There’s a website I found a month or so ago in preparation for this blog called Global Rich List. At the time I was working at SVA so I ran my salary through and found out that I was in the top 5% of the richest people in the WORLD. The website gives some statistics that I’d like to share:
• Three billion people live on less than $2/day
• 1.3 Billion live on less than $1/day
Think about that for a minute. According to Wikipedia the approximate population of the world is 6.5 billion people. That means that roughly 2/3 people on the planet live on less than $2 per day!
Poverty isn’t about a lack of money. Lacking money these people can’t pay for healthcare or an education. They live their lives day in and day out trying to make money and get themselves and their families a better chance at life. Lacking money means that they usually lack goods and services such as soap, clean water, drinking water, etc.
I’m not going to pretend to know much about poverty – I don’t. Part of the reason I wanted to participate in the blog action day was to help spread awareness and change the conversation for the day. Yes – our economy is in crisis. Yes – elections are coming up. But aren’t there bigger things in the world? Sometimes we don’t think about the little guy. We don’t think about the person half way around the world who doesn’t have access to things we all take for granted – clean water, a doctor, and an education.
My Aunt Joyann, my mother’s sister, is currently volunteering at a school in Thailand. She’s a volunteer teacher for a year and is not getting paid to help the kids. Every day she wakes up and helps teach kids who have NOTHING, not even books on the shelves in their classrooms. I can’t think of a single person I know who’s really gone out and done what she’s doing for others and I’m very proud of her for that. She’s blogging about her experiences, and I try to make it part of my every day routine to check her blog and see what it’s like to live completely immersed in another culture, and in a place completely stricken by poverty. It’s easy to forget about these people, and even easier to do nothing about the poverty stricken people of the world. My aunt wakes up every day and HELPS. Joyann – I’m so proud of you and what you’re doing! I can only imagine what could happen if there were twice as many people like you as there are.
Together WE can change the world! I was talking to Amy yesterday about the “donating just a dollar a day can feed this child for a year” commercials we’re all so keen to. Why don’t more people do that? It’s easy and it’s not expensive at all.
I’m asking everyone who reads my blog to do something for the poor and poverty stricken people of the world. Please – donate money, donate canned foods, do ANYTHING. This problem isn’t going away anytime soon, and we only have ourselves to blame for it sticking around. Tomorrow when Amy and I are grocery shopping and the cashier asks if we want to donate $5 with our food purchase I’m going to say yes. Sure $5 might not seem like a lot, but if we all do it – if EVERYONE does it, we can feed a village. We can buy books for a school in Africa. We can end poverty during my lifetime; we just have to start NOW.
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