P.S. This is not Reality

Many people have heard Dr. Gandolfo, others, and myself quote the statistic of the thousands of people that die every day from preventable diseases, mainly deaths related to water. Every day, a minimum of 26, 000 kids die a day. There is no way to comprehend the number. Think, 4 thousand died on Sept 11. Angel, who is living in El Salvador, experienced this tragedy first hand. It just reminds me that our comfortable lifestyle is not reality for the rest of the world.


http://angelitaensalvador.blogspot.com/


What hurts the most is to think of how he died. He died from kidney failure, which from what I have heard is quite painful and slow. The doctors prescribed him medication to clean his kidneys, but it cost around $50/week. I doubt he made much more than $100/month, making it impossible to pay for the medication that may have saved his life. Friends have also told me that he is the 3rd or 4th in the community to die of kidney failure in the past few years. We are starting to wonder if the water is contaminated? But even if it is, there are few resources available to clean it up...
Close to two-thirds of the world's population lives without access to clean water. Before coming to live in El Salvador, I had no idea of what that truly meant.


The tradition here when someone dies is to do 9 days of prayers, with the 9th day being the biggest and almost a celebration. I went to the 9th day of prayers for Francisco, where I also had to bring some more bad news to the community. My close friend, Beatrice, who is the new youth coordinator, had applied for a scholarship from FUNDAHMER to help pay for her to go to college. She had been calling me every few days for the last month asking about the scholarship. Few (if any) kids from Las Mesas have gone on to college, and Beatrice's desire to study impressed and motivated me. But I know that in reality it is economically impossible for her to go to college without a lot of outside help. I want so badly for her to be able to study, but I had to tell her that night, at the funeral, that there were no funds for her scholarship. It almost brought me to tears when she told me (after the news) that she was going to apply for a job at a nearby factory - a factory that we would call a sweatshop.