The saddest sight in Guyana is the children you see on the pavements begging, idling, cursing, selling cigarettes and sweets, most of them on their way to perdition of one sort or another.
And the most heartening sight is the children coming out of school looking well fed and well clothed, despite all the problems, and with at least a few books and a lunch-box often, and always full of the vibrancy and hope of children, despite all the problems.
Our children. They matter tremendously in all we do as individuals and as a country. The UN’s Convention of the Rights of the Child declares, among other things, that all children shall be provided with education, social security and health care; shall be protected from exploitation, abuse, and torture; and, on reaching a reasonable age, shall be consulted on any decisions involving them.
It is time the world paid attention to implementing this Convention. Some years ago Unicef entitled its annual report ‘Children in Dark Times’. It was an appropriate title for a document which noted the thousands of children who were dying every day from diseases that are preventable. The years have passed but the title does not change. ‘Children in Dark Times’ indeed. Unicef estimated that the cost of additional programmes to prevent 50 million child deaths every decade would be about £1.5 billion a year. “This is the amount,” Unicef pointed out, “that American tobacco companies spend on advertising in one year.”
And, of course, it is not only the physical deaths. Unesco estimated that 1 billion people grow up unable to read or write. A loss of mind is almost as great a tragedy as the loss of life itself.
The Convention of the Rights of the Child has an interesting ancestry. It began to be drafted when Unesco declared 1978-79 the Year of the Child to coincide with the centenary of the birth of a remarkable Pole called Janucz Korczak who, through his devotion to the rights and welfare of children, became known in his lifetime as ‘King of the Children’. Korczak was born in 1878 in Warsaw. When still quite young he became a celebrated paediatrician. He then added to this an author’s face, writing novels and fairy tales for children which sent his name far beyond the city of Warsaw. One might have thought that should have been enough to satisfy any man. However, Korczak then decided to devote his life to the immediate, practical care of abandoned children, so he built and became the Director of a new orphanage in Warsaw.
For 30 years he ran his orphanage and wrote books about the care and respect and love due to children everywhere. Then in August, 1942, came the event that more than any other exemplified his whole life. The Nazis, who had overrun Poland, came for the Jewish children in Korczak’s orphanage. They took 200 of them to be gassed at the Treblinka concentration camp. Korczak could not stop the atrocity but he did what he felt he could do for the 200 terrified children. He went with them voluntarily to Treblinka and, with them to the last, he went to the gas chamber and died with them. It is right that the Year of the Child should have been named for him.
Korczak wrote many learned treaties and many famous books and delivered many notable lectures and addresses. However, there was one simple lecture he gave which I like to think must have made a greater impact than any address he ever gave or any other piece he ever wrote. It was a lecture at the Warsaw Child’s Hospital entitled ‘The Heart of a Child.’
He entered the lecture hall with a small boy holding his hand tight. Without a word, he took off the child’s shirt, placed him behind a fluoroscope and turned off the overhead light. Everyone could see the boy’s heart beating rapidly on the screen. “Don’t ever forget this sight,” Korczak told the students. “Remember always what a child’s frightened heart looks like. That’s all for today.”