PovertyChallenge

Anyone reading my blog will know I’ve been spectacularly rubbish at updating it, particularly compared to the prolific blogging of some amazing others. I apologise for this.

Yet, whilst I do not in any way wish to attempt to justify my rubbishness, I do wish to discuss it in order to make a point. This week has not been the best week for me; I have had to hand in the first two pieces of assessed work for my Masters, I have been experiencing some personal problems and someone I went to school with was tragically killed in a car crash. There have been numerous times I have wanted nothing more than to climb into bed, whack up the heating and pretend that nothing beyond the parameters of my bed existed. The floor, in all honesty, just wasn’t providing me with the comfort I was desperately craving.

Such circumstances led some to suggest that I do the challenge some other time. The ‘Poverty Challenge’ is, however, as is suggested by the word ‘challenge’, not supposed to be easy.  Poverty is inherently inconvenient and uncompromising. The majority of the world’s 1.4 billion people who are living in poverty as I write this don’t just experience poverty when they are at their mental and physical best but for 365 days a year for the totality of their lives. That’s more weeks of no bed, no heating, no proper health care, no tap water, etc than my small brain can possibly comprehend.  

This is an incredibly depressing reality yet a reality that can, and must, change. I believe some relatively famous man once (or maybe more than once...) proclaimed ‘Yes we can’ and indeed, through the work of organisations such as Oxfam and other great organisations, change can happen. Stories such as ‘Seeds and Tools for a 1,000 women’ <http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/2010/11/03/seeds-and-tools-for-1000-women-in-southern-sudan/?v=media> are testament to this.

Yet these organisations are ultimately nothing more than a group of people who are committed to working to achieve justice who rely on further more people, like me and you (yes, you), to help them. In light of this, I urge you to do whatever you can - be it donating money, writing a letter to your MP to ask them what they are doing to alleviate global poverty, volunteering at a local shelter for the homeless, reducing your carbon footprint – to help achieve potentially the most significant moral imperative: the ELIMINATION OF POVERTY.