I have been feeling very stressed lately. Our family is expecting guests from out of the country for Thanksgiving weekend, and we are in the middle of painting our living room. Last weekend, we went to Lennoxville to watch our football Mounties play against Bishops. We couldn’t find a hotel room in Montreal the night before our flight back because Tiger Woods was apparently in the city (who knew so many people followed golf?? – we ended up sleeping in the airport). You likely feel stressed about other things – the assignment that is due and hasn’t been started, studying for midterms, whether you did anything you should regret on the weekend. We all complain that we live very stressful lives.
I have also been researching and thinking a lot about poverty. The week of October 14-21 was designated as the Week to End Poverty, and the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is on October 17. At the turn of the millennium, heads of state, charitable and non-governmental organizations, church groups and ordinary people agreed that poverty could be at least reduced, and that extreme poverty, defined at the time as living on less than $1US a day, could be entirely eliminated. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of eight achievable goals which, if met by the target year of 2015, would have gone a long way to easing the lives of millions of people around the world (see http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/). However, in 2016, it seems that there has not been much tangential change in easing poverty; the UN page dedicated to the MDGs has been linked with the UN Development Programmes page, and there is no longer even any mention of the MDGs on the UNDP page.
Statistics show that in our country, 1 in every 5 children lived in poverty in 2013. To put that in perspective, in Sackville, with its school age population of approximately 1000 children, that would translate into approximately 250 children, here in our own backyard, who live in poor families. That’s equivalent to almost the entire population of our elementary school. In Canada, the annual income of the richest 10% of families rose by almost $30,000 between 1993-1996, and the annual income of the poorest 10% of families fell. Our Parliament passed a resolution in 1989 to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. Instead, over that decade, the child poverty rate in Canada rose by 21.7%, and at the turn of the millennium, there were almost 1.3 million children in Canada living in poverty (that figure in 2016 is now well over 1.3 million). In our indigenous populations, the child poverty rate in 2013 was 40%. The most vulnerable families are those headed by a single parent, and most of those single parents (80% in 2011) are women. In 2011, these moms earned about 50% of the income that male single parent families earned, a median income of $21,200 compared to $43,300 for men. Canada has the 30th largest wage gap between men and women out of 145 ranked nations in the world, despite all our attempts at gender equity. And it is worth noting that all of these statistics are skewed way out of proportion if we take into account whether people are indigenous, visible minorities, mentally or physically disabled, or seniors. We have not come a long way, baby.
That morning in October 2007, I started to make a list of what absolutely needed to be done, what should be done and the little things I wanted to do before my company arrived. It was a long list. I started to feel very stressed, even hopeless. Then I thought about what I had learned about poverty. And I realized that my stress is a luxury. I remembered that my son and daughter would be fed a nutritious supper that night, after they got home from their publicly funded, universally-accessible education. My husband has a job that means we don’t need to worry about the necessities of life. We could afford to paint our living room. We actually have a living room to paint. I realized that I had no right to feel so stressed and hopeless about such insignificant things as whether my house would be clean by the weekend.
The poor, around the world and right here in Sackville, know what it truly means to feel stress. They wonder how they will get enough nutritious food for their children. Sackville’s poor families worry about how they will afford school supplies and winter coats and boots for their kids. They worry about how they are going to pay their rent. They worry about their children’s health, their children’s mental and social well-being, whether they should go to the Food Bank or not (and what their neighbours will say if they do). In developing nations, some families actually have to consciously choose which one of their children will live. The rest of their children will slowly die before their eyes, simply because they only have enough food for one child. That is stress. Next to that, my stress is selfish and meaningless.
In the time it has taken you to read this article, if you’re a fast reader, about 150 people in the world have died from completely avoidable, poverty-related deaths. That’s 25,000 people who will die today. Locally, over 200 families in Sackville will make use of our food bank this month. In 2014, the Community Association’s Christmas Cheer programme provided food vouchers, toys and gift baskets to 607 individuals in Sackville, 160 of them children. Still more families will go unnoticed.
If you are walking past the chapel (or a church) this week, go in and sit in the silence for a moment, and say a prayer for the poor in our community and in our world, as the sunlight colours your world through stained glass.
