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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n
“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.<\/p>\n\n\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 It doesn’t take much. Sometimes the need is just for some money to make it until the end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6119,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6118\/revisions\/6119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}