poverty is not OK

"A person's contentment with a situation of poverty does not make it OK."

Bessenecker makes a great point in Ch. 3 of New Friars with this statement. He recalls a time his family and a group of university students spent in an Egyptian garbage community in Cairo. After living in the community for over a month "what at first was repulsive - rotting garbage piled everywhere, animals feeding off the trash, mothers climbing rubbish mountains with their babies playing next to them in the refuse - was now quite normal."

I am reminded of my trips to Belize and Vietnam. In Belize, we stayed in a community center that also served as the village library, and the sheriff's house. There was no running water or plumbing in the building, nor in our pastor's house right down the road. We showered with buckets of collected rain water from the large basins outside, and flushed the toilets with those same buckets. After about a week of living like this it became quite normal. I even admitted to my family upon coming home that I could possibly live like that for the rest of my life. Sure, that's okay, but the impoverished states these families were in is not.

The same goes for Vietnam. I adjusted, to my surprise, rather quickly to the living conditions there in the Southeast Asian country. The dirtiness, uncleanliness, crowded streets, I took it all in. That's fine, but the pollution and unsanitary lifestyle is not. I don't necessarily believe that every developing country should live up to the standards of the "wealthy nations" like the United States or some European countries. That's not what I'm saying. However, something must be done about this increasing gap between the rich and the poor. And yes, in my opinion, the U.S. is a rich country, constantly using up resources and spewing out wastes like a hungry fat child.

There are so many aspects to this subject. I can only talk about so much of it at one time. I'm reading up on the special series article in National Geographic (Jan 2011) on population. Author Robert Kunzig addresses the issue of overpopulation and the milestone of 7 billion people inhabiting earth. That's a lot of people. He also mentions the interrelationship between overpopulation with people living in destitute circumstances: "People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty, not overpopulation." Poverty is is a problem, and that is not OK.

A poor family in the middle of Cho Da Lat begging for food.
My cousin bought them the bread they are eating in the picture.