Ebola devastation in the developing world reflects the West's attitude towards poor countries

A starving African child is cradled in his helpless mother’s arms. “I wish we were whales,” he says. This was only a cartoon in a Religious Studies textbook but it provoked discussion and pointed to a hard fact in our world: animals sometimes engender more sympathy and concern than human beings. Have we become, as some commentators say, “desensitised” to the everyday and now commonplace scenes of human suffering beamed continually into our living rooms? The poor, as Jesus reminds us in the Gospel, are always with us. Many of us might be inclined to interpret this as the poor is an insoluble problem and even Jesus himself was at a loss to solve it. Or, we might see it as a challenge, a call to action. But what can we really do in practical terms? I