Save The Children

I saw the advert on telly for Save The Children the other day and it made me think quite a lot. Can I just say before anyone gets the wrong idea from this: I'm not one of those people that think it's these childrens' own fault they have to live the way they do. I do feel sorry for them and I hate thinking of anyone having to spend their life on the verge of death like they do. Save The Children are saying £3 will buy a mosquito net and another £3 will help towards clean water, and they've got their advert on up to three times in a break. That's got to be costing a lot. I'm sure they have separate funding for their advertising from what the general public donate to them, but everyone knows the charity is there already. Everyone knows there are children starving. Putting it on TV doesn't change that at all, and people who are dead set on helping will go looking for these charities if they want to find them; they don't need to be on TV. So I thought, would it not be a better use of their money to buy mosquito nets and whatever else will improve these childrens' quality of life with the thousands of pounds they would otherwise just give to the BBC? They're trekking out to all these places with starving kids and instead of bringing food and shelter they're taking camera crews to make adverts that don't even make that much difference. Everyone I know that donates to a charity, they didn't find them on TV. And if I wanted to give money towards a cause I would look around to see which charity for that cause would make best use of the money instead of seeing an advert that was designed to make people feel guilty and jumping straight on the phone to hand over my bank details. Another thing that crossed my mind was the fact that if it's as bad as they make it out to be, these families really shouldn't still be bringing children into the world. If I didn't have a safe place to live, no reliable source of food/water and so much disease around me the last thing I would be thinking about would be having children to suffer with me. I understand that they mostly don't have access to contraception, but they don't need to be shagging till they've popped out fifteen babies that they can't look after. I know the average size of families in these places is bigger because the chances of them surviving are so much lower, I understand that they have the right to have families just like anyone else, and I understand that it's not their fault, but when you look at it like this they're really not helping themselves. And, as bad as it may sound in this context, I don't see much point in trying to help people that won't help themselves. Understandably they should have some children to keep their species (for want of a better word) going but that doesn't mean every family has to consist of twenty people. If one of their children dies, fair enough, have another one if they want. They shouldn't be replacing them before they're even sure they're going to die though.. that's crazy. If each couple only had to worry about two or three children and themselves, their limited supplies would go further and their problem would slowly start to sort itself out. Say a family gets a cup of rice but it has to go round ten or twelve people, it's not going to make much difference is it? They'll still be hungry after eating, but if the families only had four or five people then they would all get what would be a pretty good feed to them. The little bit more food would give them a little more energy to look after themselves, and because there would be less of them to look after the energy they had would go further. Women wouldn't have to breastfeed so many children so they would be healthier as their nutrients wouldn't be being divided between lots of children and they could keep them mostly for themselves. After a few months/years/whatever of that and I'm sure they'd all start to get healthier and start developing, maybe even start being able to fight some of the illnesses that kill so many of them? I'm sure a lot more people would be willing to give money to these charities if the people on the receiving end of the money tried harder not to need it in the first place.