Life In Poverty Essay, Research Paper

Many years ago a small child was born into a world of famine and violence. His village in central Africa had been victim to civil war and draught for years and there was no end in sight. Unlike most of his brothers and sisters, he made it past infancy and was lucky enough to receive a pitifully inept education by an under funded humanitarian organisation. Every few weeks one of the local children died of starvation, every few years an epidemic broke out. The only constant was the war.

About the same time in a small, suburban hospital, a young couple had a beautiful, bouncy, baby boy. He had all the advantages of a child in the richest country in the world. He played with Lego and had a cubby house in the back yard. On the weekends he would play cops and robbers with his friends. Guns were a toy. They were lots of fun.

The African men all carried guns as well they needed to. All too often, rebel soldiers would rampage through the area, burning, raping, pillaging, and kidnapping. They needed to defend themselves. Unfortunately, one man with an antiquated rifle is no match for a gang of bandits with machine guns. The little boy never saw the body of his father. All he heard was the scream of his mother, his father calling back to her and an avalanche of bullets. Then there was silence.

The little boy ran. Years passed as he roamed around with his countrymen and women, most of whom were also orphans. Nothing really changed as far as his day to day life. Their main concern was finding food and trying to get some sort of shelter from the weather.

Our white boy fared much better during his childhood. After primary school he was accepted into a prestigious private high school. He worked hard and graduated with flying colours. He had a girlfriend, a car, played football for his school. He was a perfectly normal American boy with dreams of serving his nation in the military.

The African boy was becoming a man and needed to find money. He was almost sixteen and needed to support his wife and young child. The army was the obvious choice. It was the most stable work in the area. With seventeen he joined the army and went to four weeks of basic training. He learned how to shoot and how to dig, because that s what soldiers do. He worked in the administrative wing of the army, never seeing any active service. It seemed for a while that his life might turn out well, after all.

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