PUTTING LIFE INTO PERSPECTIVE

 by Adam Harbinson

An Extract from

RICH THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD'S POOR

by Peter Meadows

I only heard the last half of the Sunday Service on Radio Ulster last week. Tony McAuley, the legendary BBC broadcaster, was in Innishowen, the most northerly point in Ireland. He found a crumbling old cottage, timber and thatch long gone, and he sat on the stones that once held a little Irish family together. His mind drifted to the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. ‘I wonder did they die here,’ he mused. ‘Did they survive, or did they emigrate.’

And it wasn’t dusty history he was talking about, it was the lives of real people, our ancestors, who huddled, shivering and dying in that corner there. Who scrabbled about in their smallholding hoping to find a potato that wasn’t blighted. It was moving. But then he reminded us that in the 21st century there are famines, and he talked about Darfur, where a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered in recent years and where over two million people, just like you and me only with different coloured skin wander homeless and hungry in the arid wasteland of Sudan.

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Peter Meadows was Chief Executive of World Vision when I knew him. He was a sensitive man who was deeply touched by what he saw on his travels, and he wrote a challenging little book entitled, ‘Rich Thinking About the World's Poor.' Here’s an extract: 

Next time you or someone near you is having a bad day, think about this:

• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
• If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death, you are luckier than three billion people in the world.
• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75 per cent of the world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your purse, and spare change in a dish somewhere, you are among the top eight per cent of the world's wealthy.

He acknowledges that he can't vouch for every statistic, but we all know that the sentiments are powerful – we live in a ‘life must be perfect for me' world, while for most people life is anything but than perfect. Because of the terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport a while ago, somebody who was delayed for a couple of hours before flying off to a sunny clime for a rest, was interviewed on the TV. She described it as a nightmare. So might I in a similar situation, but haven’t we got our priorities totally screwed up?

There's much talk at the G8 meetings each year about abolishing world poverty, although cynics might question their motives. The fact is that the wealthy world would be even better off, for then there would be more people who could afford to buy our products, but that’s another story.

World poverty could be abolished in a generation if there was a genuine desire to do so. For example, £5 billion would provide universal primary school education – about the same amount as America spends on ice cream.

Clean fresh, clean drinking water for every child on the planet would cost about the same – that’s two thirds of what we spend on perfumes. £4 billion – one tenth of what the world spends on illegal drugs – would help the world feed itself.

And the scary statistic is that all of these figures are dwarfed by our expenditure on the military; a staggering £500 billion.

What can we do about it? We can make a start by sponsoring a child, or two children. Talk to Abaana: 028 9145 1918 (calling from the UK), website: www.abaana.org/sponsorship

But doing nothing is not an option, Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’

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