Reflections on life. Collections of inspirational quotes. Rediscovering relationships and faith.
Posted in DUMP SITES, POVERTY QUOTES on Jul 22nd, 2007 No Comments »
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.
Things do not change, we change.
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”
–Henry David Thoreau
Cruising Manila during the wee hours of the morning, I found several children with plastic bags or sacks sorting out heaps of waste. Our mountains of refuse, from plastic bottles, tin cans, stale food, are trucked away to dumps, hopefully far from human sights where residents won’t be affected by the noxious stench or the toxic leachate making its way into the water supply. But for millions of people living in poverty, these piles of garbage are a source of life and sustenance: the only one!
These people rely on the scraps of garbage we throw away everyday as they have no where else to go and earn, no one else to ask for help…Nothing!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nOpABj_2no[/youtube]
At the dump sites, each arriving truck means “manna” from heaven which instantly draws hundreds of scavengers. Sacks on their shoulders, black rubber boots or open-toed sandals on their feet, they rifle the trash to grab the best bits: plastic containers and sheets, tin cans, anything that can be recycled.
Let’s make a stand together to help these children gain its lost paradise. In a rotten environment filled with our refuse and waste, let’s give them signs of hope: birds flying where no birds dared to be.
Let’s start first with ourselves.
POVERTY QUOTES
Poverty is the schoolmaster of character.” – Antiphanes
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” – Aristotle
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” – Frederick Douglass
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.” –George Bernard Shaw
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.” –
Horace, Odes