Living on a Dollar a Day

abracad, November 22, 2014 · Categories: externally authored, spiritual politics

More than a billion people around the world, one-seventh of the Earth's population, are believed to live on a dollar a day or less. This staggering fact is hard to fathom for many living in affluent countries - yet it is an inescapable reality for many millions living in the developing countries of the world. The lack of awareness about global inequality, and the lack of serious efforts to remedy it, inspired the non-profit organization The Forgotten International to send a photojournalist around the world to document the lives of some of the planet's poorest. The outcome of this journey is captured in the book Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor. Attorney, child advocate, and Professor of Law, Thomas Nazario is the author of this book and the founder and president of The Forgotten International. The compelling photographs featured in Living on a Dollar a Day were shot by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist RenÃ©e C.Byer.

Niels Bos interviewed Tom Nazario for Share International.

Share International: What is the idea behind Living on a Dollar a Day and what does it entail?

Tom Nazario

Tom Nazario: The idea is simple. I personally thought that we spend far too much time talking about the world's rich, the celebrities, the famous and the beautiful and not enough about nearly a third of our population who live on either under a dollar or a day or under two dollars a day. Billions of people are, in my opinion, largely ignored. We don't necessarily ignore them in a time of crisis, like when wars break out or a natural disaster hits. But besides those kinds of occurrences we have grown to accept the fact that people die from poverty; that we have large numbers of people living in poverty and we really haven't done enough to lift them out of poverty. So I wanted to bring more attention to this segment of our human family and that's why we did this book, which includes beautiful as well as heartrending photographs, that tells the stories of the world's poor.

SI: And there's also a documentary coming up?

TN: Yes, we are working on it now. When we sent our photographer around the world, we also sent our videographer. So we have a lot of video of the places we visited. We went to 10 countries on four continents to produce the book, it took us three-and-a-half years to get it finished. The documentary is hopefully coming out next year [2015] and hopefully it will get some attention.

SI: Does poverty affect all poor members of society in the same way?

TN: I think the answer has to be yes, at least to a very large extent. There is, however, a disproportionate effect on women and children. Men are more likely to escape poverty than women; men are more likely to be the cause of poverty than women. Certainly there are men who abuse their wives or leave them for other women. In parts of Africa it is not uncommon for a man to have three or four wives and one is simply forgotten and her children are tossed aside. So that is one of the reasons why at least our organization and many large organizations around the world try to disproportionately fund women and children. If you look at women and girls in the world, they are 60 per cent of the people who live under a dollar a day. So they are disproportionately impacted and for that reason they probably have to be disproportionately helped.

SI: The Dalai Lama has written the foreword to the book. Can you tell me about his involvement with this project?

TN: I have known the Dalai Lama since 1999, and learned much from him, either by listening to him or just watching him. This book is largely about compassion and of course the Dalai Lama is the Buddha of compassion. It is about caring for others, and helping when we can. So there are a lot of resources in the book to encourage people to do just that. The Dalai Lama believes that there are really two levels of compassion, one is that you are simply nice and respectful to other people. You are inclusive, you don't discriminate. You are kind. But another level of compassion is actually one step higher than that, when you actually go out of your way to relieve the suffering of others, ideally the suffering of strangers. That is a very high level of compassion. And in my work and life I have concentrated mostly on helping children here in the United States, and of course helping friends and family, but I never reached outside of that and helped complete strangers, at least not enough. So after having a discussion with His Holiness I decided that my foundation needed to do just that: help people that we have never met before and that may not be helped by anyone else.

SI: Many people have misconceptions about the lives of the poor. Could you address some of these misconceptions and how they relate to what you have seen and experienced in the field?

TN: I think there are three big ones that we were troubled by. One was that people in poverty don't know how to get out of poverty; that they are too ignorant or that they just wouldn't know how to help themselves. A second is that the poor are lazy, that they are impoverished because they simply don't work or work enough. And the third is that people in poverty are generally unhappy, terribly sad or even depressed. And while there is a grain of truth in all of those things, generally I think they are misconceptions. I think most poor people have a pretty good sense of what would help them out of poverty, they just don't have the means to get there. Often we think we know best and we create systems that really don't work as well as we would have hoped. We would have benefitted by talking to them and including them in the process of poverty alleviation, particularly when they are living the lives we would like to help improve. Second, we discovered that many of the world's poorest people work constantly. They may not be getting paid for the work they do but surviving, by itself, is a huge job. Spending hours each day just to gather clean water for their children to drink; dealing with some of the changes in the weather and the illnesses that they encounter. The truth is they are also very ingenious in finding or trying to create a job that will bring at least some income into the household. And I think that is particularly true with women. I have never found a lazy woman throughout my travels; they work constantly, from 6 in the morning until 10 or 11 in the evening, just trying to rear their children and keep their heads above water. Finally, with regard to sadness, even though a lot of the poorest people in the world have almost nothing, they are relatively happy, at least seemingly so. They spend a lot of time laughing, they take a great deal of joy in the simple things of life and their children find ways to make toys and make up games in order to pass the time and enjoy life.

SI: What did you find most remarkable or memorable during your journey?

TN: In our travels we visited about 45 families that are struggling with poverty. Let me tell you two stories that are kind of opposites. One is about a woman we found in India who has five children and they live in dire poverty. She struggled every day to find enough food to feed her children, but because this was often so difficult, she eventually decided not to feed her last child. This child was two-and-a-half years old but had been fed almost nothing. At two-and-a-half she still only weighed eight pounds and was terribly malnourished. But the woman used her to beg. She would tuck this child under her arm and show her to other people, as an instrument of begging. And she would even rent the child out to other beggars so they too could use her to gather sympathy from people and in turn collect more coins on the street.

It was quite difficult for us to take that photograph and tell that story. We were actually able to save that child. We got her to a clinic and into a nutritional program so she is alive and well today. We had heard that things like that happened but we had never seen it that close up. The second person, who really took my heart away, was a gentleman we met in Peru. His name is Miguel Rodriguez and his story is in the back of the book. We considered him a hero. He is a psychiatrist, a middle-class person from Peru, who had a six-month-old son who fell ill. He took his son to a hospital, but over the course of three days the child died. When he left the hospital he encountered two little street children, who were dressed in rags and had been forgotten by their families - there are 59 million street children in the world. He looked at those kids and he said to himself: "Why didn't God take one of those kids instead of mine?" When he went home and after burying his child he went to bed and his child came to him in a dream and said to him: "Father, that's really the wrong way to approach life. All life is valuable. Those children are deserving of as much love and care as I was." With that thought, Miguel prepared some food and started to feed children on the street. Eventually he sold all his property, took all of his money and left the city of Lima, Peru, for the outskirts to build an orphanage for wayward and forgotten children. He now takes care of over 1,000 children at his orphanage. He has built housing, a school, a clinic and he's incredibly loved by all of these kids.

We found a lot of loving individuals around the world that you would never know existed unless you stop and talk to some of the people we often completely ignore.

SI: With regard to those 'living on a dollar a day', what's your hope for the future?

TN: You know, things are getting better. About 35 years ago around 40,000 children under the age of five used to die each day for simply being too poor to live. They didn't have clean water or enough nutrition, they didn't get immunization, they had absolutely no access to medical care, and they simply died. Today that number is about 19,000 a day, largely due to the work of the United Nations, and some large foundations in the world like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we are making a lot of progress. I would just like to see that progress continued because 19,000 a day is still way too many. And that's just the children. If we look at older kids and adults that die from poverty the number is astronomical.

What is unacceptable is that while there are still 1.1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day, we now have over 1,600 billionaires on the planet. So the chasm that exists between the world's rich and the poor is simply immoral. Particularly because many of the rich don't give away much of their money or give to projects that are more about them than truly helping others. So we need to turn this around, we need to have more people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and others who care about people who have nothing. And for the middle classes of the world my advice is simple; they should think about doing something for others before they leave this planet. We all have a responsibility to make the world a little bit better for having been here. And it doesn't take a millionaire or billionaire to do that. Moreover, you don't have to go around the world to help, you can simply go around the block to find someone to help. As long as everybody did their share, the world would be far better for it.

For more information about The Forgotten International and Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor, visit www.theforgottenintl.org

Living on a Dollar a Day

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