Suffering, In Plain Terms

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 2

Suffering, In Plain Terms

Suffering in the world must be presented in human terms if the Save The Children Fund were to maintain and increase its work, the New Zealand president (Mrs T. L. Fancourt) said at the annual meeting of the North Canterbury branch yesterday.

“We are numbed by numbers and surfeited by suffering because we hear so much about millions of dollars and millions of people,” said Mrs Fancourt

Mrs Fancourt gave a quotation from a Food and Agriculture Organisation organiser: “If you were to take the starving people of the world and place them two feet apart in a line stretching from your front door out around the world until they came in your back door that line ef starving people would stretch around the world not once, or twice, or three times, but 25 times.

“And if you got into your car to drive down that line of starving people it would take you three years.” In Sympathy Last year the S.C.F. in New Zealand had raised its income by $66,000, Mrs Fancourt said. This was the proof of her belief that when New Zealanders were “feeling the pinch" themselves they would think of others living in desperate suffering, and would give. The widening gap between the under-developed countries and affluent nations was widening. There was an urgent need to make an added effort now to close this gap or the end of the century would bring a far worse state of affairs. “We know there is a population explosion in other countries, particularly India, but we cannot change traditions of thought overnight If we care about other people we must help now,” she said. Self Help The need to help people to help themselves was also urgent This was the only way to live and look at other people without shame, she said. “The individual must be helped to feel he is a human being—not just the receiver of a handout from someone who can well afford to give it He must be an individual who feels there is hope in life because he has an education and a job to go to,” she said.

The S.C.F. must try to expand its long-term work to keep faith with the people it was trying to support “We need to find ways to maintain our level of income, and, if possible, increase it,” said Mrs Fancourt