TWO

This is an article by Claudia Winkelman - in the Guardian Extra on 31 January 2007

I am repeating extracts, quite large ones, because this article 'touched me'. I support a couple of children through World Vision, why don't you?

Article extracts - by Claudia Winkelman:

    This week, I went to Uganda for Comic Relief. I spent three days in Kamwacha - a slum, 10km outside Kampala.

     I thought I knew what a slum was. Kamwacha is not just a slum. It's not just a place where some people are a bit ill and there are a few run-down houses.

   Imagine the worst place in the world, living conditions that defy description ...

  And then double it. And double it every two minutes for the next twenty years of your life, and then you might be close to what Kamwacha is like.

  Decrepit huts the size of shopping trolleys, housing as many as 10 people, perched along the edge of unsanitized streams of human waste. All around people are chronically sick, HIV is a plague and it loves poverty.

  ...  some people I met in Kamwacha.

Winnie is almost two years old, She's really cute. She lives in a tiny hut - the roof is falling in and it doesn't have anything inside it. There are no windows, it's very dark - almost pitch black. Just outside the house, a stream runs by, it's not a stream, but an open sewer. It's teeming with disease, but the children have to drink the water anyway ...

[abridged] Winnies mum has AIDS & TB and nobody else to look after her. Winnie eats about once every two days and even though she's nearly two, she weighs  the same as a bag of sugar. She is also suffering from malnutrition to the point where she cannot walk.

She does not have a toy or a book, Winnie spends every minute of every day sitting in the dark watching her mum die ....

This is one of three children that Claudia talks about, there are millions more -

 please support Comic Relief