Yesterday I had the great joy of participating in a flash mob with Vision Generation NSW. For those of you that don’t know what a flash mob is – it’s basically what it sounds like: a group of people getting together suddenly and randomly to perform some act in some busy location. Flash mobs don’t have to be for any particular cause, in fact most of the they can be simple childish fun (check out this mass Glee dance in Seattle). This said, yesterday was for a cause and one that is very close to my heart!
As you may know, one of The Millennium Development Goals focuses on improving child health. Sadly, 8.8 children die every year before their fifth birthday. That’s 24,000 children every day, and one every 3.6 seconds. The worst fact about these sad statistics is that these children are dying from PREVENTABLE diseases, yes I’ll repeat that, PREVENTABLE diseases – things like pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malaria – illnesses that we have medication for. Unfortunately, this is one of the least achieved MDG’s (alongside Maternal Health – for another post!) and we really need to start speaking up about it!
In 12 days I’m heading back to Canberra, this time with World Vision and Vision Generation for Operation Survive to Five – a road trip that’s all 
about getting this devastating issue on the agenda of the many politicians that are starting to speak up against poverty. In our five day stint in Canberra we’ll be involved with many more flash mobs (hopefully grabbing the attention of A LOT of media!) and we’ll be meeting with politicians and sharing our perspective about this issue. I am not a mother so cannot begin to fathom the pain of losing a child to disease, but can relate to the many beautiful under five year olds at my church and I would be devastated if we lost them to a preventable disease.
Our stunt yesterday aimed to get the public’s attention about this issue. We sang Happy Birthday Dear Five Year Old, acted like children, had a birthday cake but then began to drop dead to the beat of a drum every 3 seconds. We performed our stunt in Pitt St Mall in Sydney which gets a lot of traffic on Saturday afternoons so we managed to pull quite a crowd. We even got a few signatures for our petition afterwards too!
Here’s the clip of our stunt. I hope it really challenges and inspires you! 🙂
If you’d like to get more involved in this cause, check out Micah Challenge’s ‘Survive Past Five’ resources – they’ve got postcards you can send, and ideas for holding a Survive Past Five birthday party in your area. If you’ve held one of these parties, or are planning to hold one – let me know! I’d love to hear about it, or even attend!
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