Wow! So, what to write? What can one person do to help to eradicate poverty? And how can a little blog like mine raise awareness of this problem? The main site advises us to stay on topic. After all, any blog’s audience visits because of the usual subject matter. But I can’t exactly tell you to recycle your sextoys or sponsor yourselves to have sex in order to promote the cause.
In these days of the Credit Crunch, I think that the majority of the population have some inkling of what it’s like to be tightening our belts because of the vicissitudes of our own particular financial situations. Not for many of us the prospect of a golden hello or goodbye no matter how good or bad a job we’ve done and certainly not the safety net of a Government bail out if we really mess up. Our paycheques don’t normally extend into six figures over a year. And yet most of us use part of our income to support various charities close to our hearts which help the less fortunate children in the world. Even if it is only in the form of an annual contribution to a telethon such as Sport/Comic Relief or Children in Need.
We can also buy products that are labelled Fairtrade. Helping local farmers to get the proper price for their produce and encouraging them to farm organically. There is even a way to shop in a good cause.
Financially, there isn’t a huge amount that mere mortals like us can do to alleviate world poverty. That job belongs to those with political clout and billionaire bank accounts. I cannot help but find it obscene that anyone can have such a monetary security blanket and not go out of their way to try to help those in desperate need. But so often it seems only to be used to grease the wheels that will enable these wealthy people to make even more money. In this ‘me me me’ society, where materialism is King, the poor just get poorer and the rich are continually feeding their ‘I want it all’ habit, whilst the social niceties of life are being lost forever.
Watching Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food programme on Channel 4 last night really brought this home. There were five-year-old children who had never eaten a home-cooked meal and whose learning tools were to remember which food came out of which colour/shaped polystyrene package. Jamie’s ‘Pass It On’ recipe idea could be instrumental in revolutionising the way we eat today and yet of the 20 or so local companies who originally took part, only four have provided the oven and facilities that were required to keep the challenge running. Jamie has tried so hard to change our horrible fixation with processed and pre-prepared meals by showing us how to cook simply and cheaply from scratch. Stir fries are so simple and quick to cook, the ingredients so easy to source, and the health benefits so huge that I cannot believe that more people do not cook them. Jamie took us to the local hospital in Rotherham where he was shown one of the new ‘king-size’ beds and hoists that are being brought in to cope with our overweight population. These facilities cost several thousand pounds per week to lease, all money taken from the Government pot that has to fund our health care and any social benefits that might be used to combat our own national poverty problem. But, despite this, the number of obese people in our society is still growing, along with the extent of that personal obesity, and lack of funds to buy healthy food is often given as the reason behind this trend.
They always say that providing food and shelter for those who are in need is only the start of the problem, but if you can provide a poor man with the means to fish or farm and feed his family in the future, then you have made a real difference. Jamie is trying, in his own way, to do this but no-one really seems to care when they can eat with far less effort via a meal from one of the multi-national chains. One cannot help but wonder if this apathy in the face of the advance of big business is prevalent elsewhere also and this is why the gap between those that have and those that have not is growing ever wider.
Still, I guess, like the big vote in Congress recently, sometimes us little people do need to rattle our sabres just so the big cheeses know that we are watching.
For other ways in which you can help fight poverty, check out the Resources page.
Originally posted 2008-10-15 03:42:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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