They need your help

Imagine these children on the streets of Boston, like we see them on the streets of Cape Town and Pretoria and Johannesburg and Durban and my hometown, Stellenbosch. Imagine thousands of children everyday without a home, food, care and love. Can you? Here, where we live in abundance, can we imagine those children? I cannot forget them.

In South Africa, I tried to steer around them and out of the stare of their pleading eyes. I tried to avoid the outstretched hands, the asking in a mumbling, soft and subservient voice, "A few cents, please, melani". Inside, it often tore at the seems of my emotions, wrestling with my resistance to give in and ... What, start to care? Start to cry? Because, it gets to one, seeing them every day on the sidewalks and in the park yards: The bands of homeless children tirelessly swarming to the next man or woman on his or her way from the car to the shop, with money to pay for things needed and things nice to have alike. Yet, we have so little time for them, if any at all. They become to us like the African flies in summer that we just wave off.

But, come winter, they are still on the sidewalks and in park yards.

In Africa we have a culture called Ubuntu, which means to share with one another. It means those who have are obliged to share with those who don't. Far it is from me to impose one culture upon another and demand that the rich of the West help the poor of Africa. To do so would be arrogance. Still, I can only beseech the rich of this world: The children of Africa need your help.

Today.

[ Appeal to help Africa's orphans]