My five year old daughter and I pray about hunger daily. She feels children starving is more important than anything else for her to pray about. If a five year old can find hunger important enough to talk to God about shouldn’t we? Hunger claims the lives of 25,000 people each day and 18,000 hungry children die each day. How many more have to forfeit their lives before we as a community come together to say enough is enough?! As an obese nation,  each person  consumes somewhere around 1500 pounds of food a year.

Courtesy of BBC

Hunger is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as “the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food.”   While most of us wasted nearly $100 billion of food last year alone, over 800 million people were undernourished–that’s more than the populations of USA, Canada and the European Union. One in seven people on the planet suffer from hunger and more than 60 percent of chronically hungry people are women, which should strike most of us women as deeply disturbing…60% of 800 million people is more than 500 million women.

Courtosey of BBC

As a mother, I find this statistic the most heartbreaking: every five seconds a child dies because she or he is hungry.  In the time it has take you to read just this far, nine children have died due to hunger. 9.7 million children under five died in developing countries in 2006 alone, think of how many more have died by now. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases caused 60 percent of the deaths; they contribute to deaths caused by diahreha, malaria, measles, and pneumonia.

How many more people have to die before we as humans, God’s Children, stand up and say ENOUGH? If we all helped out just a little, we could easily end world hunger. It takes standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves and it might even mean a little sacrifice from us, but isn’t it worth it. Help stop the hunger and death!

Sites like The Hunger Site make it easy, you can donate food for free with just a click of your mouse.  I set an Outlook reminder for everyday to help remind me to visit. One click donates the equivalent of 1.1 cups of food, done daily you can contribute over 365 cups of food for FREE every year. If you want to do more, you can shop for beautiful gifts at The Hunger Site Shop.  The more you shop, the more food is donated. For the last two years, we have bought many of our family’s gifts from here and Hubby buys all of my gifts from there.  Many of the items in the shop are handmade, Fair Trade items; you can buy kits that directly help others. In 2008, The Hunger Site, thanks to their generous advertisers, donated over 8,000,000 pounds of food to Feeding America, Mercy Corps, Save Darfur Coalition, and The ONE Campaign.

FreeRice.com donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for every word you correctly define.  With every word you get right the words get harder, and when you get one wrong the words get easier.  This is a great way to donate food for free and exercise your brain. There are so many different ways you can donate right from the comfort of your home, why are we not doing more?

Visit these sites for more details on how YOU can help:

http://www.wfp.org

http://fromhungertohope.com

http://www.thehungersite.com

http://www.bread.org

http://wwwfreerice.com

http://www.worldhunger.org

We are all God’s people! and we must do our part to save those who cannot save themselves!

All statistics can be found at: http://fromhungertohope.com/hungerfacts

Photos Courtesy of BBC

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Last week we started talking about how we, as women, have such a hard time realizing our financial dreams and that most of it stems from our conditioning as children.  Let’s start today by discussing a few of the myths we have been led to believe since childhood.

• It is ingrained in our brains from a very young age to be a “good girl”.  Instead of pushing us to be the best, or to go into careers that would make us wealthy, we are pushed to “do good” and go into helping careers like teaching so we can be home when our children are.  Don’t get me wrong, teaching is a noble profession, one of my better friends is a teacher, but let’s face it she probably isn’t going to get rich teaching Kindergarten.
• We are taught that money is power and that we shouldn’t want to be “powerful”, but instead we are taught to be “nice”.
• We are conditioned from a very young age (some of us from birth) to be caretakers and nurturers, but not necessarily the breadwinners or the executives.

As if being brought up to believe that all we were meant for is to be a “good girl” were enough, we, as mothers, are faced with stereotypes and personality traits that make it still more difficult for us to become independently wealthy.

• Even if we were in a high-powered position before pregnancy, many women decide to reduce the workload or come home for a while after their children are born.  Afterward, when they decide regain that responsibility or go back to work many find they have been put on what is called “the mommy track” with reduced responsibilities and pay scales.
• Our natural born instincts are to take care of our husbands and children first and this often leads to our forgoing any investing for our futures. Men on the other hand are far more likely to invest and save for their retirement first.
• Many women find it difficult to ask for raises, perks, or even the wage they deserve because they aren’t sure they DO deserve it, have been raised not to speak up for themselves, or don’t know how to approach such subjects.  This is something we must change, we must learn to speak up for ourselves and ask for what we deserve. If we don’t who will? Certainly not the man in the office next to us or vying for our position and certainly not our bosses.

So ladies (notice I did NOT call you girls), Why are you not rich? What is holding you back? What choices have you made in your life that has prevented you from becoming independently wealthy? Have you been told these myths or others? Share with us. Tell us your story. We’re here to listen and to learn for each other.

I will answer my own question. I am not wealthy at 26 because I chose to drop out of college, get married and start a family.  Don’t mistake me, I do NOT regret any of these choices, except maybe the dropping out of college, I am simply sharing what choices I made in my life that have thus far prevented me from becoming independently wealthy.

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To learn more about becoming independently wealthy women, check out Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich : 75 Avoidable Mistakes Women Make with Money.

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