'You sure YOU have the worst problem?

You better not be laughing at this picture. Whatever the desperate boy is doing, whether drinking urine or eating faece, it's NOT funny.

An entry about Kevin Carter (the photographer of the picture above), taken from Wikipedia:

Kevin Carter (1961-1994) was a South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club.

Carter spent much of his career covering the unstable situation in the last stages of the South African Apartheid regime. He is best known for winning the 1994 Pulitzer
Prize for Feature Photography for a haunting photograph from the Sudan famine crisis of a small, starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing - and not helping - the girl:

The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene. [1]

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend in township violence may have contributed to Carter's suicide at the age of 33. His suicide note read:

I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen... The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.

Vulture or not he was to that poor child, at least he helped spread awareness to the world about the famine issue... The photo should help spur people to do the right thing.

I congratulate you if you're still reading up to this point. Some people immediately turn away when they see the first sign of portrayals of misery. Seems like you're not one of them.

Well, the question now is, what next? shall you move on another random webpage and shove this unpleasant memory behind? Or mourn a bit, and then continue your life unaffectedly?

If you feel the urge to do something, then the least you can do is to donate online to relief efforts. Quick and easy. There are many you can choose from, and here are some suggestions: Red Cross, Red Crescent, UN's World Food Programme, UNICEF, UNHCR, Oxfam, Mercy Corps...

May each of our small acts help make the world better...