Childhood lived just halfways (watch the doll), and begging to cover basic needs: just the daily bread.
Childhood lived just halfways (watch the doll), and begging to cover basic needs: just the daily bread. |
October 15, 2004
(APE).- As Giorgio Agamben points out, power has the unbounded chance of protecting life or of authorizing its holocaust. As reported yesterday by Carlos Grandi, M.D., Head of the Perinatal Epidemiology and Biostatistics area of Maternidad Sardá; in the City of Buenos Aires, where "about 10% of Argentina's annual childbirths take place", the average weight of Argentine newborns dropped by 32 grams between 1992 y 2004. Million of kids in Argentina start with their dice already cast. They come to the world being the dawn in the territory of life as Chilean writer Badilla Castillo put it.
The poor children on Earth are like a candid flock of humbled angels. Every child born within the four oppressive walls of poverty has neither the splendor of novelty nor is his turning up blessed as a necessary human renewal. For the hostile look which rules us it might be an unnecessary demographic growth. According to Dr. Grandi, the central area "covering the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Rios, with nearly 400,000 yearly childbirths" shows an even stronger drop -34 grams- in the average weight at birth.
Always referring to our children which are born in these times of defeat, Celia Lomuto, M.D., who coordinates the Perinatal Program developed by Dirección Nacional de Salud Materno Infantil at the Health Ministry, claims that about 7.6% of newbornes weighs less than 2,500 grams and that "both prematureness and an exceedingly low weight at birthtime are strong predictors of infant mortality." The percentage of childbirths showing these characteristics "explains more than 50% of the events of death among children less than one year old", she said. These are the same children who, with some luck, will carve suffocated poems in the concealed heart of blackboards.
It is told that a mother's chronic malnutrition conspires against the baby's weight and that a low weight baby -less than 2,500 grams- will show an affection in cognitive development "and that it is very probable that these kids will have their intelectual capability, their school performance mortgaged, or they may not reach minimum requirements to complete their education or to get a job", or maybe they are the manageable bodies needed for subduence into servitude.
Nevertheless, although it is known that hunger is meticulous and that there is no darker horizon as the one offered by misery, these children will resist and will insist enduring just like the footprint carving its time in sand. About how many of these homeland orphans will one half of society complain later on. How many inhabitants of the shiny side of this earth will reject them when they will knock on their doors asking for bread, while they will be thinking as usual about the depth of the next silence.
Although these numbers were formerly unheard of in the history of hunger in our country, it cannot be proved that someone could ever halt the fascination of the innocent who grow accustomed to fatality and who suddenly imagine beauty.
Data source:
La Nación newspaper, 10/14/2004