Read ’em and weep

As an idealistic 20-something, I joined the Peace Corps to “make a difference” but also to avoid a teaching job after earning a master’s degree in Spanish while simultaneously discovering I didn’t really want to teach a foreign language the rest of my life.

In its wisdom, the Peace Corps assigned me to serve as a nutritionist in the Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border, where I spent my days searching the sugar cane fields and banana plantations for malnourished children. Another health promoter and I would weigh the emaciated children on scales we lugged around and enroll the most malnourished in our center, where we’d feed them more beans than rice, give them boiled water to drink, and release them to their parents once they reached a less severe level of malnutrition.

While the program kept some children alive long enough to reach the magical age of 2, when the mortality rate dropped significantly, it didn’t save them all. Many who did survive would endure lifelong consequences, including retardation and other health challenges.

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with some of the mothers in our center about the invisible bugs in the water they carried from a polluted river nearby that were making their children sick, giving them unstoppable diarrhea, robbing them of vital nutrients. I carefully explained why it was important to breastfeed whenever possible and avoid the expired baby formula flooding the Third World at the time because when they mixed the formula with contaminated water, the babies ingested bacteria that made them sick.

When I finished my mini-lecture, there was silence while they looked at each other, finally bursting out in laughter. One of them told me that only a gringa could concoct such a story. Everyone knew American baby formula produced strong children, and this wild story of invisible bugs was just a cover-up so Americans could keep all the formula for her own children.

That’s when I realized that while it’s important to feed hungry children and provide food security for poor families, the only cure for persistent poverty is to defy ignorance with education. Most of the Dominicans I worked with were functionally illiterate, having left school when they were old enough to work in the fields, and their views were shaped largely by what they heard on the radio or saw in the films that made the rounds of poor towns on movie night.

This experience resonated with me when I reviewed the 2013 Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which once again ranked Nevada 50th among the states in education and 48th overall in terms of child well-being. It’s hard to argue with that ranking when we are last in the number of high school students not graduating (42 percent) and first in the percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds not enrolled in preschool (70 percent). Nevada also ranks 50th for the number of children with no health insurance (16 percent).

Most news stories about the dismal report noted that we are improving our statistics, if not our last place ranking, a la “it’s a step in the right direction.” But when you’re dead last, there’s really no place else to go than up.

Instead of celebrating our 48th overall ranking (Mississippi and New Mexico ranked 49th and 50th), we should be asking our governor and Legislature why we continue to spend our tax dollars to subsidize business on the theory that we will improve education and health care for our citizens if there are more job opportunities.

A dubious job in a yet-to-emerge film industry won’t make up for the lack of education and health care today. We must invest in pre-school and fix our high school graduation rate first.