Anti-poverty week 2009
How poor is poor?
What does poverty mean? In Kenya, it can mean the smell of open sewers; in Australia it can mean not having food on the table. There’s one thing poverty shares across the board, however—the need for action. Writes Faye Michelson for Warcry
Breaking the cycle
The effects of poverty on children can make you weep.
- Think about this: around the world, every day, more than 16,000 children -or one every five seconds- die from hunger-related causes.
- More than one million children under the age of 15 living in Sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents through HIV/AIDS.
- About 115 million children do not attend primary school.
The Salvation Army child sponsorship programs run throughout the world, caring for thousands of children.
Help break the cycle and change a life today by sponsoring a child
More than one in 10 Australians, perhaps more than 11% of our population, live in poverty. Adjudged to be living under the poverty line, these Aussies – some 2,210,000 people – are experiencing extreme disadvantage.
If Australia measured poverty under the same processes as the United Kingdom and the European Community, then the ‘have nots’ figure would number 3.8 million, or more than 19% of our population.
These are people on low or no income including, in particular, the original owners of the land, homeless persons, people from ethnic backgrounds are over-represented, and people newly arrived in the country. Australians who have mental health issues and physical disabilities also find themselves excluded from participation in the social and economic life of our community.
They often have difficulty accessing medical or dental care. They can’t raise enough money to get through a normal week, let alone buy children’s presents, get money together for an emergency, go on a holiday or send their kids on a school excursion.
They skip meals to get textbooks for schoolkids and uni students. They can’t afford to heat or cool their homes, if they have homes. They often have to sell or pawn their keepsakes and family heirlooms, they have to line up to get help from other people and suffer acute stress about housing availability and rising rents.
From 11 – 17 October 2009, Australians young and old can do something about that by raising funds and awareness about the endemic nature of poverty and the strategies we can deploy to fight poverty’s social injustices and inequities.
We can dress in orange, spruik for fair trade, display artworks, run activities for the homeless community, collect and distribute food parcels, or donate fresh fruit, vegetables and other non-perishable foods for asylum seekers and others in need.
Throughout the week there will be donations of clothing, cooking classes and free lunches, garage sales and concerts, church services and trivia nights, sleep outs and public forums, barbecues and heart-to-heart town meetings.
You think of something, you do it. That’s it. So, what’s happening in your community? Get involved and make a difference. You may just end up enjoying yourself.
For more details, see: www.antipovertyweek.org.au and help change your community.
Let’s do more about the gap between the rich and the poor than just talk about it.
The Salvos’ responses
With your financial support, the Salvos:
- Put up homeless people in crises
- Provide long-term housing options
- Work with people throughout detox and rehab programs for alcohol and other drug abuse
- Give emergency relief and crisis services to families
- Protect kids and provide residential care and home-based (foster) services
- Shelter, comfort and counsel survivors of family violence
- Pray with and counsel people who are grieving
- Counsel those who perpetrate family violence
- House aged people who are socially disadvantaged, and provide in-home care for aging Australians on low incomes
- Work with new arrivals to Australia, through migrant services
- Care for people appearing before the courts or living behind bars
- Counsel people fighting addiction to gambling
- Cry with, listen to, advise and support people who have been sexually assaulted
- Guide impoverished people through financial counselling and planning
- Provide disability employment services to people with special needs
- Implement foundation education services for kids whose school experience has shattered
- Find and counsel ‘lost’ relatives though the Family Tracing service
- Give initial and sustained practical, emotional and spiritual support to people suffering from disasters such as cyclones, droughts, bushfires, floods, tsunamis and earthquakes, and human-wrought tragedies such as terrorist attacks, racist assaults, shooting massacres and riots
Support the work of the Salvos with your donation
Poverty’s legacy
Poverty is an ocean full of submerged predators: neglect and abuse, disease and stunted futures, malnutrition and obesity, fear and anger, hatred and apathy, selfishness and ignorance.
Poverty is the crook water dribbling out of broken faucets and fouled cisterns. The leftovers and congealed crumbs scraped off the plates of the rich. Polluted air from crowded cul-de-sacs. Barely sustaining life. Fouling our lungs. Rotting our soil.
Poverty takes out the front pages of newspapers and leads the news bulletins, masquerading as homelessness, crime, unemployment and substance abuse.
Poverty leaves the kid to her own solitary devices in the corner of a one-bedroom unit; a child who will never be read to. Who will never access a computer, never learn to play; will never score a well-paid job.
It’s the teenagers who bash exchange students for their i-pods and points of difference.
The pensioners eating canned excuses for a decent meal.
The incapacitated bloke whose job is gone, whose health is broken and whose marriage is stuffed.
Poverty is what happens when I don’t care about you, you don’t give a hoot about me and our neighbours have no hope.
For many Australians, even those in high-paying jobs, poverty and bankruptcy is only three missed paydays away. But poverty is more than a lack of dollars. Poverty is people who are desperate for love. Poverty is broken spirits who no longer sustain any belief in life, any hope for the future or any joy in the present.
Poverty is anyone who can’t or won’t take the time to stop and listen to another human being.
Poverty is feeling Godforsaken and shattered in a world of incredible creativity and beauty. Losing hope when you need it most. Being robbed of peace in a riotously colourful, inspired sphere of wonder.
