Neighborhood Children Learn How to Advocate on Extreme Poverty

Have you ever tried to teach a kindergartner about extreme poverty? What about teaching first and second graders about advocacy? Yesterday, I gave it my best shot. I had some resources from the people at Micah Challenge. They are pros at this stuff. I was just passing on their message.

A day of action. A day for prayer. A day for promise. A day of advocacy. This is what is at the heart of the Micah Challenge as they ask people around the world to join in the commitment to pursue justice for those living in extreme poverty and encouraging our leaders to take action. 2010 is the 10 year mark of the promise made by nations of the world to meet the Millennium Development goals. The UNDP (the UN’s global development network) has been working with global leaders to cut poverty in half by 2015. Micah Challenge is spear heading the Lend A Hand campaign to focus on our promise to those living in poverty. We need to remind our leaders that this is a promise worth keeping.

This is where our kindergarten, first and second grade students at Mika CDC come in…we decided to “lend a hand”. We talked about extreme poverty. Many of our students are from low-income families themselves and it gave us an opportunity to talk about the difference between struggling and survival. It gave us an opportunity to consider just how much we do have and to count our many blessings. We made a list of ways that we can help those living in extreme poverty. Jorge said we could give money that we save. Monica suggested that we could collect food. Carlos thought it would be good to give all of the clothes and shoes that don’t fit anymore to people who need them. As for the problem of a lack of medicine, one student said we should gather all the medicine in our houses and ship it to whoever is sick…maybe not do-able but hey, at least they’re thinking!

As a sign of our promise to do what we can to help the poor, we made postcards with our handprints on them. We will be sending them to the folks at Micah Challenge and they will be sending them on to Washington, D.C. along with others they are collecting from around the nation. We also made a banner with our names and handprints to send along with the postcards so our nation’s leaders would know that we care about the poor and that they need to continue to serve them and pursue justice on their behalf. What a great way to spend an hour with our Mika students!

By the end of our time together most of the students knew that there are 500 million people in the world suffering from extreme poverty and that we are trying to get that number down to 250 million. They knew that 10-10-10 is not a holiday but a day of remembrance – a day of prayer, promise and advocacy. Most of all they knew why we at Mika CDC chose the name of our organization and the verse that inspired it. Not only do we share the name with our brothers and sisters at Micah Challenge, but we share their vision to reduce poverty in our world as well.

“And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8

View MIKA’s blog.