What Mexico Taught Me

For those of you who don't know me personally, I just spent the last couple of weeks on a mission trip in Mexico with my church. It was an awesome experience, which I have felt compelled to share to the rest of you.

The trip was being run through Youth Front, which is a Kansas City based organization that provides a base of operations for local churches that wish to do volunteer work in the town of La C.R.O.C., or Croc as it commonly called. Croc is a neighborhood of Pesqueria in the state of Nuevo Leon, near the capitol of Monterrey, which is perhaps Mexico's most technologically advanced and economically influential city. CROC, which stands for La Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos, is a Mexican labor confederation, representing 4.5 million workers in all 32 of Mexico's states.

Compared to even the poorest of Americans, the people of Croc have nothing. Most of the homes in this neighborhood of 3,000 are decrepit, falling apart, with raw sewage running down the middle of the street outside. In some areas, the smell of human waste is gagging. The homes that we built weren't much larger than an average bedroom, essentially a 10' x 15' living space for up to 3 people. Even though these people have little in terms of physical possessions by the standards of a visiting American teen, they are perhaps the most giving people I have met in my life.

An instance that stands out in my mind is when I was out enjoying a snack of spicy dried fish, that someone else had bought thinking they weren't real fish. One of the Mexican boys that I got to know on the trip, Geraldo, happened to be standing by and asked if he could have some. Realizing there was no way I could possibly eat all of those spicy dried fish, I shared nearly half of what I had with him. Geraldo, who is nearly 12 years old, will statistically quit school in two years when he turns 14. I later found out that his father, like many of the father's in Croc, is an alcoholic who frequently beats his wife and his children, including Geraldo. Despite this, Geraldo, like many of the children there, was always willing to share what little he had with a Gringo like me.

Wow.

During a conversation I had with some of the Youth Front staff, I was introduced to an organization called Operation Blessing International. OBI takes donations and uses those donations to help children, aid in disaster and hunger relief, build water wells, and offer medical services. However, the service that stood out most to me was their "Life Skills and Micro Enterprise" service. For a donation of just $100, a small amount for any middle class American, Operation Blessing will provide professional training of basic skills that would give someone in poverty the opportunity to start a business and bring their family out of poverty. Just $100.

So I've been thinking, what would happen if every middle class citizen in America donated $100 every year to a service like OBI's 'Life Skills and Micro Enterprise' service, and upper class citizens donated $200 a year, for 10 years. Here's the math.

Total pop: 300 Million
Upper Class: (1%) - 3 Million
Upper Middle Class: 15% - 45 Million
Middle Class: 33% - 99 Million
Working Class: 33% - 99 Million

3 Million x $200 x 10 years = $6,000,000,000 (Six Billion Dollars)
45 Million x $100 X 10 years = $45,000,000,000 (Forty-Five Billion Dollars)
99 Million x $100 X 10 years = $99,000,000,000 (Ninety-Nine Billion Dollars) (x2)

$6 billion will help about 60 million people receive training that could bring them out of poverty
$45 billion will help about 450 million people receive training
$99 billion will help about 990 million people receive training (x2)

Total = 2.49 billion people receive training that could bring them out of poverty in the next decade

2001 Estimated stats on poverty:
2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day
1.1 billion people live on less than $1 a day

In 10 years, nearly 65% of the world's population living below the poverty line (2001 stats) could be out of poverty.

Operation Blessing International website http://www.operationblessing.org/
OBI 'Life Skills and Micro Enterprise' Service http://www.operationblessing.org/programs/hope_works/index.asp