Bloggers Unite: Poverty

I received an email today from a volleyball friend telling me about Blog Action day. The topic is poverty. For the most part I think most Americans are fairly disconnected from true poverty. Sure we see homeless people on a regular basis, but I'm talking Cambodia, India, Bangladesh poverty. The kind of poverty where 4 year olds have to work to support the family just to have a meal that day.
My friend's husband has pledged to give up his morning coffee habit for a week to donate $25 to Kiva, a foundation that lends money to entrepreneurs in developing nations to get their businesses going. I encourage any of you that have a few dollars to spare to donate to a cause you feel is making the world a better place.
For those of you, like myself, that don't have a dollar to spare, you can play this rice game, and for each correct answer the UN World Food Program will donate 20 grains of rice to an impoverished area.
Lastly, I read this article on child labor the other day, and learned some important things about child labor laws and how to support them. In Bangladesh, many children worked in textile factories, trimming threads or performing other small tasks. Then a law was passed in the states, banning the import of any textiles from factories which used child labor. 50,000 children lost their jobs in these relatively clean working environments because the factories feared loss of business from the US. Those children still needed to bring in money, so they turned to more dangerous jobs to make a living. Prostitution, smashing apart old batteries for recycling, construction. Banning child labor is not going to happen in these parts of the world, so make sure that when supporting a new law, child labor is not necessarily banned, but that they are given clean, safe working conditions. It is definitely hard to imagine what life is like for those who are truly impoverished, especially without experiencing it first hand.
So take a few minutes today, donate if you can, educate yourself or others if you can't.