Two weeks ago, I wrote about the difficult times Venezuelan children are going through. With a skyrocketing inflation in the country that makes it impossible for the average Venezuelan to fulfill their and their families’ needs, children are the most affected by the current ongoing rough patch in the country’s economy. Children are not only starving in every corner of Venezuela, as I talked about in my previous article, but they are also dying at the local hospitals because of lack of medicine and supplies.

Thousands of Venezuelan families are being dismantled by the recent increase in child mortality rates. Not only do the hospital conditions leave much to be desired, most being in decrepit and deplorable conditions, but the youngest patients are not getting the treatment they deserve or the opportunity to fight for their lives.

It is tough enough to imagine babies and young children going through such difficult situations, but those who are helplessly helpless are the parents who are forced to accept that they can’t do much to help their dying children.

The day to day life of a mother with a sick child in Venezuela consists of actively seeking to get the medicines for her child as those medicines simply never make it to the Venezuelan hospitals. Tons of “Go Fund Me” pages are disseminated around the mostly used social networks, like Twitter or Instagram, as parents desperately seek to find the financial resources to fund the import of the medicines their child is in need of as these medicines are not found or produced in Venezuela.

If the medication is somehow available in the country’s grounds, they are mostly found on the black market and marked up to a price that nearly no one can afford.

President of the Venezuelan Medical Federation (FMV), Douglas León Natera declared in May 2015, that the scarcity of medicine in pharmacies and hospitals in the country had reached 95 percent. As proof of this barbaric scarcity, Lucero Rodriguez, mother of baby with cystic fibrosis, said in a CNN report that things were getting worse and worse.

“We can’t get medical supplies for the baby, we can’t even find the formula he needs to grow. Now we’re making sacrifices."

Rodriguez added with a tone of distinguishable agony, “I’ve been in this hospital for 15 days and I’ve witnessed how children are dying every day.”

Radio and TV shows (not government controlled) are not only a means for the population to become aware of the reality of the country, but they’ve also become a place where these desperate parents are allowed to publicly make a petition for the medicine they so arduously seek, in the hopes that someone who is watching will make a donation if they are in possession of the medication or treatment their sick child needs.

Sick Venezuelan children don’t get to enjoy a childhood of happiness and freedom. They don’t get the chance to dream about the future. They are forced to live in a today that they can’t change as their future is uncertain. Not only is their hope is being taken away as they inevitable become aware that their time on this earth is coming to an end and there’s virtually nothing to do about it, but their innocence is stolen as they spend their time worrying about when that day is going to come.