Blog Action Day! - Poverty in India and Canada

Today, October the 15th is Blog Action Day! Blog Action Day is a day where people with various online venues are encouraged to all write about the same issue on the same day. The point is to raise awareness and begin conversations. Last year the topic was Environmentalism and this year its poverty. If you're interested in this idea or want to read some examples, go to this link here:

http://blogactionday.org/

Well, I'm in India, and I can definably write about poverty!

In India poverty is always there, in your face, under your sandals, pawing at your pants begging for money. The next door neighbour of Sohayl's house lives in a home made of tarp, mud and little bits of fence. When you go to malls beggars, children and women, grab at you with little bowls asking for money in Hindi. Many of the rickshaw drivers live in their rickshaws.

In Canada poverty exists of course, but I've only seen it in from the beggars in Victoria. It's far less in your face. Of course there is one place that poverty exists and that we've probably all seen right in our living rooms - you know, those long commercials in sepia where a child looks sadly at the camera with flies on his face while Amazing Grace plays in the background and a guy in a moustache tells you that for just one dollar a day you can support a child.

I've seen an adorable child with flies on his face in real life now. I felt no surging pity in my commercial-exasperated heart. Maybe its just me but I've found that commercials like that only jaded me to the truth. And of course while having flies on your face is sad, I found the ladies with severed legs and missing teeth on the steps of the Hindu temple in Nepal to be a lot more disturbing. Seeing a bare severed leg for the first time is a shocking thing. It arrests you. Something is wrong here, something wrong at the most primordial level of the survival instinct. So where are the funds for the crippled-beggars? Where are the informercials with their broken, twisted limbs blown up on a sixty inch plasma screen? I know that my mind goes into sleep mode everytime I see a picture of a small, cute crying child.

And I've also witnessed (see my blog post about soap operas) the way organizations spend that money you donate. I've talked to many people here who been in and out of NGO's and they've all told me that the system doesn't really work in the long run.

Not really a big surprise. There are very few, if any problems in the world that can be solved by dumping money into it, especially with so many corrupt people in administration.

So what's the solution? Well of course the problem is a spiritual one, created because of corruption, greed, ignorance and a host of other spiritual problems. So the solution should probably be a spiritual one. And if that doesn't work for you, it should at least be a hands on solution. It should be less 'give a village a fish' and more 'teach a village to fish'. Instead of 'saving' a village, let's empower a village to save themselves.

Of course money is a part of that, but its not the most important part. The most important part is education, especially at a grass roots in-the-village level. If you do feel the inclination to give money, rather than go out and work with poverty with your bare hands, I'd advise that you do extremely thorough research. Just because an organization is well known does not garuntee it give you the most for that dollar.


For anyone else who has a blog, if its still Blog Action Day when you read this, why don't you write up your thoughts about poverty? Or at least talk about Blog Action Day. The way things truly change in this world is when enough people come to the same conclusions and have a change of heart.