Living Below The Line

For five days I decided to challenge myself to live on $1.50 a day. The $1.50 went towards the food I would eat during those five days. 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty. 1.4 billion people are going to bed hungry tonight. I decided to take this challenge because this has been an issue that I have taken to heart for a long while, well since college, since I broke out of my little bubble that I kept myself in for years. Hunger is a thing that should not exist, there is so much food being produced and so much food being thrown away everyday… How are 1.4 billion people going to sleep hungry? I chose to participate in the Live Below The Line challenge to help open up peoples eyes to one of the issues that have been simply swept under a rug to be ignored.

Shopping for the challenge was both easy and difficult. I had only $7.50 to spend. Here are the things I bought: Rice, black beans, corn meal, eggs, mixed frozen vegetables and bananas. A while back I bought a large bag of rice, so I made calculations and set aside the amount of rice I would need for the week and subtracted the amount that would cost from the $7.50 I was allowed to spend. When I got home from shopping I did more calculations and made out a meal plan for the five days. It was nice to know what I was cooking for the week.

At the end of last week, I asked for people to send me questions about my experience in living below the line. I received two questions, however, those questions were big. So here are my responses to those questions.

Question One: “What were your best and worst moments living below the line?”

I am going to start with the most difficult day for me, which was Sunday, the first day of the challenge. Why? Simple, I was going from eating whenever I was hungry and eating whatever I wanted to eating strictly three meals a day and a snack before bed if my daily budget allowed. Sunday I was the hungriest and my metabolism definitely was not happy. I thought the rest of the week was going to be just as difficult. Which gets me to the second half of the question. What were my best moments? Those were the last four days of the challenge, my body had adapted to what I had available to eat. During this challenge I realized how much I have, I may not have any current employment, but I do have a house to live in, food to eat everyday, clean water to drink, a bed to sleep in, clothes to wear and shoes to protect my feet. I don’t have much to complain about and you won’t ever hear me say that I hate my life.

Question Two: “How did the live below the line challenge affect you physically, mentally and spiritually? And would you do it again?”

I think where I had problems with the challenge was the physical side of it, I remembered to drink a lot of water and also had to factor in salt into my meals. By the end of the week my already incredibly knotted muscles were incredibly uncomfortable and angry feeling, although I am not sure if the challenge was adding to it. And as I mentioned in question one Sunday was rough. Mentally the challenge was easy for me, because it was raising awareness to an issue I take to heart and the more I get to talk to people about the challenge the easier it was to get through the week. Spiritually, that is a tough one. Doing something like this even for a short amount of time makes you realize the things we are privileged to have, and even when things seem to not be going as we want them to be we can’t hate our lives for that because we have so much to be thankful for and the resources we have at our fingertips to make our lives easier. 1.4 billion human beings do not have those resources.

I thank the lovely people who have taken a few minutes out of their day to read this and I hope that you share this with everyone!

Lastly it is not to late to donate! The challenge is actually happening 29th April until 3rd May! Even if you donated a dollar that could be food for someone for a day!

Here is my page! https://www.livebelowtheline.com/participant?lang=en

And please share this your friends!

Give your hands to work and your feet to walk.

It was Mahatma Gandhi that said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”. At some point in my own life, something happened, something in my brain clicked and I started to look at the world differently. I realized that I made myself blind to the world around me, blind to all of the brokenness. Most of us end up so wrapped up in ourselves and materialistic we fill our lives with that we forget to be thankful for the simple things: Food, clean water, homes, clothes, shoes, medical services and education. This moment of clarity happened starting in May 2008 during a mission trip to Homestead, Florida and then really kind of hit me like a sack of rocks in October 2008 when participating in CROP Walk. Which in a previous post I wrote about that experience, I walked five miles on surfaces including: dirt, gravel, cement, black top, brick and grass. Doing that was humbling and most people wouldn’t be able to fully grasp the mental impact by doing a simple act like that had on me, that five miles was the beginning of something new, something much bigger than myself. However, like most people, that eye opening moment faded and life continued, and up until the past few days was stored in the back of my mind. Fortunately and unfortunately the thing that brought it back to the front of my mind was an actor that I admire for the work he has done, but more so now that he has been able to do work with Unicef in Guinea. Reading his blog posts brought my own moments of clarity back to the front of my mind and continually leave me heartbroken and wanting to be apart of something to help get the word out about these world issues that are seemingly over-masked by more mundane news stories. You can Read Tom Hiddleston’s stories from Guinea here (and I highly encourage you to do so): http://blogs.unicef.org.uk/

Now for some facts that are important to the meat of this post. I will also include the links to the websites I got the information from, some of which are directly quoted.

From Unicef: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_fastfacts.html

• In 60 countries in the developing world, more than half of primary schools have no adequate water facilities and almost 2/3 lack adequate sanitation.

• As of 2006 it’s estimated that 158 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are engaged in work labour.

• Estimated that 650 million people across the globe with a disability. And according to statistics close to 200 million children have sensory, intellectual and metal health impairments.

• Over 17.5 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS, of that 14 million live in sub Saharan Africa.

From Church World Service: http://www.cwsglobal.org/resources/

• 925 million people do not get enough to eat.

• Malnutrition leads to almost 1/3 of childhood deaths before the age of 5.

• Hunger kills more than AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis combined.

• One in seven people will go hungry tonight.

Now how do some of these organizations go about visualizing and work to help alleviate some of these issues? Unicef is a huge organization that helps to educate and give financial support for countries on how they can build up their communities, they fund raise and they have celebrity support. Church World Service, their largest form of fundraising and donations come from communities participating in CROP Walk. Those are two well known organizations. However the philosophy and mission of a much smaller organization really hit the points of what is needed to support the developing world, which gives us more of an opportunity to see how as an individual human being we can make a small difference in the world. The smaller organization, I am going to briefly mention is Safe World. I strongly recommend checking out all of the mentioned organizations I have mentioned. Here is the website for Safe World: http://iamsafeworld.org/#/main

I think Safe World said it in the most simple way: Their values “People- At every level… Everyone matters.” Their Philosophy is: 

“We want to create and produce ideas that can cross cultural lines with general ease. Because the needs for belonging and love are universal, we are working to make sure our missional development is the same way.”

Can it be that simply loving and educating, with some added financial support really help to slowly improve the lives of people who have close to nothing? It has also been said that “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.” (Pass It On written by Kurt Kaiser)

While reading Tom’s posts there was one person who had a spark of inspiration, when I read their comment I got ridiculously excited for a project that they proposed and they forwarded the idea to Tom’s publicist, he also really loved the idea. What is this idea? To create a book that holds stories, poems, illustrations and photographs geared towards children between the ages of 5 and 12. We want to bring the same happiness and feeling of be safe in these stories to the children who live in these developing countries. Last link to share with you all, if this project sounds interesting to you please, please, please  click the link and read more details about the project. http://adriftinasea.tumblr.com/

I am definitely not going to be sorry for the length of this post. And if you’re reading this sentence now, thank you so much for taking the time to read the entire post. Go and remember another quote from Gandhi, “In a gentle way you can shake the world.”

 

Buckets of love to you all,

Cailin