I was having a coffee, on the other side of the road there must have been 100 people, sitting or sleeping rough against a wall that stretched the length of the road, they were beggars, some deformed, some naked, some diseased, many with aids, some with limbs broken or missing, some you would be afraid to touch, all living out their lives in the same place every day, all were begging, and the first reaction when you get over the shock is perhaps to think that somehow it was all their fault. That’s the easy way out, it enables you to walk past them and do nothing, give an occasional coin to the ones that tug a conscience yet when they ask for money, if instead you offer them part of a loaf of bread it is torn out of your hands and gorged like I have never seen before. Poverty is not the “not having” it is, as the man in the cafe said....”being someone whose potential in this life will never be realised”. No hope whatsoever, and I don’t know what a life without hope must be, none of us do, but having seen it day after day, as the hands reach out no longer for hope but for food, it has drained my heart.

For a very sad but true insight to world poverty Click here.

I was having a coffee, on the other side of the road there must have been 100 people, sitting or sleeping rough against a wall that stretched the length of the road, they were beggars, some deformed, some naked, some diseased, many with aids, some with limbs broken or missing, some you would be afraid to touch, all living out their lives in the same place every day, all were begging, and the first reaction when you get over the shock is perhaps to think that somehow it was all their fault. That’s the easy way out, it enables you to walk past them and do nothing, give an occasional coin to the ones that tug a conscience yet when they ask for money, if instead you offer them part of a loaf of bread it is torn out of your hands and gorged like I have never seen before. Poverty is not the “not having” it is, as the man in the cafe said....”being someone whose potential in this life will never be realised”. No hope whatsoever, and I don’t know what a life without hope must be, none of us do, but having seen it day after day, as the hands reach out no longer for hope but for food, it has drained my heart.

For a very sad but true insight to world poverty Click here.