by Carol Smock

Created on: April 23, 2010   Last Updated: April 27, 2010

A woman walks with her three young children under the blistering sun of Uganda. She carries a small pouch in which she has gathered the poison to end all of their lives. They are slowly starving to death, and her greatest fear is that she will die first, leaving her children with no one to care for or comfort them.  She stumbles past the quarry where she used to work, before she became too weak.

Each day at sunrise she would take her place, breaking stones into gravel with a hammer. She would toil until sunset for 85 cents a day. Then she would go to the market to buy beans or grain for the one meal she and her children would eat that day. Now she scans the ground, hoping to find a coin someone has dropped that will enable her to buy food for at least one more meal.

This would be horrifying if it were fiction, but it is not. Most Westerners do not know the face of extreme poverty, the struggle to live on less than $1 a day. In Uganda, this means that if you are lucky, you can rent a one-room mud hut with a dirt floor and no water or electricity.

Your hut floods when the rain comes. You cook outdoors. Mostly, you live outdoors. You don’t have access to a latrine. You work all day without respite to earn enough for one meal. The water you drink is muddy and disease laden. Half of your children will die before their fourth birthday.

Hopeless as it may seem, extreme poverty does not have to be a death sentence. But there is no one solution. Simply sending food aid is not enough. Simply providing money is not enough. What a person in extreme poverty needs, more than anything else, is the opportunity to earn a decent living. Enough money for appropriate shelter, clean water, regular and nourishing meals, medical care when needed, clothing, and school for the children.

Solutions, in order to work, have to be local. It is not possible for someone thousands of miles away to determine what abilities or resources a person in extreme poverty may possess. And providing the means to lift themselves out of the quagmire is not enough.

To get to a solution, you have to be there. You have to know the people and resources. You have to find a way to create opportunity.

Bead for Life is one example of a program that does all of these things. It was created after a chance encounter between a woman from the West and a woman in the slum who was rolling paper beads to make necklaces. Selling a necklace or two would mean her family would eat that day. But there was no reliable

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