Last night I was awake much of the night listening to the loud rain and wind storm that knocked out our electricity for a few hours. Usually I would sleep right through, but last night we had a dinner of just rice and tea to learn about poverty and prepare our hearts for Thanksgiving. I must have had too much tea that charged me up with caffeine.
Other families joined us to learn about how over one billion people in the world go to bed hungry each night. In order to try and grasp how large the number a billion is, we took the "Billion Quiz" I put together (above). One kindergartner asked about all my off the internet facts, "How do you know all that?" My daughter inquired, "How do they know it is three billion people that live on less than $2.50 a day? Did they go around and check?"
Regardless of how it is measured, the number of people living in poverty is completely overwhelming. We talked about the fact that we may not realize that people in our own community are also hungry. That is why we collected food for the local food bank.
As we sat on blankets on the floor and had only rice for dinner, we were reminded that many people would be thankful to have even rice to eat. One little girl said, "I'm just thankful for real food."
My husband, who was learning about Malawi with a first grade boy, asked him if he thought they ate more than rice in Malawi. After thinking about it for a while he said, "Yes, they probably eat other things like in restaurants."
When we live surrounded by so much abundance, the reality of most of the world population's situation seems surreal, and hard to imagine. As I listened to the noisy storm pouring down last night I kept thinking our daily experiences of abundance scream so loudly as the norm that we are not able to fully grasp and listen to the conditions in the rest of the world.
Sources used for Billion Quiz: UNICEF,2009 http://www.globalissues.org/; World Bank Development Indicators 2008; The Megapenny Project - Kokogiak.com; www.ehd.org/science_technology
