11 Million Backpacks, 11 Million Soccer Games

Here is an article from Good Housekeeping be prepared with kleenex... I wasn't. The following is one quote from the story - but don't JUST read this part - read it all... it will rock your world!

Seven years from now, UNAIDS expects 20 million African orphans. In a dozen countries, a quarter of the children will be orphans. The numbers sound ridiculous. The figures are inconceivable. 11 million, 20 million – they sound like answers to how many stars are in the sky, or how many light-years since the Big Bang? You can make calculations with a number like 11,000,000, but it’s impossible – unless you’re Stephen Hawking – to feel anything about it. You can find mathematical sub-sets of 20,000,000; you can perform square root maneuvers; you can graph it, but hats off to anyone who can begin to imagine what this looks like, what this means.Who is going to raise 11 million children? My husband and I now have seven children and there are days we think we’re going to be driven insane. Who’s going to sign 11 million permission slips for school field trips? Who’s going to pack 11 million lunches? Who’s going to cheer at 11 million soccer games? Who will buy 11 million pairs of sneakers that light up when you jump? 11 million bedtime stories? Backpacks? Toothbrushes? Who will offer grief counseling to 11 million children? Who will help them leave lives of servanthood or prostitution? Well, as it turns out, no one. Or very few. There aren’t enough adults to go around. A generation of parents, teachers, principals, physicians, professors, spiritual leaders, musicians, nurses, farmers, and merchants is being devoured. Very little aid from the West, including President Bush’s much-ballyhooed $15 billion dollar AIDS Relief Initiative, has reached Africa.