Take a minute to really understand what this is showing.
In high school, I repeated math every summer.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t learn how to do it; I just didn’t care. What did math really have to do with life anyway? I was too busy booking concerts, playing music, and developing my passion for activism. I did o.k. in most of my classes, but honestly, what I was doing outside of school was more important. I developed skill sets generally unavailable in most high school classrooms: autonomy, ambition, determination and compassion.
Yet I often wonder how different my schooling experience would have been if my math teachers had tried to connect their content to the real world. Higher level math is essential to understanding how to compute data, run formulas, and break down complex economic equations. If my teachers had framed math problems in real world challenges, I may have spent my summers continuing my studies out of a passion to help others.
In viewing the site GlobalIssues.org, created by Anup Shah, I have learned much about the interconnectedness of issues that effect the global community. In specific, he does a great job showing how poverty and hunger are tied together, and continuing the web, shows how most poverty around the world is a result of political decisions made by world leaders. Essentially this means that people are choosing to let others suffer while they are filling their own stomachs. I get nauseated just thinking about it. I encourage you to visit his site and learn a thing or two about these issues. Here’s some questions that you might find answers to if you visit:
How much of humanity lives on less than $10 a day?
Is it true that more than 25,000 children die from poverty everyday?
How many people entered the 21st century without the ability to read or sign their names?
How many people live without electricity?
Is it true that the richest country on earth has the widest gap between rich and poor?
I promise that the answers are there, with citations and links. So please take a look and post a comment about your findings.
In other news, we’re having our friend Dave over for dinner tomorrow night, so we’ll have to eat even less than usual tomorrow. I’m very interested to see how it goes. I wonder if he’ll leave hungry, or if he’ll be satisfied. I can’t wait to see what he has to say about this whole thing, and it will be a great way to continue having this conversation.
Here’s to an even smaller tomorrow,
Christopher
Daily Totals:
Breakfast: Oatmeal – $0.05 (less than a cup cooked)
Lunch: 1 Bowl of Broccoli Potato Soup – $0.27, Half an Orange – $0.09
Dinner: 2 Bean & Rice and Burritos – $0.29 ( Beans – $0.07, Rice -$0.14, Tortillas – $0.08), 1 extra tortilla – $0.04, Taco Sauce – $0.12 (Kerri only), Lettuce – $0.04 (Kerri only), Margarine – $0.02 (Kerri only)
Dessert – 1 Cup of TANG – $0.07 (Christopher only)
Christopher Total: $0.81
Kerri Total: $0.92
Donation Total: $652
(THANK YOU FOR CONTINUING TO DONATE!)
NOTE: If you think what we’re doing is interesting, inspiring, or just plain nutty, consider SPONSORING our efforts. Simply enter in an amount, click “update total” and follow the prompting. If you don’t have PayPal, it will let you use a credit card. At the end of the of the month all proceeds will go to the Community Resource Center (here in Encinitas, CA). We will post evidence of donations at the end.
One Dollar Diet Project 
This post brings up a question I’ve had for a long time; hopefully you can answer it.
When someone in some foreign country is said to be living on $1 a day, or earning $27 a year, or any of those staggering statistics, I always wonder – isn’t food cheaper where they live, too? (All living expenses, I guess.) Like, the person earning $10 a week isn’t paying $1000 a month in rent, obviously, but isn’t everything less expensive in their country? Is rice $3 a bag, like it is here, or 10 cents? Doesn’t $1 buy very different things in different places?
I’m asking this not to disparage poverty, but to try to understand the reality of the economics.
I could not be prouder of the two of your for your commitment to humanity. I have been following your dollar a day project all month and I find myself clinging on every word.
So far I’ve made only one small monetary donation but continue to forward your feed daily to support the cause. For the first time in my life I’ve found myself wondering where the groceries are going to come from and your reminder that we really do need far less food could not have been more timely.
We no longer worry about going hungry. In fact it seems ridiculous that we even entertained the notion. Seriously, that fear has all but been deminished after seeing the reality laid out for us. Suddenly we seem to be happy to get off the fast track to certain illness and feel more abundant then ever.
I just wanted to say thank you again for the reminder and the new perspective. In the end I predict our physical reality will shift with our collective perception and this is a real eye opener for a lot of people, especially the young people.
Much love and many blessings to you and yours
Socioeconomic Poverty and hunger go hand in hand with a child’s future to be successful. Even right here at home. On one side of my town a High School is out of this world on standardized tests while on the other side of town, the rival High School has not seen their test scores improve in a decade. Why? Poverty, the working poor and the fact that the kids are more focused on how to live and survive then on learning or testing.
Engaging internet site – Hope to come back soon.