Alright. So there are around 2
billion people in the world living in poverty, right? Something like that,
vaguely defined as "living on less than $1 a day" if I recall. But
what exactly does that mean, how much is a dollar worth in a poor country
anyway? I’ve never really understood. What does it mean to live on less than a
dollar a day?
Well, consider the following: in
Nicaragua a dollar won’t buy you a 5 minute phone call to the next major town.
It won’t buy you a return bus trip to a town half an hour away. It won’t buy
toothpaste or a single piece of clothing. It will buy you sex, drugs, or a cup
and a half of coffee
This is a country where more than
50% of the population is under 16. It’s cheaper to buy sex than to buy birth
control. It’s cheaper to buy crack than to buy a hot cooked meal.
To give you an idea of what money
will buy relatively speaking here’s an example: ($1 = 15 Cordobas. All prices
are in Cordobas)
Bag of mango sold on street 2
Newspaper 3
Can of coke 5
Ice cream 6
Condoms (3) 6
Sex 10
Crack 10
Packet of biscuits 10
Bus trip 45 minutes 12
Toothpaste 24
chike & rice dinner 20
Magazine 25-45
Cotton top sold in market 70
Contraceptive pill (1 packet)
100+
Child labour is endemic to
Nicaragua and Mexico. Countless families in both countries survive on the
income brought in by children, either breaking and hauling stones, sifting
through rubbish, or selling drugs. Police aren’t allowed to search children so
some parents figure it’s better to send their children out selling drugs than
risk it themselves. Crack is the primary traded product among minors. One
mother admitted to sending out 6 kids all below the age of 10. It’s easy to
sell and cheap to buy. In parts of the country there are kids as young as six
buying crack. On boy from Honduras said he’d been smoking it for 3 years and it’s
the best thing that’s ever happened in his life. The effects only last 15-20
minutes. It doesn’t say much...
As regards prostitution, one of the
striking features of female prostitutes in Belize was how vulnerable they were.
It’s an unpleasant livelihood. A nurse who had worked with many of them said
that for the most part, they had been sexually abused and thus have so little
self esteem, that it takes little more away from them if other people abuse
them. And to clear up a little myth, "happy" prostitutes fall into
the same category as honest politicians and flying pigs. Prostitution is soul
destroying enough, but when all it buys you is a packet of biscuits that isn’t
"living" on less than a dollar a day. That’s barely existing.
Living on a dollar a day here
means you struggle to afford basic personal hygiene products like toothpaste or
clothes. Heck you can’t afford the return bus fare to the nearest town even if
you wanted to buy those things. Having travelled in Central America (and it’s
not cheap) I regularly wonder how people survive. On such little money you can’t
do anything, take the bus or make a phone call. In fact you can’t do much other
than sit in a little mud brick house subsisting on a basic diet of rice and
beans and never getting sick because you can’t afford the medicine.
And that, in case anyone else,
like me was wondering, is what it means to live on less than a dollar a day..
