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Today, Oct. 15 is blog action day. I didn’t realize it was until my friend Jamie told me this morning. The theme for today is poverty. I care deeply about injustice and I feel that a lot of injustice happens as a result of poverty. Mom’s sell their children into slavery, or to work as a result of poverty. They don’t have enough money to feed their families and so they resort to the worst of acts that a mother can make which is giving up her child. There are many other things that result as a result of poverty. Here are some things that happen as a result of poverty that should not be.
-About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds.
-AIDS is now second only to the Black Death as the largest epidemic in history. AIDS kills over 2 million people a year, or about one person every 15 seconds.
-Pneumonia and other forms of acute respiratory infection (ARI) kill more than 2 million children alone each year in poor countries.
-Diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery kill about 1.6 million people each year, almost all of them children. Diarrhea is most often a result of unclean water, unsafe sanitation, or poor hygiene.
Please take a moment and think of the poor. Don’t just think, but pray. What is God’s heart for the poor and what does he expect from us?
Luke 4:18
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”-Jesus-
More stats like this can be found here.
Poverty is the ultimate injustice, considering those of us who live in excess have the power to end poverty, yet choose not to, and without poverty we end many of the forms of injustice you mention here.
hey dude,
how are ya?
i’ve been reading about this some, and thinking about the causes of poverty. i now believe a lot of it is due to economic principles practiced by american corporations. (the book i’m reading right now is called THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein)
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