The World's Children

As life rumbles on under the gray Wisconsin sky, I’ve been thinking about children I meet when I travel.

Homeless boys in Nairobi who watch parked cars to make a little money. Well-fed daughters living with their families. Children laying on mats, starving because of a drought. Girls and boys in overcrowded orphanages. Street kids in Lima sniffing glue. Classrooms full of children in uniforms getting a basic education. Children working in India, bent over open flames shaping hot glass bangles. Boys in the Philippines mixed in with the adult prison population. African girls wearing dirty dresses that no longer zip up the back.

I think about what I’d like to see. A world where children have sufficient food, decent clothes, and a place to live. Where they receive a basic education. Where they need not work before their time. Where they can read and have access to books. Where they can play. Where they do not die of curable diseases. Where they are not put in prison or called on to be soldiers. Where loving adults would watch over them and care for them, so they can be children.

How do we get there? To that world?

(Lest you think I'm too intense, let me add that I'm watching Gilmore Girls and eating M&Ms while I write this.)