$2 a day…you can’t even get a cup of coffee for that…
So with one week to go till Live Below the Line we’ve started to draft up our list of food and drink and have opportunities to raise awareness with our friends and family.
As we get closer we’re starting to wonder what we got ourselves into. At first I thought there’s heaps of tips and tricks we’ve picked up as uni and bible college students. Unfortunately they don’t all work.
As a poor student, you can usually try and get things for free or leech off your parents but having meals from parents or be given stuff for free is CHEATING…
Chris having a hard time contemplating the lack of meat in a week. We talked about ideas such as buying Pork bones, chicken bones, salmon head. But then you think about what is going to go WITH the pork/chicken/salmon bones? Even if we make a soup its pretty thin. The $1 or $2 we spend on bones could be spent on a couple of packs of homebrand pasta…then you need to start thinking about buying salt, oil, soy sauce, or ginger…and we are NOT ALLOWED to apportion anything! If we use salt, we need to buy the WHOLE bag in our budget.
Or what about a simple vegetable pasta? Pasta is cheap but its the other ingredients that usually go in a pasta sauce – tomato paste, tomatoes, herbs, salt, oil, garlic, (we usually try and put red wine in it too) – these all need to be purchased separately and again, not apportioned. No parmesan of course. Right now we could have pasta with tomato and garlic only to keep the cost down.
And what about drink? the reality of drinking water and only water every day is starting to hit home for Chris. I’m not too bad with drinking water (since I do that mostly) but if we want variety we need to buy tea (a whole pack). And that’s already easy since we live in a country where we can drink however much water we want and don’t need to walk hours to get it and bring it back…
We’re going to have to stop watching Masterchef that week. And I should stop my trek through ‘Dae Jang Geum’…
I think we’ve since become more realistic about the kind of food we’re going to eat. Very little variety, and very basic. Creativity only goes so far. Well that’s exactly the experience of so many parts of the world living under the poverty line. We’re going to need your prayers and encouragement to get through at the same time lets spare a prayer for those who do this their whole lives…
Grace Lung 