Living on One Dollar a Day

Extreme poverty is a harsh reality for more than one billion people worldwide. Sharon Wilkinson, country director for CARE in Cambodia, spent one month getting to know what life is like for the people we serve, by living on $1 a day. Below is an excerpt from her first few journal entries.

Day 1
It’s a strange way to start a “do-without” month … There I was, aboard a 747 flying out of Taipei, when October sixteenth arrived—the first day of my pledge to consume less than one U.S. dollar per day. I looked at the airline breakfast—and I knew the hardest thing to give up would be the coffee!

Looking at this feast, I remembered the mid 80s in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I traveled there with Clare Hanbury, who was taking forward the Child-to-Child movement across Africa. We shared a room and went to breakfast together at a rather grim hotel. She sat, a very dignified English type of lady, spreading each slice of rapidly aging bread with as much butter and jam as it would carry. Then she cut them into small pieces—and she left it! “Uh, Clare,” I ventured, “what are you doing?” Then she told me the story of the street children living out of the hotel rubbish bins. “If we cut the bread and add the butter and jam, it won’t be recycled to another customer, and the kids will get it,” she explained.

In Cambodia, the children call the waste food that comes from the airlines “God’s Rubbish Bins” and so I sat on the plane making tiny sandwiches, hoping the kids would get them. Imagine your child getting food from the bins; the crumbs from our table.

I have had the privilege of working to change the fact that many thousands of people go to sleep hungry each night. I do this through CARE, through my colleagues and partners in big ways such as interventions in food security— introducing improved agriculture, water catchments, water purification, and introducing a range of services that protect children such as nutrition and hygiene education, supported with kitchen gardens, immunization programs, and access to essential health care and schooling.

It’s these sorts of interventions that will make the difference. So for the next month, I will continue to work on the bigger picture issues while experiencing firsthand how it feels to survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day.

Day 2
Breakfast was an egg for about seven cents. A dozen eggs comes in at just over one dollar. Oh, and I had coffee!

I walked to work, which takes forty minutes and gives me the chance to get to the market before the heat of the day ruins the produce.