Number 13

My eldest son, Kendall is thirteen years old.  He and his eleven year-old brother, Kamden, choose to wear the number thirteen on their soccer and baseball jerseys.  Bucking the societal belief that thirteen is an unlucky number, they have set out to prove, if only in their own minds, that a number is just what you make of it.

James, age four and a half, sitting on the left in the below photo,¹ and his little brother Joey, age three, represent the millions of children in developing countries around the world.  These may not be their real names or their real histories, but for these two boys, it is very real that thirteen may be an age they never see.  For them and for ten million children a year in developing countries, thirteen is the number of times they are more likely to die within the first five years of² their lives than children like Kendall and Kamden who are born in industrialized countries.  They may also be two of the 29,000 children under the age of five who die today around the world.  Or, they may be two of the twenty-one children under the age of five who die each minute, mostly in developing countries, of mainly treatable causes.³

James and Joey live on the other side of the globe from my boys.  Their lives, their communities, their families, and their futures are vastly different than Kendall’s and Kamden’s.  How can they buck the system and change their relationship to the number thirteen?   How can they look at the number five, the number twenty-one, and the number 29,000 and set out to prove that a number is only what you make of it?

The United Nations hopes to make this possible for James and Joey through the success of the Fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG4).  One hundred and ninety-two United Nations member states and at least twenty-three international organizations have agreed to achieve this goal and seven other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), begun in 1990, by the year 2015.⁴

The fourth MDG’s target is to reduce by two-thirds the number of deaths in children under the age of five by 2015.⁵ In 1990, the number of deaths per 1,000 live births was 93.  The 2015 target number is 31 out of 1,000.   As of 2008, the number of deaths per 1,000 live births is 65.⁶ Five years remain to reduce the current number by more than half.

Part 2 on Rise of The Mama Bear will be presented next week…..