Alleviating the country’s hunger and poverty: What can we do about it?
(Original)

Rosarin Hataiseree
(Age 12, Thailand)
Rajini School, Bangkok

Hunger and poverty is one of the most serious problems in the world today. Can you imagine how many people die each day from poverty? It’s hard to believe that in the 5 minutes it takes to read my essay nearly 100 people will have lost their lives from hunger. This is a truly “inconvenient truth”. According to the United Nations, around 25,000 people die everyday from hunger or huger-related causes. Worse still, in 2006, more than 12 million children died before they reached the age of 5. You will not believe me if I tell you that this sort of suffering has also occurred even in the richest country like the United States and some middle-income countries like Thailand.

I think you are now wondering how this could happen in the today’s world, especially the world where there is plenty of food for everyone. Although there maybe a variety of ways to help the poor people, I am confident that teenagers like us can have important role to play to help reduce the suffering of the poor. In what follows, I will show to you how we can do that.

Let me start first with the brief overview of the recent situation of our country’s poverty and hunger. In Thailand, I always observe that children of my age or younger have to earn their living by selling some sort of flowers and newspapers at the traffic junctions. Many of them often do this during school time. It follows that they loss opportunity to study in order to have a better future. Worse still, some of them lost their lives from car accidents. To give you two additional examples, I still remember the story of a mother who was put into jail for stealing a piece of food worth 10 Baht for her two-year-old child. Her story broke the people’s hearts, when it appeared in the country’s newspapers. The recent story of an impoverished 12-year-old boy, named Chatree Nadda, is another good example indicating the difficulty the boy’s family has always had. The poor boy’s letter to His Majesty the King has enabled him and his family to get help from the King.

Regarding the methods for helping the poor to escape from hunger and poverty, I will first encourage people to give their money and time to support the operation of fund-raising programs, especially those aiming to support children’s education. Then, I would ask the government to set aside a simple payment of 5,000 Baht a month to poor families. I will do this by making a big voice through media campaigns that target newspapers, radio, and the Internet. The setting up of the money-donation program organized jointly by the UNICEF and the Citibank Group is a good reflection for this. Who knows, if poor children are given a chance, some of them may become valuable human beings who could make endless contributions to our world. A real-life story of a female-homeless child, as shown in a Hollywood movie entitled “From Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story”, is a good example in this regard. Murray’s story has inspired many of the poor youth people around the world. At least, I have learned that better education can make a real difference to people’s lives.

At the same time, if I have a power to do so, I will push for a more aggressive approach. Essentially, I would initiate certain types of national-level change. For one thing, I would encourage people to participate by forming a “Zero Hunger” program. The aim is to help the poor living in the remote areas of Thailand, particularly those living in the Northeast Region. For another, I will encourage people to join hands to lend our voice and amplify the message to the Government about the country’s poverty. We need to tell them to clearly establish social policies for the poor, particularly those related to child labor and child prostitution.

Before I end up, I just like to emphasize that it is time for teenagers like us to take initiatives and be part of the solution. We should not sit back and expect our politicians and leaders to fix the problems for us and then complain that things seem not to get much better.