700 Bucks

700 bucks.  That’s it.  That’s how much the average Indian lives on per year.

Now, I know that the majority of Indians live in poverty.  My friend Mark, who has been to India several times and is also going on this trip, has told me several times that the level of poverty is astounding and confronts you every minute you are there.  In preparing for this trip I’ve also done a lot of studying of India by reading a few travel books and the seemingly endless supply of information available on the web.  It’s easy to find things like the $700.00 figure listed above.  You can also find out that 77% of Indians actually live on less than $0.50 a day.  And you can read about the fact that about 47.5% of Indian children suffer from malnutrition.  Compare that to the sub-Saharan Africa rate of 24%.

For some reason though, that $700.00 figure seems to stick in my head.  Maybe it’s because that’s about the amount most Americans seem to be willing to spend on a television.  Just a month ago my wife and I almost did that, but then our old TV stopped doing the weird thing it was doing and came back to life so we decided to hold off a little longer.

Maybe it’s because $700.00 is quite a bit less than our household spends on its cellular phone bill each year.  Or it could be the cable TV and high-speed internet bill that annually costs us almost double that.  Sometimes, especially in the fall, our monthly bill for gasoline in our personal and business vehicles totals to just about $700.00.  I put new tires on my pickup this last spring and that was right at $700.00.  It just so happens that the immunizations I need to get in order to take this mission trip are going to cost me almost $700.00.

Putting the average yearly Indian income into terms of my everyday expenses really seems to rattle me a bit.  Guilt, anger, sadness, and about a dozen other emotions, some that I don’t even have a name for, bounce around in my head and heart as I contemplate it.

In researching for this blog post I came across another fact that will surely haunt my dreams.  As a result of the extensive poverty in India, it is estimated that 2.1 million Indian children die before reaching the age of five.  That means that in the time it took you to read this post, about eight Indian children have died because of not having enough to eat.

Even as I type this I am fighting tears.  I have no idea how I will react when I’m actually confronted with it face to face in a little over six weeks.

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