How Do the Poor Describe Poverty?
A survey conducted in Niger by the Office of the Prime Minister asked the poor of that country to describe poverty. Their answers included: dependence, marginalization, scarcity, incapacity and restrictions on rights and freedoms.
Continue Reading ›The (Sort of) New Global Poverty Line
The new global poverty line (of living on less than $1.90 a day) captures income and consumption data. What it doesn’t reflect are other conditional circumstances and deficiencies that strip opportunity and hope from the poor.
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‘Poverty, Inc.’: The Global Poverty Industry
How does Compassion measure up to the ideas about the global poverty industry presented in the documentary ‘Poverty, Inc.’?
Extreme Poverty Is Not a Given for This World
A major success in a poverty-reduction goal for the new millennium — halving the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 per day — was probably reached three years ago.
Will Eliminating Extreme Poverty Require a Miracle?
How big is the problem of extreme poverty? Three billion people worldwide and 1 billion children deep. But despite the size of those numbers, many people at Compassion believe that we can eliminate extreme poverty in our generation, that we can remove or utterly destroy it.
You might think we’re “drunk on the spirit,” that our goal is unrealistic, completely irrational or even not Biblical, and I will be honest with you, I thought it was out of I thought of it as an impossible task, too.
Child Survival 101
Being a mother takes courage. Being an expectant mother in desperate poverty takes courage and so much more.
Each year more than 500,000 mothers die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications, most of which are preventable. The babies who survive while their mothers die are much more likely to die in their first year of life.
Seeds for the Harvest
The green leaves start to receive the first rays of the sun, leaving the darkness and cold of the night behind. It is 6 in the morning and the harvest looks ready – ready to be separated from the corn bush, ready to become part of a meal, and ready to be part of a change in the lives of an entire community.
This is the fruit of seeds planted with hope, watered with hard work and dreams, and, at last, harvested with joy.
Pastor Damian checks two sacks full of beans. It is just the beginning of the harvest and the fruits already look promising.
Another man, Brother Juan, a seasoned farmer with dark skin and gray hair, is a perfect example of a Salvadoran farmer – thin but somehow robust, quiet and wise. Juan has served as an adviser to Pastor Damian since they decided to implement program “Double Seed.”
Juan talks about the beans and how they should keep some leaves and dirt in the sack so the beans will not lose the humidity they need.
“This way, they can last for about a year,” he adds, and smiles, knowing that the efforts made these past three months have given results – promising results that translate into hope.
It has been three months since Double Seed started in the community of Corinto, in Zaragoza, a city located eight miles south of the capital city, San Salvador, in El Salvador.
These past months meant sweat and great efforts for the people, but it also meant hope for a future that did not seem so clear a few months before. (more…)
