Third World
As refugees currently stream out of Syria, Iraq and so on, the world is faced with a choice. Help these people in a major way, or not. I wrote the following magazine article a number of years ago. Students at Bluffton College set up a "tent city" for a week to camp in solidarity with the 13 million people living in refugee camps around the world at the times. The students were able to also raise $2,000 for a complete Habitat for Humanity "home build" in Afghanistan. The U.S. has the wherewithal to help the current refugees in a multitude of dynamic ways. As president, I'd mobilize all the help possible for the refugees -- including opening up the White House to take some of these people in -- with the hopes of inspiring a lot of others as well. (We have, periodically, taken homeless Americans into our home throughout the years.)
Again, worldwide poverty would be a major focus of our administration. [See our position paper on Foreign Relations.] Some 24,000 people starve to death every day in the world; one billion people live in deplorable slum conditions; one billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water; malaria is still rampant in a good number of countries…
America could impact all this way more than it does. And our administration would mobilize every means possible to impact all these areas. Over the years, I interviewed a wide range of Americans going the extra mile to help those in the Third World.
This is one of those Americans, and one of the first articles I wrote about the subject.
I recently interviewed a local high school student, Jadyn Barhorst, who was recently back from a missions trip to Ethiopia. The team went to poverty racked Khora, where a good number of people live at a garbage dump there (even paying rent for small shacks on property where they forage for food, clothes...). She said she and her team experienced extreme "culture shock" seeing all this. She said that it would be easy to get overwhelmed with the enormity of the suffering in Ethiopia -- and not do anything. But Jadyn said she adheres to the "light one candle" spiritual philosophy.
