Growing up as a musician in South Africa I witnessed first hand the man-made obscenity that was apartheid and used music to protest against injustice.
Gift of the Givers has just been granted permission to set up base, medical teams, equipment and supplies at Banadir Hospital, the largest hospital in Mogadishu (the largest city in Somalia) where thousands of patients are flocking to from various refugee camps in and around Mogadishu and the South, and are in desperate need of life saving medical assistance.
South Africa's Ubuntu Spirit knows no bounds. We are indeed making an emphatic continental statement that Africa is coming to the aid of Africans unreservedly. The power is not in the proclamation but in the execution: being the first African agency and the only agency in the world to fly 6 planes into Mogadishu in a two week period delivering 112 tons of aid, gave a very good feel being South African.
"As the hunger took its toll a husband and wife left their two children in the 'forest'. They could not bear the thought of their children dying in front of their eyes nor did they want their children to sense that they (the parents) were dying".
Realist Foreign Policy refers to the policy of a sovereign state in its interaction with other sovereign states. It might seem strange that an article that opens with a line like this finds itself in an environmental publication.
Parts of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are facing one of the worst droughts for 60 years, and around 20 million people are desperately in need of food, clean water and basic sanitation.
