Numbertastic

It feels like we live in a world of statistics sometimes doesn’t it?

Meaningless big numbers whether we’re talking debt and deficit or population or distance. Here’s some more big numbers: If we woke up today with more health than illness, we are more fortunate than one million people who will not survive the week.
If we have never been shot at, or imprisoned, or tortured, or starved, we are more fortunate than 500 million people in the world.

Recently I heard a wonderful way of making a certain statistic a bit more manageable:
A billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and two billion on less than $2 – that’s a third of the planet’s population. I know a billion is a big number – but do you know how big? If we counted to one million, at a rate of one number per second, it would take us 11 days.
With this in mind, how long do you think it would take us to count to 1 billion?
It’s actually 32 years. But if 10 of us do the counting – it’s only 3 yrs.
If 100 it’s about 4 months… and a 1000, brings the task to 11 days.
The seemingly impossibly big challenges can be cracked if a community of people say – together, in a loud, clear voice, enough – this must be done.

And this is what happens every year in Christian Aid Week, when a third of a million people – another enormous number – take to the streets to collect money house to house, and many, many more run coffee mornings, events, sponsored walks – all sorts of things that raise money and awareness for the work of Christian Aid and our vision to end, yes END, poverty. It’s a huge task, but one we’re undertaking together.