Sustainable Development: The UN Millennium Development Goals, the UN Global Compact, and the Common Good

Foreword

ix FOREWORD Bishop Kevin Dowling, C.Ss.R. As the introduction to this volume states, “There is an astounding gap in wealth and income throughout the world. While some poor countries have become prosperous, in many nations poverty and inequalities have deepened, especially in Africa. Today there are more than one billion hungry people, up 25 percent in the last five years. every day 17,000 children die of hunger. Too many people are jobless. over 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have hIV. What is the moral response to these painful disparities?” Yes, the statistics are numbing, mindboggling. But I only understood the statistics when I had actual experience with some of those suffering. one day, many years ago in 1996, I sat in a miserable rusted zinc and wooden shack, one of over five thousand in an illegal so-called squatter camp in the midst of the richest platinum mines in the world, just north of Rustenburg in South Africa where I live—just one camp among several in the area housing some 350,000 destitute and despairing people. In the suffocating heat the perspiration poured down my face. In front of me on a bed were a dying baby and a woman, a single mother who had migrated from a country to the north, together with her firstborn little girl, in a desperate search for a way out of severe poverty. her story was just one personal experience of many others, and it depicts the horror behind the need for the Millennium Development Goals. Somehow, this woman had heard that perhaps there was a job in the mining areas in South Africa. She migrated, but she did not know that her search would end in a “poverty trap.” She arrived in this shack Based on a talk delivered at the March 2011 conference represented by this volume. x Bishop Kevin Dowling, C.Ss.R. settlement located right next to a mine shaft and a hostel housing migrant workers from neighboring countries, men who had left their wives and families to find work there. She had no house, no money, nothing. So, like other women, she went to the only “salvation” there was—a tavern where men were lounging around drinking, the only pastime in such surroundings. She found a man who offered her accommodation in his own shack—but at a price. She had to provide him with sex, and the next day this became sex for money to buy food, and again and again—because, as she quickly found out, being an illegal economic migrant meant there was no job for her there and no hope of finding one. The consequences were devastating. She inevitably contracted hIV and then fell pregnant, and her baby was born—also hIV-positive. This was before the advent of antiretroviral treatment in South Africa, and before I was able to develop a partnership with a local company to build a hospice in-patient unit to which we could bring these “little ones” of the earth to die in peace and dignity. Because of her poverty and malnourishment, she rapidly deteriorated. That day, she and her baby were dying before my eyes. I will never forget her despairing words to me as the tears ran down her cheeks: “Father, I have no hope. There is no hope for me.” I held her in my arms as she sobbed. All I could do was entrust her to the care of my dedicated team of trained community home-care nurses in the settlement, and they cared for her in her shack until she and her baby died. not for the first time in my life, I felt so helpless , but I also felt anger at the systemic issues and injustice which had condemned her to this shameful and degrading death. This story illustrates how poverty should not be visualized only in monetary terms; a more holistic understanding is required, which reflects all the ways a human being experiences being “deprived.” In fact, a range of deprivations characterizes what it means to be a “poor” person in their actual context. The chALLenGeS The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) articulate several critical priorities in the quest for a more humane and just world. They Foreword xi also require an ongoing analysis of the causes of the misery experienced by millions in impoverished regions like Africa—because the tools used for analysis are...