Oh how easy it is to sit in our nice comfortable lives and decide how things should be.
?companies should pay their employees a living wage?. Of course, but at what cost? If they stop employing people in foreign countries and use people in the UK instead, they are employing UK citizens and contributing towards the increase in employment in this country, but at the same time they are taking away jobs from those who perhaps need them more, for whom that small wage helps to contribute towards feeding, clothing, educating their children, and who, without that small wage, might not live to see the next month, the next year, whose children might not survive. If they increase the wages of the staff in the countries where they are currently employing, it has potential to have a massive impact on the economy of that country. Let?s not forget that these countries are often poor countries, where the majority of the inhabitants live below the breadline, and where the majority of businesses simply can?t afford to pay their employees a decent wage. Then a big corporation comes in and starts to pay its employees way above what other companies are paying. You then create a financial divide, workers seak to go and work for the big corporations because they pay the most wages, and this leaves the little companies unable to find employees and therefore unable to trade which has an impact on the local infrastructure. It?s a bit like the big supermarkets coming in and sending the little corner shops out of business.
?governments should be providing anti retro viral drugs for aids sufferers?. Yes they should, but it goes way, way deeper than that. We can give people in Africa all the drugs they need, but this will not prevent the spread of aids, in fact it would probably exaserbate the problem. It?s about education, about cultural change. Aids is so rife in Africa because promiscuity is so rife. When a woman in Africa has a baby it is culturally acceptable for that woman?s husband to go and seak pleasure elsewhere while she is breastfeeding. It is not considered appropriate for a man to approach his wife while she is breastfeeding his young baby (first three months it is I think but could be wrong on the period of time). And so the men go off and find their pleasure elsewhere, contract HIV which they then bring back to their wives who then pass it on to the children when they are born. And safe sex is not an option because condoms are also a contraceptive, and another part of African tribal culture is that the man has to be able to father many children, and the woman has to be able to produce many children. and when condoms were brought in in the 80s and distributed free the Africans considered it a ploy from the white man to stop them ?breeding?.
You cannot fix the problem purely by throwing money at it. Many of these governments are extremely corrupt and the money would never be seen by the man on the street. And you cannot use the war in iraq as the answer to everything ?the government shouldn?t have spent all this money on the war in iraq? they did. It?s done. And they will spend money on many, many other such projects.
I don?t give a toss if a celeb gained a bit of publicity doing that. I?m sure ant and deck didn?t enjoy their trip to Africa, have you any idea what it?s like to see people starving to death? To see people living in such poverty that they don?t know if their children will survive until morning? It wasn?t a bloody jolly to the caribian, it was an insight into the third world, and if they gained a bit of publicity doing it they also gained a bloody lot of humility in the process and no doubt now are thankful they will never have to live like that.
Suzycreamcheese when you?ve been to Africa, and seen what it?s really like, then you can begin to judge those that go there to raise awareness. But until then, you have absolutely no idea, because what you see on tv doesn?t even touch the serface.