number 1 of the eight Millennium Development Goals, set during the Millennium Summit in June 2000, is to Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. all the eight goals have a target date of 2015, and goal 1, in detail, is only to halve extreme poverty by the next eight years. when they proposed to do that, they had fifteen years, and now that we are closing in on the halfway mark, have we quartered poverty? not really. while we've decreased poverty in some places, it has increased in other places; read the 2006 Report for details.

as i hear this plea to help the poor by not just offering them charity, but by finding a solution to the problem, i think of what it means to offer them charity. does offering charity just mean giving them food, clothing, and shelter for free? does offering charity mean offering skill-building courses? does offering charity include providing anything that they do not deserve? or is offering charity just a mindset - in the mind of the charity-giver - i offer, so i can turn my head away? are we doing that when we offer charity?

while micro-credit programs around the country are showing us a way to help the poor help themselves by simply offering them credit first, then requiring them to show their worth later, it puzzles me to a little degree that it has not caught on. of course, the first selfish thing i think about, in a poverty-free world, is what happens to the entire field of social work? although my job as a writer is not merely focused on fundraising for the poor, there would still be a huge displacement for those who work within these organizations. and the field of social work has been expanding these past decades, with nonprofit organizations popping up everywhere. so here is where it does not puzzle me: social service is the trend, and micro-credit is not. that is why it has not caught on. i'm not saying micro-credit is the end-all solution to the problem. but it is still always a bit puzzling to me to find that there are not enough people in power who are good enough to see beyond their backyard, lay aside illusions or differences, and perhaps even sacrifice a little in order to allow working programs to do what they do best: work. but perhaps it's not the people involved, but the bureaucracy. good intentions must jump through hoops of fire, get sliced and compartmentalized, re-edited and rewritten, pushed through various departments, signed and re-signed, and on and on.

so we're left with perseverance. and while the poor persevere one second at a time, we are taking weeks, months, years...and not often enough am i asking myself: what am i doing to help?
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