Most of us don’t realize how many people are affected by poverty. Poverty is defined by the state of being extremely poor. Personally, I have learned to never judge people who struggle with poverty because we never know what’s going on behind closed doors. The amount of people that are in poverty is an outrageous number. Three billion people in the world are suffering from it. To be in poverty, the annual salary in a household of four is $25,750. That would be less than $2.50 a day, or $77.50 a month.  If you’ve never had to deal with the struggle of money, you wouldn’t understand how stressful this actually is.

Poverty is something that is often overlooked. Many people throw food away, clothes, and anything else they no longer need instead of the alternative, which is donating it. Poverty could almost be erased from our world, unfortunately that won’t happen due to a lot of people out there who aren’t worried about the conditions of others around them. Many people suffer from poverty for many reasons including: little or no access to livelihood or jobs, inequality, and poor education. Education plays a huge role in poverty because if you don’t have the right education you’re set up for a hard time of finding employment.

Poverty is something I’ve had the experience to witness and it brings me so much sadness. I interviewed my cousin, Dylan and asked him, “How does thinking about poverty make you feel?” He said, “Sad and selfish”. We don’t notice how often we take life for granted until we see people around us suffering in poverty. I asked him, “In your opinion, what does it mean to experience poverty?” He said, “Being poor and not having anything”. That’s what we think of when we think of poverty, but it also includes how much money we make a year that determine whether we can afford things we need or not. I also asked him, “How does poverty affect education?” and he replied with, “You can’t always afford things to go to school”. He says this because schools require so many supplies and not everyone can afford them. I believe that if we really tried that we could change something about poverty.