{"id":3389,"date":"2020-05-22T17:46:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T21:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/?p=3389"},"modified":"2020-05-22T17:46:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T21:46:18","slug":"war-on-our-real-common-enemypoverty-illiteracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/war-on-our-real-common-enemypoverty-illiteracy\/","title":{"rendered":"War On Our Real Common Enemy:Poverty\/Illiteracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Rashid Abdu, M.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We are now fighting a <\/span><b>globa<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">l war against COVID-19.\u00a0 But what have we learned from this invisible enemy?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We have learned the following:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is global, but will not stay with us forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It recognizes no boundaries.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is not a democrat, republican, communist, socialist,\u00a0 conservative,\u00a0 or liberal.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has no religion, or any political affiliation.\u00a0 It has no conscious.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It started in China, but it is <\/span><b>not<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Chinese.\u00a0 It is now in America, but it is not American.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Its victims are mainly old, weak, poor, and uneducated.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, are at higher risk than the well to do and educated. Death rate in black\u00a0 neighborhoods, is \u201c 6 folds higher\u201d than in white neighborhoods. (Clyde Yancy, M.D. JAMA).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Minority neighborhoods, are poor, poorly educated, and harbor many of the risk factors, such as\u00a0 crowding, diabetes, heart diseases,\u00a0 obesity, and poor nutrition.\u00a0 Because of their lack of education, they are denied the luxury of working from home. But the underlying factor common to all poor communities, is a lack of good <\/span><b>education<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0 Lack of education and poverty are inseparable, and generate each other.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0One time, I conducted studies on Victims of Violence and on breast cancer.\u00a0 I found that young, mostly adult males, \u00a0 victims, and\u00a0 perpetrators, were born and raised in the predominantly poor black neighborhoods. Almost without exception, they had poor, or no education. I will never forget a 21 year old man, who could not read or write, but still received a high school diploma. \u201cThey give me diploma just to get rid of me\u201d, he said, in a low voice, and sad, cast down eyes.\u00a0 Instead for being an asset, without education, he became a liability.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In my study of breast cancer among white and black women, I found that poor black women had\u00a0 higher death rate\u00a0 than white, because they sought help late and died early.\u00a0 Once I choked with emotions, when I saw a beautiful lady in her early 60s,\u00a0 whose\u00a0 breast\u00a0 had been replaced by\u00a0 a huge malignant ulcer. \u00a0 I could see her ribs.\u00a0 She did not see a doctor when it was still a small lump, because, \u201cI did not have insurance\u201d, she said.\u00a0 She could have been my mother or sister.\u00a0 She lived about 2 miles from the hospital. \u00a0 I wanted to cry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My heart goes out to the poor, and uneducated, because I can relate to their blight and their despair.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0I was born and raised in a village in Yemen,\u00a0 where we had no electricity, or running water, and often not enough food.\u00a0 Most of the men and all women, could not read or write.\u00a0 As one of 16 children, I slept on the floor, and celebrated, when I had something to eat!\u00a0 I know poverty and illiteracy first hand.\u00a0 I lived it.\u00a0 It was the <\/span><b>force of<\/b> <b>education<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that pulled me out of that swamp of poverty and ignorance. The same force that could, should, and must, pull out every child from the same swamp.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">According to UNISEF, and World Bank, 11.5 million children in the United Sates, and 387 million\u00a0 globally,\u00a0 live in extreme poverty, with poor access to education, proper nutrition, or adequate healthcare.\u00a0 Nearly one billion people cannot read or write, worldwide.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">COVID-19, is a temporary enemy, but in its wake, it has taught us a lesson:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has taught us that our permanent, and greatest global enemy, is not\u00a0 a pandemics of any kind, but rather, it is the intertwined twins:\u00a0 <\/span><b>Poverty and Illiteracy<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0 Pandemics come and go, but poverty and illiteracy have been our enemies since the beginning of time. We could tolerate it when our world was separated into many parts, far away from each other, and\u00a0 when a part often did not know what was happening in the other parts, but today,\u00a0 technology in all its forms, has shrank our world into a small \u201c<\/span><b>village\u201d<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Only a worldwide unity, cooperation, and common purpose, could defeat this common and universal enemy, in order for\u00a0 humanity to survive and thrive, where every child will reach his\/her potential. We, the nations of this \u201cvillage\u201d, cannot afford the status quo. All wars produce negative results in lives and in treasures. But global war on poverty, illiteracy, hunger, and diseases, will be an i<\/span><b>nvestment<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. It will save lives, and whose dividends will benefit all of humanity. \u00a0 COVID\u201419 will take its toll, and leave, and we shall prevail, but poverty, hunger, illiteracy, will remain with us forever\u2014if we allow it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='clear '><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rashid Abdu, M.D. &nbsp; We are now fighting a global war against COVID-19.\u00a0 But what have we learned from this invisible enemy?\u00a0 We have learned the following:\u00a0 It is global, but will not stay with us forever.\u00a0 It recognizes no boundaries.\u00a0 It is not a democrat, republican, communist, socialist,\u00a0 conservative,\u00a0 or liberal.\u00a0 It has no [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3390,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions\/3390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}