poverty

With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful. "As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live.

If we agree that God did not create poverty, then in my opinion, poverty came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.

WE MUST ALL EAT OR ELSE WE WILL PUT SAND IN YOUR FOOD.

Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.

To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings.

I didn't have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the __ar on terrorism_ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week__ toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths _ and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.

It takes nothing to stay in poverty, but everything to break free from it.

It is bad enough when rich Christians show little concern for the poor, but when they moan about their lot, they show contempt not only for the poor but also for the generosity of God.

Lack of luxury is not a reason to push others to poverty. ~ Michael A. van Doorn, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul

The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. __a,_ I asked. __here did you get the money for the record player?_ __ had it saved,_ she lied. My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player. __ducation is everything, Johnny,_ she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. __ou get smart like regular people and you don__ have to live like this no more._ She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, __o go and enjoy, already._ My father always said I was my mother__ son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of. That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven__ Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.

By helping the poor, we must be able to remove their poverty. By extending help to one here and one there in the form of providing food will not remove poverty.

Looking back, I wish that everyone could have that sort of moment: a moment where you realize that your hands are so impossibly small and this world is so impossibly big. And the two don__ seem to add up. Maybe recognizing the smallness of your own hands is just the very first step to changing anything at all.

The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.

The poor commit villainies because they are poor or because they have no alternative employment. But the rich do them in order to enjoy themselves more or to earn more money.

If we agree that God did not create poverty then, in my opinion, it came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.

Life__ mystery continued to trouble meA question came to my mind, is freedom dearer than life? or does it become easier to live when life becomes difficult?