shoshminsk:

I told my mom about this project today, saying our class was living like a third world country for a week, and she said, “No, you’re not.” 

When I tried to argue with her, she read me this passage from a book she’s been reading:

“We don’t know the world of poverty. We try to get our arms around it, but we just can’t comprehend what it’s like.

A couple of years ago I watched a television special featuring a CNN reporter who was studying poverty and the long-term effects of hunger. He interviewed a man who had lived in a state of hunger his entire life. Wanting to “get” what this must have been like, the CNN reporter boldly said, ‘I’m going to live your life for thirty days. I’m going to eat exactly what you eat and drink exactly what you drink for thirty days straight.’

On day twenty-one this CNN reporter had to bail. He was dizzy, he was faint and he couldn’t function. His mind had slowed down and his body had begun to waste away. He just couldn’t take it.

Twenty-one days. This other guy had lived forty-plus years this way, and a guy pretty much like me had lasted less than a month. We simply cannot relate to what billions of people on planet Earth today are facing in this regard. Billions.”

I think my mom made a really good point. We can do our best to change our lifestyles and cut back on things we want, but there are billions of people in the world who don’t have anything they want and don’t even have enough of the things they need, people who have been starving for their entire lives, and we can make an attempt to live like them for a week but we will never understand what it’s like to be them. 

Clearly there are lots of developing countries who aren’t so underprivileged, but this passage made me realize that we inhabit an entirely different world than most of the people outside of America, and even when we cut down our consumption we are still living like some of the richest people in the on the planet.