Tuesday, Oct. 17, was likely not a day many of us had circled on the calendar. I know I didn't know much about the significance of the day until I received an email from teacher Louise Herle at Davis Bay Elementary School.
Louise invited us to cover their International Day to Eliminate Poverty activities. The day was established by the United Nations in 1989. The school raised funds as well as donated food to the local food bank. The students also watched a slide show created by the staff and students, sang songs and learned about poverty around the world.
During the past few weeks, the school has been embarking on a project to learn more about poverty and ways that they can help with the cause.
I applaud the school, staff and students for taking this initiative and showing this kind of leadership. Had I not received the email, I would not have known Tuesday had such significance.
I took the opportunity to conduct a little research. Here are just a few of the sobering facts I uncovered on the United Nations website.
Global poverty continues to claim 50,000 lives a day. Every single day, 30,000 children die because they are poor. Billions of people are living in poverty, not through chance or by nature, but because of human decisions - in particular, economic decisions around unjust global trade rules, the huge burden of debt, insufficient and ineffective aid and inappropriate economic policies imposed by rich countries that serve to create and sustain poverty in developing countries.These human decisions I read about got me thinking about my own life and some of the decisions I make.
I was recently in New York on holidays. When it comes to restaurant food and eating out, let's just say they don't call it the Big Apple for no reason. The portions we were served were huge. I have a pretty healthy appetite, but on more than one occasion, we sent back a lot of food we couldn't finish. My mom remarked how we should feel embarrassed and ashamed that we were wasting so much food. We shrugged it off at the time, but that got me thinking. We should have felt bad about sending back all that food. I bet if I was to combine all the meals I had in New York and all the food that we wasted, we could have fed a number of families for weeks. This scenario is probably played out hundreds of times at all of our dinner tables.
My point to all of this is while we can't solve all the world's problems, we can all play a role in helping out.
We can all give a little more to the local food banks. We can make a donation to the Elves Club or other charities. We can do without that extra helping of mashed potatoes we know we won't finish and then send off to the trash bin.
As Nelson Mandela said in 2005, "Poverty is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
