Poverty is relative

I’m feeling distinctly grumpy today. For reasons which I won’t go into (I might elsewhere, but it would detract from the point of this post), I’m unable to travel to Jamaica next week for a planned trip to indulge in my hobby of ham radio contesting. This makes me unhappy.

Call it middle-class guilt if you wish, but reading other Blog Action Day posts has been a humbling experience. To even be able to consider making a trip such as the one I’ve just had to cancel puts me so high up in the 99th percentile of well-off people in the world that it’s almost obscene. Sure, there are plenty of people better off than me, but huge numbers much, much worse.

I can’t fix world poverty. But I can do something positive. I’m off to kiva.org to make some microfinance loans to entrepreneurial people in less well-off areas to help them get local businesses off the ground.

What are you doing?