What would you do with $2.50?

Your making a list of things you need to buy,

That list includes: Water, Band-Aids, a protein rich snack, and a newspaper.

You look at your list and nod thinking to yourself, “necessities”.

Almost simultaneously, you begin to hum, “Look for the bare necessities– the simple bare necessities– forget about your worries and your strife”, from the jungle book, and walk out the door.

On your way to the convenience store, you notice several rusty pennies and a couple of nickels down the path you’ve taken, but between your humming of that nostalgic tune and your rush to get to the store you mindlessly walk by the coins and shrug off the fact that you missed out on making easy money, thinking to yourself, “It's just some spare change, I can’t do much with it anyway”.

When you arrive at the store, in complete oblivion of the coins you dismissed earlier as useless, you realize you are running low on cash and you buy the bare necessities; a bottle of water, and a snack –costing you a total of $4.10.

At the cash register, before handing over your money, the cashier lady asks you if you would like to leave anything for those in need, you shake your head shyly and say you don’t have enough–this automatically triggers an image of you walking by the rusty coins that you could have used to donate to spare yourself the guilt trip.

After leaving the store a bit disappointed in yourself, you search for the coins. While retracing your steps, you realize they are no longer where you last left them. Defeated by the entire situation, you shrug it off once again, convincing yourself that few coins couldn’t have helped much anyway, and head home.

In this scenario lie 3 universal truths:

•  Human necessities include: clean drinking water, food, medical appliances, and some form of educational material.
•  The amount of money it takes daily to sustain the average person today is well above $5.
•  People have lost the ability to see the bigger picture.

Today, it is very difficult to go about one’s day thinking of anything other than accomplishing tasks on one’s own personal agenda. A wide spread mentality of, “Out of site, out of mind” has begun to spread like wildfire through up and coming generations, and the flames are burning holes in the bigger picture: Humanity.

If you would have woken up today knowing that the 3 billion people facing poverty- Nearly 1/2 of the worlds population – are LIVING on LESS than $2.50 a day, and those facing extreme shortage (1.3 billion) are LIVING on LESS than $1.25 a day, would you have deemed those coins on the ground worthless? Maybe even spared a second, out of your busy life, dedicated to picking up the spare change, fruitless in its form, and finding it a greater purpose?

Living with poverty is living in the absences of those things necessary to mankind; food, water, medicine, and an education. Poverty has planted its seed everywhere in the world, some places more than others, nonetheless, it is a global issue we must attend to urgently.

Picking up spare coins is no trivial way of fighting against this matter, in fact, if enough people see to it, the value of what one penny, nickel, or dime can do multiplies allowing the possibility that a man, women, or child be fed, taken care of, or educated.

I will make it a part of my personal list of things-to-do to actively instill in the minds of others the meaning of a greater purpose, to look beyond the object in front of me–in this case spare change, and through the act of sharing my vision of the bigger picture with you, inspire change to extinguish the wildfires of poverty like a tsunami.