To Pass on the Torch

I’m currently developing a concept note for a poverty alleviation project.  Inevitably, I had to surf the net for the country’s latest poverty statistics.  It wasn’t just the tables and figures that I came to.  I stumbled upon reports as well, bearing photographs on its covers showing exactly what poverty means in this country. 

The tables and figures are impersonal, merely black and white representation of the cold facts.  By looking at them, they appear to just be a jumble of numbers, albeit incomprehensible to some.  In contrast, the pictures would immediately leap at you.  You see dilapidated nipa huts with wide-eyed children peering out of windows.  You see pictures of bare-*$$3d, barefooted children, with protruding bellies that seemed an ironic representation of the hunger that beset them every day. 

I could write a thousand and one words to describe all the things that was running in my head while I was looking at the pictures.  In fact I’ve started penning them down just so I could make a sense out of them. But, how can one write about something one feels so strongly about?  The only thing that keeps cropping to my head is the line, “Poverty is wrong.”  And indeed it is. 

I am awake and aware enough not to question the meaning of things anymore. I think I was ten years old when I started asking a lot of the “why’s”.  Even then my heart had bled at the thought of the seeming “inequities” that is prevalent in the world. In all those years, I have come to the answers of most of those questions.  I am way past asking the why’s anymore.  I’ve now moved on to asking myself if I am in the position to make a difference somewhat, and what my contribution should be.  I am no hero, I am not a hammer-wielding demi-god who can command the thunder and lightning at my whim.  But I know, in my own little way I can do something.  I just wish I can plant the same seed to my children: that feeling of concern, of wanting to do something or affect a change somewhat.  It would be a legacy I would gladly pass on to them...