By Betty Mills

“For $300 a year, a child can go to school and get three meals a day,” a friend told me this morning while explaining the conditions her granddaughter, a nurse, found in a mission to Africa she recently completed.  

That sounds like a bargain until you remember that millions of African children have no access to $300. Or three meals a day. Or any form of medical care. Or safe drinking water. The list is long.

An image of my seven-year-old great-granddaughter floated through my memory bank, remembering last weekend at our cabin on the lake when she and a friend raced in and out, sometimes with popsicles in hand, on other occasions in search of a favorite game, or a clean beach towel or…the list was always on the move as were they in their sturdy little well-fed bodies enjoying the waning days of summer.

I’m sure if I added up the care that they have each been provided in the last year it would soar over the $300 mark. The temptation is to shrug off that stark difference in life’s expectations as the luck of the draw, not in my backyard, monstrously too big to handle from my poor aging perch.

Not that the backyard of my childhood was staked out in a lap of luxury. The first eight years of my life in a country grade school would qualify by today’s North Dakota school standards as too inadequate, maybe dangerous, to remain open. There was no water, no telephone, no library, a stove that eventually caught fire, an outhouse, an occasional rattlesnake, and was only open eight months a year, minus blizzard time.

But I was always safe, well-fed, adequately clothed, in a happy family in a rural neighborhood that housed uncles and aunts and cousins who were also always safe. There were no murderous gangs roaring down the country roads which connected us to anything that really mattered, nobody was selling dope behind the local bars, we never locked our doors, and a family doctor tended to our minor woes and sent us to the big city of Bismarck for major concerns.

By today’s standards, however, I would have been considered underprivileged—dangerous school conditions, no travel to the bigger world, no library, theater, concerts, the arts—a poor rustic rube. But compared to those children in Africa, living in the lap of luxury.

Has life in my beloved state of North Dakota changed since those rustic days of my childhood?  Yes, obviously and inevitably, and not always for the better. We have had menacing gangs roaring down the highways, children who come to school without breakfast or lunch money or even mittens in sometimes still frigid North Dakota. There’s no shortage of illegal drugs if that’s your goal in life, $300 a year would not be nearly enough to cover the minimum yearly needs of a child, and there are still rattlesnakes west of the Missouri River.

But we have the internet and public television and the same electronic gadgets available in the big cities. We have their cars, too, and combines traversing our fields by remote control.  Our children travel the world, sometimes with language skills our immigrating ancestors tried  to shed, calling home from some foreign shore as clearly as if they were in the local supermarket.

When my son called to say they were moving to Wyoming from Portland, Oregon,  I asked, “What about your job?” and he replied, “I can work anywhere I can plug in my computer.” That portable occupation facility is also open anywhere in North Dakota as long as you can plug in your computer.

Which then gets us back to the children of the world who cannot even go to school and who live in an abject poverty we would consider in the realm of the illegal in our society. If we can contemplate traveling to Mars and look up intricate hunks of knowledge on a small telephone, surely we can find a way to bring all the children of the world into a brighter future.    

And if that sounds like an impossible dream, we perhaps should consider that given the changes in our world, they are technically in our backyard.   

Betty Mills

Betty Mills is an avid reader and belongs to several book clubs. She is a longtime writer and co-author of “Mind if I Differ?” She also enjoys crosstitch.