Famine in Niger

Reading The Village Voice last night and I saw this story in their Bush Beat section. It's about the everyday problems in the country of Niger.

Sure there's all this talk nowadays about Niger, yellowcake, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Robert "the smarmy fuck" Novak, Karl "flesh-colored-hair" Rove, et al, but I can guarantee that most of the people in Niger don't give a fuck who any of those people are. They just need some help getting food everyday. The article starts:

Forget Niger's yellowcake. Don't even think about anybody at any time exporting any kind of cake whatsoever from Niger. That starving country needs all the cake, grains, cereals it can get.

One of the worst crises in decades of starving children is occurring right now in Niger. Did I mention starving pregnant women and starving elderly, too?

A country always in crisis is in one of its worst. As the U.N.'s IRIN news service pointed out late last week, "millions teeter on the brink of famine".

Hey, you can even forget about handing out that prohibitively expensive yellowcake stuff. People cannot afford even the 46 cents it costs to buy a cup of millet. Can't relate to that? Try this: As men flee to urban centres, their women lie listless at home, too weak to work the fields despite the recent onset of the rainy season, and their children wither to skin and bones.

It's issues like this that the Live8 concerts were supposed to raise awareness for.

The concerts triggered something within my head and I wanted to help out. I'm doing my part and I'm selling the photos I took at Live8 Philadelphia and donating the profits to World Vision which is currently working in Niger fighting famine.

If you've got a little money to spare, please take a moment and head on over to my Live8 Philadephia Photo Gallery on my photoblog and have a looksy. The prices are cheap, they're low because I want the prints to move. If you live in the Center City area, I can even hand deliver them to you, or you can pick them up saving you the $3.95 in postage.

I'm in no way trying to say that what's going on here on our soil with Rove, Wilson, Plame and the rest isn't important. I'm not saying that we can't make a difference in the outcome of all that, but you can make an immediate impact on the lives of children and families in a starving nation that is currently in the spotlight, but the people who are starving are not the ones in the spotlight. They don't have to be in the spotlight and they don't have to be starving, they shouldn't be starving, there is just no reason.

***UPDATE*** 7.19.05
And I just saw this BBC News article on Niger's people starving to death, specifically the children.

Aid agency World Vision warns that 10% of the children in the worst affected areas could die.

They say the international community has reacted too late to the crisis.

...

Families are roaming the parched desert looking for help. One family we came across did not even know where they were going.

"I'm wandering like a madman," the father said. "I'm afraid we'll all starve."

They were hundreds of miles from the nearest food distribution point.

Some more articles from BBC News: here, here, here, here.