November 3, 2005--Living On A Dollar A Day
Those like me who lead privileged, rarified lives, casually toss a dollar to a men’s room attendant without thinking much about it. Reading about Malawi the other day in the NY Times (story linked below), I was reminded again that two-thirds of Malawi’s 12 million people (and billions of others worldwide) earn less than that dollar a day.
Injes Juma’s monthly income is $20 a month and with that he must support 10 men, their eight wives, and 16 children. When in the past I read stories of this kind I must ashamedly admit thinking, “Well, a dollar in New York isn’t equivalent to a dollar in Malawi or Haiti or Bangladesh or . . . “ The Times piece caught me off guard in my own arrogance.
It wasn’t so much about the hideous economics and world scale inequalities, it was additionally about what Mr. Jume needs to do to earn that $20 and what what he does is doing to Malawi and to the rest of us.
He and his fellow Malawians are cutting down their forests. They are doing this in order to turn trees into charcoal (Malawi’s major rural industry) at such a rate that to earn that $20, he and others need to survive, the forests are disappearing at the rate of 2.8 percent of their total acreage annually. That means, to quote the assistant forestry officer in Malawi’s southern region, four-fifths of the region’s tree cover is now lost. And the cutting there is dwindling “because there are no more forests.”
My first reaction was about the planet—if this is happening in Malawi as well as in the Amazon as well as in Indonesia as well as in California, what will happen to my planet and how will this affect me and my family?
My second reaction had to do with what I might want to say to Injes Juma who is helping wipe out these forests as he struggles to take care of 34 people.
I realized in fact that I didn’t have anything to say to him.
Frankly, if I needed to earn $20 a month to take care of my family and if cutting down the trees in Central Park and converting them to charcoal were the only way I could do it, I would wake up tomorrow, get out my axe, walk over to the Park, and start chopping.
Injes Juma’s monthly income is $20 a month and with that he must support 10 men, their eight wives, and 16 children. When in the past I read stories of this kind I must ashamedly admit thinking, “Well, a dollar in New York isn’t equivalent to a dollar in Malawi or Haiti or Bangladesh or . . . “ The Times piece caught me off guard in my own arrogance.
It wasn’t so much about the hideous economics and world scale inequalities, it was additionally about what Mr. Jume needs to do to earn that $20 and what what he does is doing to Malawi and to the rest of us.
He and his fellow Malawians are cutting down their forests. They are doing this in order to turn trees into charcoal (Malawi’s major rural industry) at such a rate that to earn that $20, he and others need to survive, the forests are disappearing at the rate of 2.8 percent of their total acreage annually. That means, to quote the assistant forestry officer in Malawi’s southern region, four-fifths of the region’s tree cover is now lost. And the cutting there is dwindling “because there are no more forests.”
My first reaction was about the planet—if this is happening in Malawi as well as in the Amazon as well as in Indonesia as well as in California, what will happen to my planet and how will this affect me and my family?
My second reaction had to do with what I might want to say to Injes Juma who is helping wipe out these forests as he struggles to take care of 34 people.
I realized in fact that I didn’t have anything to say to him.
Frankly, if I needed to earn $20 a month to take care of my family and if cutting down the trees in Central Park and converting them to charcoal were the only way I could do it, I would wake up tomorrow, get out my axe, walk over to the Park, and start chopping.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:07 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home