Relatively absolute poverty

I was trying to learn about this week's countries and saw "Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America."  Wow, I thought, that must be bad, and it was, with a GDP per capita of $2,800 a year.  But what does that mean?  So I looked up Haiti - poorest in the western hemisphere at $1,300 a year.  Wow, that's really not much... I wonder what the worst of the Eatsern Hemisphere is? Turns out it's a toss-up - Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo both have a GDP per capita of $300.  So that's less than a dollar a day.  Less than $4 a day in Haiti.  Just over $7.50 a day in Nicaragua.

The US is $46,400, or more than $127 a day. (Only #11, incidentally.  All stats from the CIA fact book.)

Now, maybe GDP per capita isn't an accurate indicator.  Maybe there are dimensions that it doesn't capture that reflects a less desparate life than these figures seem to say.  But when I think about the fact that I spend more on diet coke alone than $4, I find it hard to really interalize what these numbers mean.

Web Super Sleuth #1!

Estela Cabrero Kallweit wins the first Web Super Sleuth for finding contact info for bishops in Nicaragua!  Still looking for Panama contacts.

Thursday night call for help

On Thursdays I try to hunt down contacts at the Catholic bishops' conferences of the nations we're praying for the following week to ask for prayer intentions.  It's a fun exercise, trying to navigate a website in a foreign language.  I got stumped tonight: for the life of me, I can't find a contact form or e-mail anywhere on the Nicaraguan bishops' site: http://www.cen-nicaraagua.org.  If you can, you get my eternal thanks and I'll mention you as a Web Super Sleuth.