Walking away from the world of money

One day you loose your job and your last hundred dollar bill breaks into two 20’s and a 10. Then your money crumbles into the last dimes that send you off the cliff.

Watching myself slip into poverty feels like following the lethal injection as it disappears into the skin. Poverty is its own society and system and if you don’t know the system as you leave the world of money, you’re so lost, you suffocate.

Everything is complicated and uphill now. If I get work today, how would I afford the gas to get there? How would I survive for two weeks or a month as I waited for my pay?

What amazes me is how much money, change, how many extra rooms, couches, cars and jobs people have. But so few help and even fewer do anything of substance.

Even when someone does help, there is an amount of guilt mixed with resentment within me. I need a job so that I can create free will for myself.

Even my relative who is letting me sleep here wants me to move already. It has been a month and she wants to get her second bedroom back and maybe turn it into an office for her pyramid scheme business.

So, do I look for a job or a place to live?

I have no place or rights at the restaurants or the movie theaters either. I have no reason to go into almost every populated place I find. Tomorrow, for just one day, imagine a world like that.

The world sees the beating heart of a poor man as an unfortunate continuation. If things get worse and my clothes get dirty, finding even a bathroom will become a moment of guilt that I will have to pursue.

You sometimes feel that you have slipped into a place somewhere between a dog and a man. And so you wait patiently for a world that is so bothered by your existence that it finally calls you to your bowl. But you will eat knowing it is only because you barked, whimpered and gave the world your guiltiest eyes.

I have heard people say that the homeless or the poor deserve these circumstances, are lazy or want them. But I am here because someone hired me and then did not pay. Then another job was starting but it did not. I would bet most of us are here because of something similar.

It is believed that 1 out of 10 people in this country, very soon, will be unemployed.

Of the nearly 10 percent unemployed now, many will slip forever away from their productive lives. Many will silently slip through the cracks of the richest country in the world.

The goal is to not be one of them.

Living on a dime

Sometimes ‘living on a dime’ is just an expression we use. For some it refers to cutting back on expenses or maybe even dipping into a savings or credit account to make ends meet. But for some people, in some places, this expression literally is a style of living.

The world is divided into three parts: First World countries, Second World countries and Third World countries. Poverty rates differ drastically between each division due to many, often overlapping, political, social, strategic, cultural and economic situations. Many in the Third World deal with very high poverty rates, where people have to scratch through their daily lives and find ways to feed and bathe their children, to put them to sleep in a safe place and find clothes for them to wear. But “need is the mother of all inventions”, and many people use their ingenuity to do some or all of that daily.

Palestine is not much different from any other Third World country. It also suffers from poverty, and has witnessed a huge increase in poverty rates over the last eight years. The Gaza Strip is a small part of Palestine that extends along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It is densely populated and suffers from very high rates of poverty and unemployment.

The Gaza Strip has three main commercial ports that allow goods, materials, medical aid, building tools, food to enter. Unfortunately, they stay closed most of the time because of the political situation that we suffer from which leaves all Gazans living on a dime whether we chose it or not.

No electricity, no fuel, no food, no water, no medicine and no life is our daily life here in Gaza; but life cannot stop; it just has to go on and Gazans make sure that happens. Of course, these band-aids have their advantages and disadvantages. Take fuel for instance. Gazans came up with a fuel formula that the world was not aware of before by mixing cooking oil with gasoline. The fuel they came up with can make cars run perfectly.

Advantages: it is very cheap as people turn to falafel shops and restaurants to take huge tanks of used cooking oil for half a dollar each.

Disadvantages: it pollutes the air with huge amounts of smoke and damages the car’s engine if used over the long run.

The fuel formula has been used to develop other products too. Gazans invented cooking tools and ovens that work using the same formula.

Advantages: the oven is very powerful and takes no time to cook, plus the formula is very cheap.

Disadvantages: It produces very high heat and can be dangerous to start and operate.

Using the same formula you can also have a light bulb which is very useful due to the constant electricity outages and a heating system that comes handy in winter.

Advantages: cheap sources of light and heat.

Disadvantages: It produces polluted smoke and can be dangerous to operate and start.

Small (but effective) electric cooking tools:
Cooking tools that depend on electricity to produce a huge amount of heat in no time using iron as the main component in manufacturing them.

Advantages: cooks in no time, very small and doesn’t take any space and very cheap (very affordable).

Disadvantages: the electricity is out most of the time, which makes the electric tools useless, very dangerous and contains naked wires.

Living tents: it’s not an invention but they coped with living in tents like living in houses due to the demolish of their own homes.

Advantages: better than living in the street, a place to live and sleep in and without monthly rent payments.

Disadvantages: It doesn’t protect from the rain, can burn while cooking, very hot in the morning and cold in the night, strained dogs can bite through it and hurt the whole family, and doesn’t apply as a healthy living place.

Gazans live on scratch literally, they use wood and flammable materials to make fire, tents to live in, any edible things for food, public or nearby faucets for water or children’s bathing and dish washing, the beach to bathe their children and wash their clothes and dishes, sleep on the floor, and any kind of cloth to sew and stitch for their children to wear.

“Living on a dime” has a whole new sensation here in the Gaza strip that you have to come, see, feel and experience yourself.

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About the writer: Omar is a 22-year-old journalist living in Gaza – Palestine.

Breaking Through Poverty: Chicken a la Carte

A little girl digging in a trashcan for spaghetti.

I couldn’t erase that image from my mind after a friend recently showed me a film on the poverty and hunger caused by globalization. Directed by Ferdinand Dimadura, the film Chicken a la Carte is a six-minute tour of the world of an impoverished Filipino community that lives in stark contrast to its country’s urban elite. Whereas well-off teens dine at the biggest international food-chains, this community lives off of the scraps left behind in trashcans after closing time.

This isn’t just happening in the Philippines, the film reminds the viewer in the end. Scenes like this can be found all over the globe, from the streets of Los Angeles to the slums of Bangladesh. Around the world, we have 25,000 people dying of hunger every single day. 25,000 people. What’s more scary is that this statistic is probably outdated, since Dimadura made the film back in 2005. With a global economic crisis on our hands, how much further will this number climb?

The whole economic crisis facing us today came about because of one very old human problem: greed. People in key decision-making positions wanted just another car, or just another house, or just the pleasure of knowing they have an extra million or so set aside. So they let things spiral out of control.

And let’s face it, this crisis is partly our fault as well. Those of us who live in a culture of consumption that doesn’t separate want from need, that throws aside the barely bought for the just released, and expects nothing less than free refills with our supersized meals while people are living off of a piece of bread a day. We are not innocent.

But it’s not because we’re evil. We all care about our kids, our neighbors and our friends. Heck, we even care about those people in far-off parts of the world that news broadcasts and films like Dimadura’s thrust in our faces every once in a while. We feel sorry, wish we could do something, and then drown back into our own lives until we are reminded of them again. A vicious cycle.

But one we can break. Although this global economic crisis is making things more difficult for a lot of us around the world, it also gives us an opportunity to reevaluate the culture of consumption we’ve awoken to find ourselves in. This is a culture that provides relative luxury for a minority at the expense of an impoverished majority. It is also a culture with a built-in time-bomb: things can only go so well for so long before the system implodes on itself. And when that happens, the circle of privilege shrinks even further, throwing many of us out to join those already in the fields of global poverty.

As we work towards a solution for our current crisis, we have the chance to recreate the culture we have found ourselves in.

But will we take that chance?

If we do, we have the power to transform films like Dimadura’s from stark portrayals of our current reality into fading images of a distant memory.

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This article originally appeared on WireTap Magazine.
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Chicken a la Carte