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your nostrils with the smells. We saw hundreds upon hundreds of
the rickety wretched sampans--small sailboats--on which whole
families live. Many have been born, lived a lifetime and then died
on one of these dirty filthy sampans without ever having stepped on
land. We saw dingy, dilapidated, old six- and eight-story
apartment buildings, without elevators, where large families live
in one or two small bare rooms--thousands of dirty, decrepit,
decaying shacks.
Leaving Hong Kong, we flew over Vietnam. But we made stops at
Bangkok, Thailand (Siam); Bombay, India; and Tehran, Iran (Persia).
The pitiful, poverty-stricken, diseased, starving people in these
populous areas of the world beggar description. One sees people
begging food, starving, dying, right in the streets. Starving
mothers trying to nurse emaciated babies which have little chance
of living. IT MADE US SICK AT HEART!
What could we do to help these pitiful, miserable people?
Our son, Garner Ted, who now carries most of the broadcasting
on The WORLD TOMORROW, has been speaking on the program from Cairo,
Suez, and Jerusalem, Jordan. My wife and I had visited all these
Arab countries ten years ago. Perhaps you heard the broadcasts
describing the wretched and degenerated condition of the masses in
those countries.
Of course, in all these countries, there are the upper
classes--but they are the small minority. I want to tell you that
it was driven forcibly into my consciousness how most of you, here
in prosperous America--as well as our readers in Canada, Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Europe--have NO CONCEPTION
of how more than HALF of all the people on earth are living--in
half-starved and starving squalor, filth, stench, and degenerated
ignorance. Did I say living? No, not really living--eking out a
miserable, degenerated, and probably disease ridden existence!
WHAT could we do to help them?
Authorities in Hong Kong have a program for improving
conditions. The United States is sending wheat, food, clothing,
and hundreds of millions of dollars in relief to India and other
such countries. Yet this is hardly a drop in a bucket. It isn't
going to solve the problem of human degeneration, ignorance and
misery. All the nauseating filth and degradation remains.
But honestly--wouldn't you like to help CHANGE all this? I
WOULD!
When you are right there--when you are SEEING it with your own
eyes--yes, and smelling the stench, it becomes REAL! You are
filled with mingled disgust and compassion. You want to DO
something about it--but you can't.
And yet WE CAN! And WE WILL! But not in our own power.
With all of man's efforts, this problem can't be solved.
Haven't you ever thought--as you sat down to a banquet, or a big