The Orphan Crisis

These eye-opening facts are hard to read, but reality in our world.  I will admit for the longest time I was oblivious to the orphan crisis.  Now that my eyes are opened, they can never close again. 

• Fact: Nearly 144 million children across the world are orphans.
• Fact: Every 2 seconds, another orphan dies from malnutrition.
• Fact: 87.6 million orphans live in Asia. 43.4 million Orphans live in Sub-Saharan Africa. 12.4 million orphans live in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Fact: 6,000 children are orphaned by AIDS every day. That is newly orphaned child every 14 seconds.
• Fact: Around the globe, 15,200,000 children have been orphaned by the AIDS crisis. If all these children held hands, they would stretch across the United States. By 2011, this virtual chain will reach around the world.
  
• Fact: Malnutrition plays a part in more than half of all child deaths worldwide. Every year, malnutrition is associated with the deaths of five million children under the age of five.
  
• Fact: Even more often, malnutrition cripples children's growth, renders them susceptible to disease, dulls their intellects, and diminishes their motivation and their productivity.
  
• Fact: India has more orphans than any other nation, totaling 35,000,000 in 2003; nearly 1 out of 10 of India's children are orphans.
  
• Fact: In India, one out of two children under the age of 5 is underweight.
  
• Fact: Millions of children suffer from micronutrient malnutrition, when the body lacks essential minerals and vitamins. These deficiencies can lead to severe mental or physical impairment, life-threatening anemia, lowered productivity, blindness, a weakened immune system.
  
• Fact: 854 million people do not have enough to eat - more than the populations of USA, Canada and the European Union.
  
• Fact: By 2020, southern Africa will lose one out of every five agricultural workers to AIDS. With a shrinking labor force, food is harder and harder to come by in areas that need it most.
  
• Fact: In like sub-Saharan Africa, where up to 20% of the adult population has been impacted by AIDS, orphaned children not only lose their parents but also teachers, health workers and civil servants who die of the disease.
  
• Fact: Sub-Saharan Africa has the greatest portion of children living as orphans. In 2003, there were 43,400,000 children with no living parent. This number represents 12% of the region's children.
  
• Fact: It is estimated that by the year 2010 in sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than 18 million children – more than all the children in the United Kingdom, will have lost at least one parent to AIDS.
  
• Fact: Every week, AIDS claims as many lives as American fatalities in the Vietnam War.
  
• Fact: By 2010, the total number of orphans, from all causes, in Sub-Saharan Africa will increase to 50,000,000.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  James 1:27