Leighton Williams, Project Coordinator

Last week, I had a discussion about something that reinforced the saying 'no matter what we think about our situation, there is always someone worse off than us'.

I am referring to a discussion which came from a story about a family who was forced to survive on a paltry $2,000 per fortnight. For those of you who do not know, that works out to US$29.41 per fortnight. Of course, there are many of us who waste more than that in an hour, but for that family, the harsh reality is that that money is gold and anything more than that is guaranteed to make them feel like millionaires.

You see, we live in a world where there is an unequal distribution of wealth. Some may choose to say that there are people who have and those who don't have. Those with money are the 'haves' and would shudder at the thought of surviving on so little for a day, let alone for two weeks. But for those who don't have, it is a reality that they must face daily and so $2,000 or US$29.41 has to go a long way.

Strangely, those who have are often the ones who are quick to make suggestions about how to survive on that small amount of money when they can't and, to me, asking someone to survive one $2,000 per fortnight is just plain wrong.

For one, $2,000 can barely feed one person for two or three weeks let alone two or three people for a week. I would not even say four people because that would be just down right impossible.

And I am just talking about food, I haven't even mentioned essentials such as water, toiletries and clothes. I can't mention elec-tricity or any other modern day trappings such as cable or Internet because those are luxury items.

Every three months, scores of politicians talk about how many jobs have been cre-ated. They also talk about how the economy is poised to take off and how well we are doing. Now all that is fine and dandy, because they are sitting in air conditioned offices looking at numbers.

But in reality, there are people who live from day to day and will never experience this growth because at the end of the day, no matter what they do, they still have to stretch that $2,000. For them, the economy has taken off and crash-landed.

These people will never know what it is to be able to spend $5,000 in the supermarket at one time because that money will never touch their hands all at once.

For others though, we will look at those people and feel sympathetic, some may even laugh, while the rest will try to offer suggestions - albeit, they may be impossible to carry out - but, at the end of the day, no human being deserves to live life like that.

When you think about it, some of us may want to help but can't, but for those of us who can, let us put things right, let us at least attempt to improve the lives of people living in such dire conditions because poverty begets social ills, which we would rather live without.