A few unscrupulous farmers pay end of season wages by writing checks on already closed accounts. It is heart-rending to witness these families knot around the cash register, baffled at the refusal of the clerk to accept their wages as good. I have seen carts piled high with food left abandoned in the store as these people leave empty of hope. Rural poverty is as silent as a fallow field and is as nameless as the child I met once whose flesh melted where her nightgown met open flame. Their windows are open holes, shuttered by wooden boards on cold nights.
Infants die here at a rate five times that of the country as a whole.
Children give birth to children unaware of what they themselves might become with more knowledge of the world and of their own hearts. I have seen three generations of a family bed-ridden in one room. I have not yet learned to ignore the hacking coughs of young children whose only source of heat on cold nights is an unvented kerosene heater. Planning for information exchange should be based upon human needs not upon the limitations of currently available technology. Machines change rapidly.