Four parishioners from Dromore Cathedral were due to be travelling to Maridi, Sudan with CMS Ireland in early March 2009. The team had been raising funds to help with their travel expenses. In the Christmas/New Year period, news reached us of terrible civil unrest in the area the team were supposed to go to. As a consequence, the trip was postponed, and the team, Dromore Cathedral and the wider Down and Dromore Diocese put their energies into gathering funds for emergency financial relief. Many people were displaced by the unrest, people lost they lives and are still displaced from their homes.
A member of the team writes for the Dromore Cathedral website this week. Follow her experiences this week as she embarks on a poverty challenge. This challenge aims to raise some money to send to Maridi and to raise awareness of what it means to live in relative poverty.
Sudan Poverty Challenge!
The challenge is could you live on £2.00 per day? (15.2.09 – 22.2.09).
“Certain things affect us more at specific times and since I started thinking about going to Maridi, I have become greatly affected by poverty, both that which I see around me and further afield. My dilemmas usually start over the price of my morning cup of coffee, just under £2.00. We’ll get above the definitions of poverty as there seems no universal definition of but we can visualise relative poverty being described as living on $2 (say £2.00) per day. Remember my cup of coffee, that cost me £1.80, almost a whole day’s budget.
I am very careful about the timing of this small challenge, it’s before Lent (Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent is 25th Feb. ’09) a time when, remembering Jesus fasting 40 days and forty nights, many ‘give up’ something they like. But this kind of poverty is no attempt to live as Christ did. It’s about survival. But your rising to the challenge could be Christ-like.
Could you pick 1 day or 1 week to live on £2.00 per day? In reality that £2.00 would be for food, heat, transport, clothes, medicine, everything.
Now if you do something like that could you give the Cathedral the money you are saving (however great or small) in excess of £2.00 per day to pass directly to our link Diocese in Sudan for a specific poverty related pressing need? Food, cooking utensils, whatever Bishop Justin in Maridi needs to support those who call on the church to help. The people of Maridi are crying in their physical weakness, but they are strong in their faith in God’s power.
Imagine you wake in the darkness of poverty, how you would survive? Now my challenge may not always be practicable, you will get the sack if you don’t get to work and you have to feed the children. But where it’s safe, try it for 1 day or 1 week. I’m picking next week beginning Sunday 15th Feb. to Sunday 22nd ‘09 with my offering being made to Dromore Cathedral on Sunday 22nd Feb. With the Parish magazine this month many received a small brown envelope which you could use. If you’ve lost that put it in an envelope marked “Poverty Challenge”. Those who aren’t parishioners could direct their funds through Dromore Cathedral Office, Church Street, Dromore [contact details elsewhere on this site]. Even the children could get involved in this. For them it could mean forgoing pocket money.
As part of my challenge I should be walking to work in Lisburn, for 5 days but that’s not safe. So I’ve roped in a couple of friends to ATTEMPT to walk some of the equivalent distance this weekend. The rest will be walked at lunchtimes next week. My travel to work normally costs about £4.00 per day. I’ll try to let you know how I get on this week on this webpage”