I've been contemplating listing a bunch of statistics on this blog that pertain to extreme poverty. Then I look at just two statistics listed just below the photo at the top of this blog.
Approximately 22,000 children under the age of five, die every single day. They die from causes most people in the U.S. rarely worry about. Malnutrition. Unsafe drinking water. Lack of a five-cent vaccine.
I wonder what it would be like to be one of the 1.4 billion people on the planet that work all day to earn $1.25. Many of them will only eat one meal a day, sometimes not even that.
I try to imagine one of my three children not having enough to eat. Or I imagine that one of them has diarrhea and is dying from dehydration and all I can give her is more contaminated water. I start to burn with anger by the time I try to imagine one of my beloved children perishing because I was not able to get them a 5 cent vaccine!
If I'm honest, there's a part of me that wants to simply not believe these things are happening in our world today. Or to somehow believe that there's just nothing that I can do about it. I think the simple truth is that if I choose to believe that the above facts are indeed true, and they are, and that I can somehow do something to change these grim facts, then I'm confronted with a choice, a decision..... I either move toward or away from the calling...how can I possibly turn away? Yet so often I do. Maybe, I haven't been seeing it so much as a choice, I've been passive, only seeing when there was simply no other place to look.
I also think of what Rich Stearns mentions in the article we posted yesterday. " Poverty is not an image, or a statistic; poverty has a face, a name and a story." I think this is key to connecting with those who live in worlds so different from our own.
So, as we go along there will be statistics mentioned on this blog because I think they are important to look at. However, the two mentioned here today are enough for me to contemplate for now.
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