Last week, I lived below the international extreme poverty line for five days, in solidarity with the 1.4 billion people who have to do so every day. I did it to generate awareness about their situation, and to raise funds to address the injustice of extreme poverty. It was a challenging and thought-provoking week.
Thankfully for me, the poverty line of $1.25 a day from 2005 has been adjusted to $1.50, to account for inflation. Nonetheless, $1.50 doesn’t go very far in the up-market part of Manhattan where I’m privileged to live at the moment. Thanks to some good help from a colleague who lives in the slightly less expensive Brooklyn, I managed to procure the following food on my $7.50 budget for the week:
- 1 bag of rice
- 12 eggs
- 1 bag of lentils
- 1 bread
- 1 sweet potato
- 44 cents worth of bok choy (Chinese vegetable)
Money left over for (hypothetically) covering rent, health care, transport, education for my (hypothetical) kids: $0.00 – a disturbing observation, given that $1.50 a day in reality has to cover all expenses for the world’s extremely poor. All through the week, I tried to remind myself that I was far better off than every fifth individual on the planet every time I was tempted to complain.
While the physical hunger was tough, the psychological aspect of living below the line was the greatest challenge. Having grown up in countries where extreme poverty was an ever-visible part of my surroundings, I’ve always been passionate about this issue. Still, last week has changed me. After only five days, I can quite honestly say that I can relate much more to the profound sense of disempowerment that accompanies the physical deprivation of extreme poverty. To me, the intensity of this feeling was unexpected.
Below, you can read about some of my experiences and reflections as I recorded them during the week. At different points I went out to socialize with friends over a glass of water, I ate rice and lentils while everyone else was eating burgers and fries, and I sat in meetings with a lingering caffeine-withdrawal headache smelling the coffee that everyone around me was drinking. In addition to the hunger (which really dominates your thoughts), the feeling of being left out was quite a challenge. This is daily life for far too many people.
Although the days felt exceptionally long, the week came and went. Come Saturday morning, I euphorically devoured a large breakfast of eggs, sausage, yoghurt and fruit, washing it down with orange juice and several cups of coffee (quite a shock for my system, incidentally…). In retrospect, I reflected on the fact that I had probably devoured the good part of a week’s budget for a poor person in one single meal – which was a sobering observation. I am truly privileged.
The most common question I was asked during the week was: “why are you doing this? How will you starving yourself make anything better?” My answer: I believe that generating awareness is the first step to getting something done. I believe that each person in the more developed world has the power to make a difference – through everyday choices (e.g. using one’s consumer power to support fair trade and other such initiatives), through sharing some of their surplus with those less fortunate (i.e. through donating time or money to initiatives such as Generation, see www.salvationarmy.org.uk/generation), and through using their voice – encouraging the powers that be to do what they can to address the systemic issues that cause and perpetuate extreme poverty.
Far more can and must be done. I encourage you all to do your part.
Chris
Extracts from Chris's journal
3 May – Day 2 of living below the line
My conclusion, two days in: this is harder than I expected. So far, the psychological aspect has definitely been the hardest part of living below the line. I really thought i would handle it better, and that the physical hunger would be the worst part. Not so.
In a World Bank study from a few years ago, thousands of the world's poorest from different countries were asked what poverty means to them. One of the recurring responses was: "a feeling of hopelessness." As unconvincing as this may sound: after only two days, i already feel like i know much better exactly what they were talking about. It's not just the bad food, or the feeling of hunger. It's the knowledge that you can't do anything about it. It's seeing everyone else eating, and seeing food all around, and knowing that all you can afford is tasteless rice and lentils.
AndI know that in my self-imposed, temporary poverty, I'm vastly better off than the world's 1,4 billion extremely poor.
My menu today:
- Breakfast: Two slices of toast and 1 egg
- Lunch: Leftover rice and lentils from yesterday, mixed with an egg (NOT successful taste-wise) and 1 slice of toast
- Dinner: Rice and lentils, bok choy (Chinese vegetable) and 1/5 of a sweet potato.
Except for the lunch, this was also my menu yesterday, and will be my menu for the next three.
I'm definitely a guy who appreciates good food as one of the major joys of everyday life. So my salt-less rice and lentils really aren't doing it for me. So, today I made a radical decision: I sold two eggs (fortunately, I found a willing buyer in one of my colleagues) so that I could afford 16 cents worth of salt. From the outset, I had a two-egg-a-day budget, plus two extra eggs saved up for desperate occasions. My two 'reserve' eggs are now gone. I'm trusting that the prospect of having food that I can actually taste will make up for it.
Other than that, my caffeine headache was back this afternoon (same time as yesterday), and I had serious trouble staying awake during the afternoon's meeting (had nothing to do with the content of the meeting of course...).And, yes, I've been hungry.
Two down, fortunately only three to go.
5 May – Day 4 of living below the line
It's the end of day 4 of living in "extreme poverty." Getting past the halfway mark yesterday boosted my mood quite significantly. Still - it's been two more seemingly very long days since my last update, and yes, I still feel the hunger. Although tomorrow is the last day, it still feels like Saturday morning is far away. Normally I’m a very positive guy (annoyingly positive, I’ve been told). But like I said in my last post, more than the physical hunger itself, this week has really challenged my mindset.
The last two days, I’ve reflected on another negative aspect of being poor: social exclusion. A former colleague was in town, and wanted to meet up for a coffee. This, of course, was impossible on my $1.50 a day budget. Which made me think: how would my social life look if I had to live on $1.50 a day always? Sure, there are fun things to do that are free. But so much social interaction still depends on some form of eating something, drinking something, or otherwise spending money on something (particularly in New York…). I ended up going to meet her, and drinking water, which was still nice – but I know that if we could both just afford drinking water (and had the energy-levels of people living on $1.50 a day, and were wearing clothes paid for on a $1.50 budget …), our opportunities for socialization would look quite different.
Other insights and observations from the last two days:
- The salt: definitely worth selling my eggs for
- Lentils still taste terrible, even with salt
- I’ve actually been a vegetarian this week. NEVER thought that would happen
- I can still drink water, as much as I want. And much water has been consumed, to keep me feeling “full.” For many of the world’s poor, however, clean drinking water is hard to come by. Often, they will need to walk significant distances to access safe water. I can just turn on the tap.
What strikes me the most, I guess, is the inequality in this world. Next to my building, there is a high-rise office building with a food-court in the basement. Every night, at around 11:30 pm, the garbage truck stops outside to pick up the day’s garbage from the food-court. It usually takes 15-20 minutes to load all the garbage bags. Much of the waste is discarded food. So: dozens of garbage bags worth of wasted food are carried away every day from my neighboring building. That’s one building among many, in one city among many, in one country, among many.
With so much surplus food going around, one child die shouldn’t have to die every 5 seconds due to hunger-related causes.
Every time I feel tempted to complain about my “hunger,” all I have to do is to think of that statistic. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.