This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

When was the last time you heard of anyone starving to death in the United States? Or dying of a mosquito bite for lack of drugs on the shelf of a California hospital? I’m not saying it never happens, but it almost never does.

In the United States, we mitigate the effects of poverty, and we’ve built the tools to allow most people to pull themselves out of poverty if they want to.

We mitigate the effects of poverty through a safety net of welfare, food stamps, emergency health care, a progressive income tax and public housing. We give people tools like all-but-free access to education, and access to the most coveted and vibrant free enterprise system in the world. Yes, we have challenges and problems, but we have it pretty good in the USA.

The third world has a very different kind of poverty.

Because the effects of poverty aren’t mitigated, and there are few tools to pull yourself out of it, even relatively prosperous middle class families can suddenly plummet into the depths of poverty when just one thing goes wrong: a family member falls ill, a cart overturns and destroys food that was to be sold, or weather destroys crops before they are harvested.

Think about living without reliable access to clean water, or working electricity. Without access to opportunities in education or employment. Without a governmental system that promotes justice and equality (ours isn’t perfect, but it’s among the best).

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a family living next door to Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu.

Their family cow died a few years ago, and there is no money to replace it. The family survives on the small amount of food they grow behind their shanty, or what little they can buy when they sell their surplus produce at market.

The mother spends most of her day with the baby strapped on her back, walking the two hours to a clean water spring with a group of women in her village, and then walking the two hours back while carrying the day’s water supply. The father walks several hours a day as well, so that he can earn about 20 birr – a little over $1.50 – helping a land-owning family to harvest their crops. Because of this, these dedicated parents manage to keep their three older children in school.

Then the mother falls sick. The needle that delivered a coveted vaccine five years ago seems to have delivered something else as well: a silent HIV infection. (Other common methods of infection may be infidelity on either spouse’s part, or being the victim of a horrific assault.)

Now, several years later, she has full-blown AIDS. Without access to antiretroviral drugs, her health will steadily deteriorate until she dies of a minor malady made great only because there is no immune system to stop it. Most likely, the years that she lived with this silent infection means that her husband is positive as well. The same fate will eventually befall him. And for all they know, the baby might be infected from breastfeeding.

When the mother dies, school becomes impossible for the children. At least one is needed to care for the baby and fetch the day’s supply of water. But HIV/AIDS is still misunderstood by many, so fear is likely to keep the others shunned from school as well.

At least the father and his four children still have a place to live – if he had died first, the entire family might have become instantly homeless, since ancient traditions in many African countries don’t give women the right to own or inherit property.

When these four lose their dad, there are only so many options available to them. They might just stay where they are, and the twelve year old becomes the new parent – “kids raising kids” as they call it. Or perhaps they end up in an orphanage if one exists nearby and has room.

Relatives might take them in, if they can be found. Yet many relatives will refuse – what if the baby is infected as well? And many are simply unable. How can they bring in four new mouths to feed when their own children already go hungry some nights?

The other options are unspeakable, especially for girls: slavery, prostitution, human trafficking.

I’m not being overly dramatic. This is not an atypical story in many parts of Africa right now. Take this scenario and multiply it by thousands of families, and you begin to see the problem.

• What happens when HIV/AIDS effectively wipes out an entire generation of moms, dads, doctors and teachers in a village or small town?
• What happens when sheer hunger prevents a father from being able to provide for his family?
• What happens when contaminated water or a mosquito bite brings a family to its knees, suffering from diseases conquered in the west years ago?
• And what happens when illiteracy and lack of any opportunity for education or employment makes it utterly impossible to change these realities?

This is the spiral that is poverty in the developing world.

Are you feeling “compassion fatigue” yet? Perhaps you’re thinking that you should pull back to the world you knew before? After all, what can one person do to change all of this?

I admit to having that thought cross my mind a couple of times.

But as William Wilberforce (the great British MP who led the abolition of slavery) once said, “having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know.”

So hang in there and don’t leave now. There’s one more post about the nature of poverty, but then we get to start talking about solutions. And I’m excited and passionate about the solutions that are developing to end poverty in our world.

“We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies.” – Bono, U2 lead singer and founder of ONE campaign

Next Post: Changing the World Requires Sustainable Solutions

Photo: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia