Orphans as our Collective Responsibility
To start, I will firstly define the word orphan and collective responsibility: An orphan is a child whose parents are both dead. Two categories of orphans exist: 1) Vulnerable and 2) Invulnerable orphans. Vulnerable orphans are those orphaned whose survival depends wholly on adults and invulnerable orphans are those orphaned children who are now adult and could work and successfully earn their living. I wonder how many invulnerable orphans we are having in our country, but unfortunately I am not concern with the invulnerable orphans. Rather I am mainly focusing on the vulnerable orphans. That is why I will again defined the term collective responsibility: Collective responsibility refers to a duty that certain group of people consciously share among themselves for a specific and usually positive objectives, If the issue of Sierra Leone orphans is our collective responsibility, therefore the objective of improving the live of these children whose parents are dead should be everybody’s concern in our country. To what extent this prevails in the country is the crucial question we all need to ask ourselves? Does anybody want to become an orphan? No body is willing to be an orphan. This means that the state of being an orphan is completely involuntary: and a consideration of the forces that makes children be orphan will help us be conscious of the need to come together to give support to such a vulnerable group. Both natural and artificial forces are responsible to render children orphans. On the natural plane include the death of child’s parents by old age, diseases, fire, hurricanes, and wild animals. The December 26, 2004 Tsunami that rocked the foundation of Indian Ocean and its shores is typical example of natural forces behind the making of orphans. Very close to us in Sierra Leone, however, such earthquakes may be rare but our own records of death are colossal from the impact of diseases and drowning. Ranked among the least developed countries in the world Sierra Leone has been name for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, STD or sexually transmitted disease…….. All of which are potential catalyst in the process of making orphans. Added to these diseases is the Aids pandemic with its uncompromising fatalism. Many parents died because they are either too poor to secure the basic necessities of life or pay for professional medical assistance. What about death by drowning? Can we remember the case of how Sierra Leonean traders died enrooted by boat to and from the neighboring countries? Have fishermen not lost their lives in pursuing their profession? In all these case, however thousands of children in Sierra Leone become orphans due to natural forces. What hold on the artificial plane also strikes a pessimistic chord. Many orphans have owned their status to the death of their parents by war, road accidents, airplanes crash, witchcraft or mining. Think of the thousands of people killed during the Freetown intervention and in other part of the country. To this end, orphans are our collective responsibility.
Alpha Beretay