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As some of the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”
That is not true. I traveled through South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, to gauge the impact of the cuts in humanitarian aid, and I found that children are already dying.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old orphan with H.I.V. in the city of Juba who had been getting his medications with the help of a United States-supported outreach program. The program ended, Peter’s immunity became compromised and he was soon dead of an opportunistic infection. Similar things happened to Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, and Evan Anzoo, a 5-year-old. That’s three children who died within weeks because of the cancellation of a single program in a single city.
In another town, I visited a new American-supported maternity clinic that had effectively ended deaths in childbirth in the area. Mistakenly assuming that I, as an American, was somehow responsible for establishing the clinic, one new mom wanted to name her newborn after me. Other villagers assembled to thank me and cheer America’s generosity. They did not know that the Trump administration had already ended that support, and that the clinic is scheduled to close this month.
As I wrote in my column, powerful men in Washington made decisions that will leave impoverished women bleeding to death in the dust.
