I was a bit ranty when I wrote this one...

Someone once said to me ‘wow look they’ve got brick homes, lights and a school building and a doctor that visits’. I told her that this village in Africa she was talking about had electricity for 2 hours a day, school classes of 60 and the hospital was miles away with no access to an ambulance.’ She replied ‘but what they’ve got is still quite good for a poor village, they’re the lucky ones aren’t they?’

The more I think about it, the more I get a bit annoyed. I know things have been hard financially for our country recently, and hopefully that helps us empathise. But I can’t help wondering whether we have some double standards. While we worry about the state of our school playgrounds, 75 million children are not in primary school at all. While we complain about the state of the NHS, a woman dies every minute because she can’t access healthcare. I don’t mean to sound preachy or self righteous, I am ashamed that I am guilty of this. Just yesterday I was complaining about the road works in my street, when over 220thousand people died in the Haiti earthquake and the rebuilding from that will take years.

There’s been a lot of talk in development circles about how we can measure poverty, is the dollar a day line ignoring the many different dimensions of poverty? More and more people talk of a ‘moral poverty line’, how poor is too poor? Scraping by is not life in all its fullness, and it is not OK that the majority of people in our world struggle to survive day to day. We do not deserve more than anyone born anywhere else.

As we accept that the poor in our world are whole human beings with the same rights as the rich, who are so vastly in the minority, our response to the need we see becomes a lot more generous. Fewer coppers, and more calls for change.