Let's wage war on poverty in Africa

Recently, President Bush returned from Africa, a continent facing challenges and heartbreak. Malaria and AIDS claim thousands of lives daily. Millions lack access to basic needs like clean water and food.

For all its challenges and tragedies, Africa holds hope and opportunity. We have proven and effective solutions to problems which used to seem unsolvable.

America's AIDS initiative is providing lifesustaining medications. America provides millions of bed nets, protecting Africans from deadly mosquitoes. Never before have these solutions been so affordable: AIDS drugs cost as little as $1 a day. A mosquito net costs $5 and protects a child from malaria for five years.

What great results. But we shouldn't be satisfied. So much more still needs to be done.

America's next president and members of Congress must continue working in Africa.

Investing in education is a key part of America's work in Africa because 33 million African children don't attend school and 54 percent are girls.

This is more than a presidential legacy- it's our legacy as a country and a community. I propose coming together as a community and helping the people of Africa. There are roughly 46,000 occupied dwellings in the city of T.O.; imagine just 1 percent contributing $20 a month- - $9,200.

This amount couldn't solve any of the problems we face today as a nation and a community, such as school closures, homelessness, layoffs, foreclosures and recession. Nevertheless, it could impact a whole village in Africa, like 1,840 mosquito nets preventing people from dying of malaria or feeding more than 300 children for a month.

Through whichever means, please join the effort to wipe out poverty. I leave you with a quote:

"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

- - Martin Luther King Jr. Gabriela Buery Thousand Oaks