A little girl with a torn sweater

I was just watching the making of 'Do they Know its Christmas' by an all-star cast of the British music industry. It was fascinating and moving, but the most shocking moment was when Bob Geldolf showed everyone the famous Michael Buerk BBC report that prompted the world to act 20 years ago in Ethiopia when it was shown at Live Aid 1984. In it you can see skeletal kids struggling to walk and making it for a few steps before collapsing... a mother wrapping her little dead child in something that looks like a sack and just staring at it with tears in her eyes before moving on...a child struggling to get milk from her mother who is so emanciated she cannot produce any....It's hard to picture how shocking these images are until you actually see them. Poverty is the most heart-breaking thing in the world.
I remember when I was back in Kigali over the summer holidays and I was walking to the road to catch a matatu. There was a little girl by the side of the road standing infront of a horrible-looking shack. She was wearing nothing but a torn and filthy sweater-she couldnt have been more than 6 years old- and she was crying and crying. Every inch of her was brown with dirt and it was covered in sores. And she just stood there crying and crying. I kept looking back every few seconds until she was just a speck in the horizon but she was still crying and I could still hear her. For her, life will be nothing but unrelenting misery and suffering right up until the day she dies. All over the world there are millions and millions of little boys and girls with torn dirty sweaters and skeletal frames and parents who are lucky to bring in one meal a day, never mind four. As Bono said, we can be the first generation to make poverty history. Are we up to it?