Blog Action Day: Poverty

It's blog action day and the topic is poverty.

Where to start?

Well, since, once again, I am very busy, it's going to be short, but the first thought must be to do with the financial crisis we find ourselves in.

In particular, I was interested to listen to a radio programme a couple of days ago which was talking about the possible impact on Edinburgh, home to the Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The discussion centred on the premise that if the headquarters of these banks were to be moved elsewhere, then Edinburgh would suffer. The reason I was interested was because I have had the privilege of working under the hallowed halls of one of these headquarters. Indeed, as a teller I had the opportunity to sit at the far end of the hall, under the expansive, highly decorated, rotund ceiling, and watch customers walk towards me, their voices echoing embarrassadly as if in a library. I could then try and help them out, take their money, or give them some. In the evenings I would try to balance my cash before heading home.

I did consider banking as a career, briefly, when I was finishing university, but decided I would not like to be a young whipper snapper telling older men like my father what to do and whether or not they could get loans etc. I made the decision that I would rather do a "social" job rather than one with a possibly better salary. It now seems I made the best decision on both accounts.

Anyway. While the world goes mad, my Year 11s are considering the topic of Evil and Suffering. One asked, why do we always think about people in developing countries? Why do we not think about the poor people in the UK? I think that we do, but it's true, many of our examples are based on developing countries. So we thought about the suffering faced by people in the UK. Young people. And we considered why that is a problem for many people when it comes to thinking about God.

I am afraid that my computer is running really slowly, so this is extremely hard to type out at the moment. So I will finish there for now and perhaps continue later.

Anyway, that is my contribution to Blog Action Day!