A phrase that I use flippantly, as do most of my peers. But that phrase has a different meaning in many places.

The current financial crisis has alot of Americans on edge. While we have alot of questions: Will we need to cut back on our meat consumption? Will we have to skip our vacation this year? Will we lose our home?, not many of us realistically have to worry about starving. After all, if we truly cannot afford to buy food, we can go to the many government-run or charity-run shelters in our cities.

But that's not an option for most of the world's poorest people.

According to this article in the New York Times, this financial crisis will cause an additional 22 children to die, per hour, throughout all of 2009.

And many of those that do not starve to death will be malnourished, or forced to drop out of school to help provide for the family.

Current hunger statistics can be found here, with some of the highlights being:

*Every day, nearly 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That amounts to one child every 5 seconds.

*Already 40 percent to 50 percent of the world's populations are undernourished and there are 50 million starvation-related deaths each year.

*Worldwide, 161 million preschool children suffer chronic malnutrition.

So if you are weathering this storm comfortably, perhaps now you are now feeling a little less comfortable. And if your answer to the questions above was no, perhaps you can consider voluntarily doing one or all of those things to help the poorest in the world actually make it through this time.

If you are wondering whether you can really make a difference, the answer is a resounding yes! Even cutting out meat once a week, $7, can provide a week's worth of food for one hungry person, and $32/month can provide food, medical care, and schooling to a needy child.

What are you willing to do to prevent one child from starving to death? Leave a comment with your ideas.

Labels: In the News, Thankfulness

This is the second year of a new phenomenon in the holiday hype: buy a laptop for a child living in poverty. You can visit the main site here, and purchase through Amazon. There are two choices: you can just purchase one to give for $200, or you can spend $400 and get one for yourself as well. There are mixed reviews (from adult Westerners) about the fit and function of the laptop, but the laptop was not created for them. For a child living in poverty, this most likely will change his or her life. However, this will not only change the lives of children in third world countries, but will also change the lives of our children. Until this point, the ability of Western children to interact with the world's poorest children was limited. Possible, but difficult. Now that these children are online, my children could be interacting with them as frequently and intimately as they could with a cousin on the other side of the country. And there is not a better way to cure materialism and selfishness than to care deeply for someone who has absolutely nothing to their name (except a laptop, of course.) I would love to see them set up a pen-pal system as an addition to the program.

Labels: Thankfulness

Kudos to StatCounter Blog for this insightful post giving an alternative view on the credit crisis and for all the other posts on poverty due to Blog Action Day 2008. As we gather around our tables tonight, let's be thankful for what we do have: a place to eat, pots to cook with, heat in our house, and food to put in our stomachs.

Labels: Thankfulness