and Sian from Geek is new Chic and Cybher is going out on Monday. I’m going to be following her journey through her blog, and I hope that lots of you out there will be prepared to ShareNiger too.