Oh the perspectives we gain.....

I was reading a book titled The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs for my Comparative Politics: Inequality (awesome book, read it) class today on the bus and it definitely rattled/changed my viewpoint on sweatshops in regards to poverty. So the first chapter began to talk about the hardships of people in Malawi. There was a drought and there was less food to go around the already starving village of mostly young children and older women. The young men in the village were struck hard by the AIDS virus and the part that shocked me was how little the more developed nations did to help the country fight off the virus. The book talked about antiretrovirals being the main hope for survival if you already have AIDS. Problem is, those drugs cost patients a dollar a day, something that view people there have. When Malawi asked the developed nations for more financial aid to help make the AIDS drugs more affordable, they originally only asked for the money to help 300,000 people (about a third of the people suffering) and then because the developed countries thought it was "too ambitious and too costly." Eventually about five years later, the accepted the proposal that gave 40,000 Malawians treatment. So that's Malawi. The part about Bangladesh was a little more uplifting. The book talked about the sweatshop conditions of women and I've always been pretty anti-sweatshop but this book has a good point in saying that countries like Bangladesh are one step up from places like Malawi and we should not be advocating that sweatshops be taken out of those countries, but that wages and conditions be a little more fair. It also said that the women who work at those places feel lucky compared to others because they have extra money to spend and don't have the live out in the rural areas where they would probably have to be married and pop a kid out by the time they were 17 or 18. When they work in a sweatshop, they get extra income and can start a family when and if they want to. I don't know. I'm enjoying this book so far. I'm definitely not as anti-sweatshop and anti-US jobs going to other countries as I was before.