Living Below the Line - Day 5
This year, I decided to take part in the Living Below the Line fundraising campaign. Living Below the Line aims to raise awareness about poverty by challenging people to live off of $1.50(USD) a day (the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line). If you’d like, you can donate to my campaign or donate to the cause in general.
As you might have read in Day 1, Day 2, or Day 3 my strategy is to live exclusively off beans and rice for the next 5 days as that was all my $7.50 could afford.
I skipped writing anything for Day 4 because it would have been just “I ate rice and beans today”. There wasn’t anything interesting.
However, today is the last day of the campaign. And good news everyone I’ve got about 1/3 of the bag of rice left.
According to a friend who did the program last year, that means my daily budget for the week has a bit of surplus… and that means I get to have hot sauce today! That’s going to be awesome.
This has been an interesting experience, and I am glad I did it.
I was driving to a meeting yesterday enjoying the air conditioning, and it really sank in how small of a glimpse this is into extreme poverty. It’s more than most people would attempt, but it’s still not even scratching the surface. But I am very glad I did it, and I am very thankful for the small insight and the remembrance of where I come from.
For the curious, by the end I will have gone through a 2 pound bag of beans, and around 4 pounds of rice. I lost 6 pounds (~2.5kg). At midnight tonight I am going to have a huge salad with every single vegetable in the refrigerator, and tomorrow I am going to gain all that weight back at the vegan food and beer festival.