B.A.D Poverty

Blog Action Day 2008. The day when bloggers around the world write about a pressing issue. This year is poverty.

Have you seen poverty? Up close?

My travels in Vietnam and India took me to places that were bereft of any forms of modern comfort. A roof made from garbage, over a dirt floor and an open fire for cooking; was all that designated one family from another.

This kind of poverty cannot be escaped. No miracles will pluck the deserving from the muck. Money rarely trickles down this far, and the pennies that do are used for the absolute essentials. It is a life that we can only imagine and even then I doubt if we could really understand.

I have my own (probably horribly naive) thoughts about poverty. How some economies depend on it. How those economies require the equivalent of human dung beetles who turn garbage/effluent into usable items for existance. Still we as humans can do better (yet I don’t think our western type lifestyles are the “better”).

So I support the notion of micro-lending and have put money into Kiva. Where the local (women mostly) entrepreneurs build businesses that will help their local area (and remember these businesses are still streets above those in extreme poverty) because the more “real” money that starts circulating at that level the more there will be to trickle down even further.

Just a thought….