The food availability, safe water access, and medical treatment in Sudan is much different than what is available in the United States. Currently in South Sudan, around forty eight percent of children are underweight, and only twenty seven percent of all people in Sudan have access to safe drinking water. In the book A Long Walk To Water written by Linda Sue Park, the main characters Salva and Nya struggle to survive. However, Salva and Nya both show hope as they carry on through Sudan's water crises, food shortages, and medical emergencies.
Sudan has had many wars over the last few decades, resulting in around two million people to be displaced from their families. In the war torn country, refugee camps were filled quickly, and were soon
…show more content…
Most of the doctors and nurses in Sudan are in the cities and towns where the cost is higher to get treatment. Therefore, most people do not go there unless it is an emergency, and for some people, they don’t realize that until it’s too late. Although there are doctors, there are not many. There is only about three doctors for every ten thousand people that need help, so hospitals are almost always overcrowded. In A Long Walk To Water, it states, “So Nya and her mother had taken Akeer to a special place, a big white tent full of people who were sick or hurt…(Park,45)” This quote shows how the hospitals in Sudan are poor, normally just a large tent to fit hundreds, or even thousands of people. For this reason, many families typically wait to see a doctor unless it is an emergency. Unlike Sudan, the life expectancy in the United States for males in 2012 was seventy six years and for females it was eighty one years. That’s around one and a half times as long as the sudanese expectancy. We are lucky to have clean water and food when we want it, as well as medical assistance just a phone call away. Living without that assistance takes a lot of hope, as Salva and Nya both prove in A Long Walk To