Rich White Woman

As I previously mentioned, I have started working at the United Nations and most of the people with whom I will be working are on trek up country.  The result is that I have spent a lot of time reading documents on the shared drive that pertain to my subject area. On many of the documents there is a background section telling about the poverty statistics in The Gambia.  One sentence that is always there is:

“53 percent of the population lives below the US$2 per day.”  (Okay, so sometimes the sentence is more or less grammatically correct but this is it copied from the current report.)

I decided to calculate how I compare to that.  Right now, Peace Corps pays me my stipend plus a supplement because living in the city is much more expensive than anywhere else.  Also WFP will be paying my rent.  Adding this money up and converting it to dollars comes to roughly $12.85 per day.

That’s pretty impressive considering the $6 a day I would get if I was living in village. Of my $12.85, $4.35 goes to rent, which leaves me $8.50 for daily expenses.  I am RICH.

But trust me, it does not feel rich. You really have to think about every purchase.  But where I am thinking, can I afford this bottle of beer that costs a dollar, the poor are worrying about having enough to feed their families.  In the time before the harvest comes it a meal will often be rice with greens that they have foraged.  Protein can be a luxury.  One of the volunteers said yesterday that she always loses weight when she is at her site.  She shares the family food bowl (she pays the family) and the bowl is not large.  In addition they have a teenage son sharing the food bowl.  For those of you who have had teenage sons you understand why she loses weight. The fact that so many people are living on a such a small amount of money is why they have the World Food Programme in The Gambia doing school feeding and emergency food relief.  Hopefully, next week I can start making a bigger contribution.