The Global Village of 100 People
Thank you to all the people that contacted me following last month’s editorial on counting our blessings. Several of you had visited the Eden Centre, and suggested that I look at the piece on global statistics where patterns of inequality are pictured as a global village of 100 people. With Racial Justice Sunday on the 12th February, the article provides us with much to meditate upon and I provide it for you here.
If the world’s population was understood as a global village of 100 people:
• 60 would be Asian
• 14 would be African
• 11 would be European
• 09 would be South American
• 05 would be North American
• 33 would have no access to electricity
• 15 including 10 women, would not be able to read or write
• 18 would live on less than $1 a day of whom 11 would be women and children
• 37 would have no access to a toilet
• 50 would live in an urban area of whom 15 would live in slums
• 13 would have no access to drinking water
• 10 would be disabled
• 14 would have no right to basic health services
• 02 would be born this year and 1 would die
• 09 would be under 5 years old
• 15 including 3 children, would be undernourished
• 06 would be infected with malaria
• 10 would die from tobacco related illness
• 20 richest would possess 90% of the wealth
• 15 would be overweight, 4 would be clinically obese
• 10 would be over 60 years old
• 24 would have access to the internet
Let us pray
We share a common earth.
We stand among each other.
We share our planet,
We share birth, death, hunger, love.
The sky opens above us and we receive space.
The earth stands beneath us and we receive ground.
Living things die for us.
And we die, returning to soil, sea, and air.
We are the people of pain and fear.
We are the people of anger and joy,
We are the people of compassion and grace.
In all of us, let there be a longing
for a life that has not yet come,
for a world that is free and just,
a dream of hope for all people.
Amen.
Dorothy McMahon ‘Celebration of the Unity of all Humankind’
Rev Julia Feb 2017