This week, I came across one of the most disturbing images I have ever seen. On the front page of Tuesday's New York Times was a picture of a little boy starving to death, reduced to a thin sheet of skin clinging to a clearly visible skeleton. He is but one of countless victims of an unprecedented famine currently striking Somalia, a tragedy of which I was pretty much unaware until I saw that graphic picture.
Dartmouth likes to pride itself on being a socially-conscious campus concerned with global problems. When earthquakes strike Haiti or Japan, students and administrators alike rush to raise awareness and hold fundraisers to support the afflicted. President Kim likes to remind us that the world's troubles are our own troubles, yet somehow we do not seem to be very upset by the fact that millions of people in East Africa are currently starving.
More than two weeks ago, the United Nations announced a famine in Somalia affecting over 12 million people, the first time the U.N. has declared a famine of such magnitude in 30 years. Still, there has been almost no reaction on campus. There have been no statements from the administration, no blitzes from student organizations, no fundraisers or benefit dinners. It seems that most students are completely oblivious to what is going on in Africa, and even those who are aware of the situation have not done anything about it.
Perhaps amid midterms, papers, corporate recruiting and pong we do not have the energy to worry about starving people. Perhaps a famine is not as dramatic as an earthquake or a city-leveling tsunami. Perhaps we are so used to hearing about impoverished Africans that we have become desensitized to their problems. But the disaster in Somalia is very real, and so is the need for help. The United Nations estimates that about $2.5 billion in humanitarian assistance is needed, more than double what has been raised so far. As a result, even in refugee camps, seven out of every 10,000 people are starving to death each day.
To be fair, the rest of the United States hasn't taken much interest in the famine either. In the past few weeks, the media has been caught up in the back-and-forth political bickering over the debt ceiling, while international news has focused on shootings in Norway and continued upheaval in the Middle East. Even Nicholas Kristof, whose New York Times columns are known for their stark descriptions of tragedies in the third world, has recently become more engrossed in American politics than famine in Africa.
Certainly, the debt ceiling is important, but ordinary citizens have little immediate leverage over what politicians ultimately decide to do. We can, however, have a direct impact on the situation in Somalia, where humanitarian organizations are currently in desperate need of money to feed starving people.
Of course, the stories that the media focus on tend to reflect the public's interests, and people usually aren't too interested in tragedies that don't affect them. This regrettable truth is particularly evident here at Dartmouth. In the case of Haiti, President Kim's previous involvement with the country helped to mobilize the entire campus around relief efforts, with the College going as far as sending down a team of doctors. When the earthquake struck Japan, the Dartmouth Japan Society took an active lead in increasing campus awareness and raising money. In a way, the world's troubles are our troubles only if they directly affect us. With neither the administration nor a large enough fraction of the student body being personally affected by the famine in Somalia, the disaster has not been able to penetrate the Dartmouth bubble.
This summer at Camp Dartmouth, the bubble encompassing our blissful little campus is as airtight as ever. Far from images of dying children, the front page pictures of this newspaper show students swimming in the river, grilling burgers in front of their houses and tossing Frisbees on the Green. Granted, we are all busy, and keeping up with famines is a pretty bleak way to spend our free time. But we owe it to these starving children to at least be aware of their suffering and take a few minutes to pitch in however we can.
