Malaria is really really really bad

Our lack of mercy towards malaria victims vastly outweighs almost any sin the American church preaches about. Why aren't we more upset?

If you ask me to tell you about something I hate with a passion, I might give you three facts as straightforwardly as I can:

1. More than four hundred thousand people per year die of malaria, almost all of whom are children. That means that every two years, the entire population of San Francisco dies of malaria.

2. The best research puts the cost of saving a child’s life at a little over three thousand dollars, by donating to malaria alleviation charities. Given typical life expectancies in malaria-prone countries, this means that the cost of buying someone (statistically) a month of life is somewhere around five dollars.

3. The Against Malaria Foundation alone still has about a 40 million dollar funding gap for its next distribution cycle. This will result in about ten thousand avoidable child deaths, and is approximately the same amount of money we spend every week on Peanut M&Ms.

But what I really want isn’t for you to know these facts.

I want them to make you burn inside
the way I do

I know that it feels abstract and far away and it’s just Colin talking about malaria again

I am begging you to look at the people who die — we are talking about children who suffer, whose earthly lives are being ripped away from them — because of choices we make. Not in some hard-to-fathom systemic or corporate sense, but specific concrete decisions you and I make that we could make differently.

I am running out of ways to say this is evil and ungodly and satanic because you used all those words up against gay people and now there’s nothing left to describe the really bad things in the world.

You told me that reducing charity to numbers was “cold” and “calculating” and “took the heart of out of it” but I wake up at night grieving and shaking and you seem totally fine.

At least tell me you see how fucked up this all is.

(If you can’t get over the f word but can get over your involvement in mass child death then I really don’t know what to say¹)

Because until you tell me, I honestly won’t think you’ve fully understood the situation.

I don’t think you understand that a thousand kids will die today of a disease we know how to prevent and just … don’t

I don’t think you understand that the opportunity cost of every sub sandwich is a month of someone’s life, a nice blender is a full year, and a low-end laptop is seven.

I don’t think you understand that to spend five million dollars you have to believe your church’s building is worth more than the full 50+ year lives of a THOUSAND children.

And I don’t understand how you can stand up in church to pray without a hint of irony that God would move heaven and earth to rewrite the very laws of physics that have preordained rain on Tuesday since the very beginning of time so that you can have a picnic.

When you can’t give up a hamburger to save two months of someone’s life.

(I do the same thing and I don’t understand that either.)

I am not asking you to be perfect and I’m not asking you to renounce everything to become an ascetic

I’m just asking you to be angry.

And yes, once you’re upset
we can talk about how to be okay
we can talk about self-care and anxiety and can take care of our hearts
we can budget and give and grow in sustainable holistic ways
we can talk about whether to prioritize climate change or malaria or anything else
we can compare donating nets vs. supporting local net markets
we can do all that

But first you have to stop telling me it’s okay
because I need you to see that it isn’t

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If you oppose the death of children, please consider donating to the Against Malaria Foundation. For more of this, sign up to get All of it Again directly in your inbox!

1. After I published this somebody pointed out this similar Tony Campolo quote. I can’t remember if I’ve seen that before, so adding a footnote just in case I subconsciously stole the idea!