Below The Line

Hey All!

My sister Stevie (who you may remember from this post) and I are taking the Live Below The Line Challenge, which gives you a little insight into life in poverty by challenging you to live on $10 worth of food for five days and raise money and awareness to help kick global poverty's butt out of our global future and into the past. We figured, if Hugh Jackman can do it, so can we. (But then again, Hugh Jackman can be a very convincing Wolverine, and I'm afraid neither Stevie nor I can claim that one, so I guess we'll see how it goes)

Here are some pics from our rather miserable trip to the shop yesterday:

Stevie misses Nutella already... and we hadn't even started then.

Significantly less fresh fruit and veg than our normal weekly haul...

Altogether it came to $20.40

Today was day one, and I'm already experiencing serious paranoia about not having enough food to get us through the week. We both had porridge made with water for breakfast - that stuff is sticky! And not very tasty. Tinned spaghetti (1/4 of a tin each... gotta make them last!) on toast for lunch, snacked on a carrot and then pasta with a tomato and spinach pasta sauce I made that was awfully brown and not delicious looking at all, and tasted, well, good, but bland. So we've got some pasta sauce ready for tomorrow's lunch, and hopefully the pears we bought will be ripe soon, but with only half a packet of pasta left, man! I'm reaching for my Bach's Rescue Remedy drops already, and it's only day one. WHAT IF WE RUN OUT?

If we run out, I'll have given it a red hot go, admit defeat, be proud of the generosity of my friends and family that we've even raised the bit that we have, momentarily think deep thoughts about the state of our world where some have so much and others not even enough, then sprint down the street as fast as my legs will take me to Hungry Jack's... Fortunately I have that option. Obviously, most people living in poverty don't.

Living Below the Line sucks even on Day One. There is no novelty to it, it's just a big, stressful bummer. It makes me very thankful that I've only had very fleeting encounters with being too broke to afford food (and that was usually because I'd bought something pretty instead and then regretted it later) and have never lived in a situation where money was so tight that we had to go without it.

It's weird that beyond anything I'm realising what an empty-pantry-phobe I am, and how incredibly emotional I get about needing lots of food, really close at hand. I've always had an emotional tie to food; I'm one of those people who cannot stand to skip meals without becoming Medusa incarnate. I'm terrible at controlling what I eat - whenever I impose a rule about only eating a certain amount I tend to think I'm hungry when I'm not, then eat whatever it was that I wanted incredibly quickly, not savouring it at all, like it didn't even happen - which is making this whole process really quite difficult. Having to "ration out" the food we can eat this week is going against all of these crazy emotional food control habits I have and it's - the worst part of all - forcing me to think about them critically. Yuck.

(Critical thinking is even harder on an empty stomach. : ( ... So is writing articles for your website. )

It makes the facts in this video seem so outrageous, in the 'shockingly bad' sense of the word, not so much the Britney Spears song sense of the word.

SO, if you want to donate to help those living in poverty, you can visit my donation page!