The sad face and sunken eyes attract attention as soon as you meet Eric. He is 8 years old and wears sweatpants and a jacket that is too big for him. I got to know him and his story in April of this year, in the community of El Bordo, in Chaco Salta. He suffered from tuberculosis and was severely malnourished. They also told me that they had to perform an anal procedure against nature, This is the place where he defecates. “I have to tape half the diaper to his stomach,” his mother explained as he played with the slingshot.
The certainty that there are so many children in Argentina living in a permanent state of emergency is worrying. Not only do they suffer from the ravages of malnutrition, they suffer from extreme cold and heat, live in precarious housing exposed to many hazards, and have difficulty going to school or receiving medical care. All together, every day. How does this marginalization affect their lives? What effects does it have on the body and psychologically? How far can they dream?
I met some of them who work on the Future Hunger Project. stories like juniors, A 16-year-old teenager crawls on the ground behind a soccer ball in El Impenitable, Chaco. Her mother said: “It was a caesarean section, but at the hospital they made me carry her via natural birth. He passed through my feet and they took him out like a dog.” The lack of oxygen left him with cerebral palsy that prevented him from walking and he could barely speak. He does not go to school, does not have a disability certificate, and in the nearest hospital, which is 20 kilometers from where he lives, there are no neurologists or traumatologists who can treat him.
“When it hurts too much, I cry.” said Marcela, a 7-year-old girl, touching her wrists, knees and feet. “Arsenic attacks us in our bones,” her mother Lydia explained. They are part of the Cuellar family, many members of which suffer from chronic endemic aquatic arsenicosis (hackery), a serious disease caused by prolonged consumption of water containing high levels of naturally occurring arsenic. They live in the Cobo department, in Santiago del Estero, where rural communities can only get safe water when they collect it from rain in cisterns. The rest of the time, they consume polluted water. Of Lydia’s eight uncles who grew up in the Filmer area, six died of cancer and one is undergoing treatment for skin cancer.
These are not isolated cases. In the country there are 1,387,878 children up to the age of 17 (equivalent to one in ten) who are at high risk, According to data from the Social Debt Barometer of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA). This means that they are hungry, and that they have at least three basic rights violated.
This is a silent pandemic. They are plagued by inherited and multidimensional poverty that does not ring alarm bells as Covid-19 did, For example. The country is not paralyzed. And there are no massive vaccine development efforts (in this case, public policies) that would allow it to have a decent present. In the face of this epidemic, we are indifferent. The long-term effects will be catastrophic and we will see them too late.
Why was I born in my house and they were in theirs? Why isn’t poverty written in my bones, in my short stature, in the scars of domestic accidents? I think it was luck. I had a warm bed, a plate of food before bed, and the ability to choose what career I wanted to study. Is this fair? Am I in debt? Not for the first; Yes to the second. It is not enough to file a complaint with the state, although you can start there. It is not enough to continue establishing NGOs, although we can support them as well. Is anyone else worried about this? How do we organize ourselves?