Written by: Tim Glenn
My son, Morgan, turns one year old tomorrow. I can’t believe it. Over the past few months, we’ve been making changes around the house to protect him. Cabinets are locked to keep him away from anything that could do him harm. A gate blocks his access to the stairs. Potentially dangerous items have been moved out of reach. Electrical outlets have been covered.
They call it “child-proofing” your home. Which is actually kind of a backwards way of looking at it. You’re not protecting your house from children…you’re protecting children from your house.
You can’t protect your children from every possible harm. But there are some things you can prevent. And it would be downright irresponsible of you to not do them.
If only we looked at our world the same way. What are we doing to “child-proof” our world to make it safer for our children? Surely, we’ve made great strides…but there’s so much more to be done.
- If only stopping child abuse was as simple as putting a gate at the entrance of a stairway.
- If only stopping child pornography was as easy as covering the electrical outlets.
- If only making sure that a child never goes hungry was as simple as locking the cabinets.
We may not be able to protect the children of the world from every danger. But there are some things we can do now. Take, for example, malaria. Here in the US, we “locked the cabinets” on that disease nearly 60 years ago. Still, malaria kills more people every year than AIDS. That’s why Compassion established its Malaria Intervention Fund. Our goal is to distribute insecticide treated nets to children who are in danger of dying because of something as small as a mosquito bite. To date, we’ve distributed over 178,000 nets. We hope to distribute another 300,000 over the next two years. It’s doable. It’s easy. It’s not even that expensive.
If our planet is our “home” then we’ve got to do a better job of ”child proofing” it. Malaria is one danger we can prevent now. I urge you to take part in protecting children from malaria. Visit Compassion’s Malaria Intervention page to learn how easy you can help bring an end to this horrible disease.
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March 20th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Great analogy, Tim. I really hope our generation is able to lock the cabinet on malaria worldwide. There’s no excuse for that particular door to remain open.
March 20th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I hope so too, Kelly. You’re right. There’s no excuse for that particular door to remain open.
I would love to see a virtual end to malaria within the next 5 years. With great organizations like MalariaNoMore and, of course, Compassion, fighting the disease, I don’t think that’s too much to hope for.