Now and then a friend from Haiti will contact me with a request for some money. I know life is difficult there - especially these days - and so I usually comply with a bit of cash.
It doesn't take much. Sometimes the need is just for some money to make it until the end of the month. Fifty dollars can be the difference between a friend and his family going several days without food or ... having their daily rice and beans. Fifty dollars might enable a family to keep a child in school for the next month or two. Fifty dollars might make a visit to a doctor possible.
Me? Well, yesterday I took two items back to Target and Lowes that I had decided I didn't really need - and I was tired of them sitting around the house. (For several weeks.) The total back on my card was $48.
"Poor" is a relative term, yeah? I think Americans have a nearly impossible time imagining what it would be like to be one of the 700 million people on this planet surviving on less than two dollars a day. It's a level of poverty that is nearly incomprehensible to us.
I am certain that my Haitian friends have never experienced buying $50 worth of something they might not really need, just as I have never experienced going for several days without food because I couldn't afford any.
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