Eradication of Poverty

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Poverty is one of the major obstacles to peace. Here we fight poverty.

Website: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/social/intldays/IntlDay/index.html
Location: Global
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Latest Activity: Apr 16, 2013

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International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Poverty is not just a matter of subsistence. Poverty encompasses the absence of opportunity to partake of the very things we take for granted: food, housing, education, training, work opportunities, and most severely, it denies the right to a fruitful life. Poverty drives individuals to extremes just so as to survive.Others lose hope, faith and will.

Despair drives parents to sell children, teenagers sell their bodies for a pittance and societies crumble incrementally under the pressure of living on nothing.

Values and norms lose meaning as the fight to live through hunger and a spot in a drain pipe for sleep out of the rain, fighting over that extra sniff of glue are all that some children learn about being disposable and invisible to the greater world

And what do we lose in the process? Human potential. We lose a child’s discovery of their own mind, a child who through play and exploration would otherwise uncover the wealth of their own talent and what they could possibly contribute to the world

As you brush off a child who begs to wash your car windows as you wait for a red light, or a kid asks to take your shopping trolley, don’t just imagine it being your own child, but see the scientist, the musician, the economist, the community leader, the teacher, whose potential dies in your looking the other way……

The choice is yours… and yours…and yours And mine! We can make poverty history if we want it to be.

There is this idea that poverty is something that born and bred in developing nations: media and commerce have created the illusion of a great divide… and it is often relegated to a developmental one.

Truth is Poverty is spawned in your own home. It starts in the mind. It grows roots in the soil of apathy and it spreads like a cancer among the backstreets of everything you and I pretend not to see. It flourishes among the garbage bags of everything we take for granted: running water, a bed, warmth, family, holidays, birthday wishes, even a simple smile which lets you know someone has SEEN you, acknowledge your existence…

Poverty is not just a matter of money. Poverty is what comes from living beyond the realm of those in need of a helping hand.

Give, so a girl can development her self confidence and become self-reliant.

Give, so a young man need not prostitute himself to foreign holiday makers,

Give, so that a man need not traffic his child for 50dollars.

Give a Damn… it goes farther than just a Dime …. And BE the difference in their lives and your own.

Poverty like illness knows no boundaries. Wealth does not protect one from it and poverty itself does not make you immune to its impact.

With the current tumbling of the world’s financial markets, the loss of billions around the world offers all of us an opportune moment of reflection. The first Wall Street Crash sent the world into an economic nightmare. These days governments rally together at the speed of light in a financial rescue mission….

And it still does not change one aspect of the status quo…

Those stuck in poverty remain stuck in the mud or rambling knee deep in disease infected refuse landfills, which is home to seagulls and homeless children: it feeds a pittance to some anonymous stricken family in the back streets of Bogota, children scramble bottles together for enough small change to kill the cold off their skin for a night.

Walk around your own city without stepping over some homeless anonymous entity and ask yourself how difficult is it to care…

Poverty Day: Take part! Care enough so there does not have to be one next year!

Create opportunities for Trade rather than Aid.

It's in our hands and hearts... if we choose to have a mind to.....

some pictures courtesy of flickr.com

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Comment by David Califa on September 13, 2008 at 5:49pm: We might want top start discussion on a country level here. And find out what we can actually DO in each country to eradicate poverty.

Comment by Radfax on September 13, 2008 at 2:15pm: unfortunately this crisis is set to grow, this is due to increasing water levels and the resulting loss of land. To compound this even further there will be more wars and lack of organised reliefe efforts. People of the World Earth must make a stand together as a network of ONE to change the outcome of these events.

Comment by care4u on September 13, 2008 at 2:15pm: I was just talking with a Holocaust survivor who passed the horrors of war, aggression, poverty and abuse. They survived the war but he remembers very well the sever poverty and hunger. We always believed that WWII disaster and the tragedy it brought will be the last but the human nature always invent something new. Like it's not enough that we have hunger and poverty in our world due to droughts and floods but then wars break between neighbor countries and tribes which turn the condition to intolerable.
Without international aid and preplanning we'll never be able to overcome it and bring more light to those dark corners we use to ignore in our daily life.

Comment by Jamie Speirs on September 13, 2008 at 2:08pm: Peace with compassion will work.
we are the examples.
E Ma Ho = How Wonderful

Jamie
Speirs

Comment by David Califa on September 13, 2008 at 1:58pm: I am sure as a group we can make a difference on a global or local level.

Please invite all your friends to this group. Click here and choose invite Friends

Comment by eggy1943 on September 13, 2008 at 1:58pm: Can someone write a petition, we could all sign and than send to our own governments? We need a mass movement to include all people, all country's together to overcome hunger.
We can take action here. Bruce