Taking Care of Our Own – Should Come First

I fail to understand why the children who need us most – those in our own neighborhoods – are often put second to the ones across miles of ocean, from where the slave ships sailed generations ago.  Come ON.  As a black woman, I see so much pain all around me in people of the same color and I just cannot understand why they have to endure this kind of suffering.  I’m not saying that there aren’t sisters all over the world that need help – there are.  But to help others, I strongly believe you have to help your own first.

You see pictures of sick kids in Africa, with flies all over them and huge bellies and you think about how horrible their conditions are, but what about the kids who are right here starving because their parents are below the poverty line?  What about the American kids who are neglected and abused and whose needs aren’t met, year after year after year?  What I’m saying is that you can’t let those kids be forgotten while tending to the disease and sickness of other nations.

In this article I read in the New Yorker, they chronicle the story of Dr. Nadine Burke; a medical director of a clinic in San Francisco – and a woman of color – who just couldn’t stand watching the pain and suffering.  The patients who came in often needed serious care because they were ill from years of hurt or were neglected as children.  Her theory is that it is a medical problem instead of a social issue and that the issues need to be handled with a treatment plan, just like patients who have cancer or diabetes.  Listen to this staggering statistic:  “SIXTY-SEVEN percent of Dr. Burke’s patients have had one or more ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) and twelve percent have had four or more.”  With so many suffering at home, why would anyone even look across the borders?

In the powerful documentary No Woman, No Cry (based on the Bob Marley song) – Christy Turlington (yeah, the model) brings attention to the serious problem of less-than-perfect maternal health around the globe.  Even though her work is good, the real problem is this: what about the poor folks who share my skin color and hair texture, who are not lucky enough to have lived the life I have?  When I adopted my son, I didn’t fly to all corners of the Earth looking for the perfect brown-skinned baby who needed “rescuing” – I rescued my forever son right here at home, just 50 miles south of where I live.  And let me tell you he is beautiful, kind and bright.

So while the Hollywood hotties are out there strutting their thing and trying to show the world conscientiousness, what they are really doing is ignoring all those sisters who just don’t have choices in this, our own “land of opportunity”.  Why is it these sisters’ fault that they don’t live all the way over on the other side of the ocean?  If they did, maybe they’d be featured in Christy’s film, like all those women and children out there in Africa, Bangladesh and Guatemala.

Maybe then, the heroic and proudly set up humanitarian efforts of women like Madonna and Angelina Jolie would be seen closer to home.  While these women are flying 20 thousand miles to get to suffering kids in places all over the world, a girl who might live only 20 miles away from their neighborhood gets ignored.  No matter how you boil it down, there is enough disease and suffering to go around on our own turf.

Have you ever thought about it this way?  A child who is over three-years old, with black or brown skin, is as much a special-needs adoption child as any kid in all those faraway places.

So, I have questions.  Several questions.

Why is it so easy for Americans to overlook certain citizens while in their hearts and minds justify allowing the worse kind of sickness and poverty and death to continue happening right under their noses?  Why do Right To Life supporters only picket in front of clinics where white babies are murdered but then they allow a so-called physician in Philadelphia to massacre black mothers and their late-term unborn children for years without even an outcry?  Even Oprah ignored her sisters here in the US and set up a school in Africa!

I am just hurt and confused as to why people who look like me, have the same ancestry as me but are poor continue to be ignored.  Can someone please explain?