by Kirk Olivier

Created on: June 30, 2008

Its dinner time, the man of the house sits at the head of the table patiently waiting for his loving wife to hand him the pot roast. He dishes himself a fair sized portion and hands the plate onto his wife and down the line to the rest of the family. The meal is enjoyed by all, even the family pet who gets the leftovers. When dinner is finished, the man sits on the sofa and reads the newspaper. The headline reads "Zimbabwe elections a sham". A few kilometers down the road a mother calls her children off the street, it is dinner time. There is no man of the house and no dinner table. The children sit around a make shift table in the make shift house. The mother hands each one a small plate containing a slice of bread each and as she has had a good day digging in garbage bins around the neighborhood, there are a few dry chicken bones with the bread.

As the children very excitedly enjoy their dinner, the mother retires to her corner of the room they live in, tears rolling down her cheeks; she has managed to feed her children for another day. Unfortunately for her there was not enough to go around, maybe she will eat tomorrow. She picks up a newspaper, it is three weeks old, she doesn't care what the headline says, this is her warmth for the cold night. This is becoming a common scenario around the world. Many take for granted the food on the table or a warm bed for the night. Millions more will go to bed hungry and cold and in some cases they will mercifully die in their sleep. The Zimbabwean election have dominated the world headlines since March 29 2008. In all this time, the starving Zimbabweans have been in the back ground. Nobody cares that millions of dollars have been spent on an election campaign that turns out to be a "sham", millions of dollars that could have fed millions of people.

It usually takes a disaster of huge magnitude; that affects the not so poverty stricken, before a report is made and somewhere in the article, the poor may be mentioned. In a very recent flood in South Africa, the headlines were "13 die in heavy flooding", the article went on to describe how all the local business and tourist destinations had been affected. The 13 that died were mentioned somewhere in the article, they were from a nearby poverty stricken area, 7 were children trying to get to school. The main photo's for the article were of a few cars being washed down the main road, yet 1000's were left homeless, no photo's showed their devastation.

On the other side of the

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