Looking Back at the Finish Line

It’s been a few weeks since our $2 a day challenge.  In case you missed it and are in too much of a hurry to go back and read about it in my previous three blog posts, my wife Jenny, my daughter Meredith and I lived for five days with a food budget of $2 per day per person. 

I was telling a friend about it shortly after we finished.  I promised I wouldn’t mention his name in this space nor give you any details about him, because you might know him (especially if you go to my church).  He looked down at me from his four-inch height advantage for a second, smiled, and shook his head.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but in Nigeria we have a saying: ‘White people do the darndest things.’”

When I looked at our project from his perspective, I had to agree.  There are relatively few white people in Nigeria.  How few?  According to that bastion of knowledge known as wiki.answers.com, “out of 150 million people in Nigeria the white population is only 50 thousand.”  I expect that this 0.0001 percent would be quite affluent compared with most of the rest of the population.  I can only imagine how our project would look to someone in financial trouble.  It would seem like we were treating poverty as if it was a game.

But I’m glad we did it.  Maybe it was a game, but it was also an education, and I learned many important lessons.

So here’s my list of stuff I learned:

1)      I think about food a lot.

I think about what we are going to eat for dinner.  I go to sleep anticipating what I will have for breakfast.  In the middle of the day I think about what snacks I can have.  Food for me is not about nourishment.  It’s about entertainment.

2)      I trade money for time and comfort.

It’s hard work to eat on a tight budget.  It’s so much easier to use frozen or convenient foods, or to simply “punt” (as Jenny puts it) and head to the local fast food chain.  My friend Rob told me in response to my blog post titled "Two Dollars a Day" that since they moved to a more rural location, they save a lot of money by raising their own food.  I really admire that, because raising chickens or goats or growing a garden is hard work.  Unfortunately for many, that simply is not an option.  And sometimes, our schedules are so hectic with work and family that we cannot afford the time to eat more simply.  On the other hand, planting a fruit tree or a tomato bush might be a great investment.

3)      You can eat pretty well and healthily for $2 a day, but you need to plan very carefully.

In fact, Jenny planned out our menu so carefully that when the five days were over, the peanut butter jar and the sugar bowl were empty, the strawberry jam and the milk were gone, and we only had a few spare pieces of celery and a slice or two of bread leftover.  That was it.  If it had been my responsibility and not Jenny’s, we probably wouldn’t have made it.  Most families aren’t lucky enough to have a Jenny.

4)      You can eat pretty well and healthily for $2, but you will probably feel hungry.

Portions were smaller than what we were used to, and there was not a lot of protein to give us a full feeling.  I was certainly looking forward to the end of the week.

5)      When your food budget is extremely limited, your family is only one minor disaster away from going hungry.

On the last day of our experiment, the coffee maker died.  As I made our morning brew by boiling water on the stove and pouring it manually through the filter, I imagined how a family struggling to make ends meet would deal with a similar situation.  I realized that most of the appliances I have, like the coffee maker, are non-essential.  But if the stove had gone out, or the refrigerator had died, the consequences would have been dire.  A week or so after our experiment, we had an entire gallon of milk go sour.  I poured it into the sink and was grateful that Jenny had purchased a spare gallon.  I also took note that if it had happened during our challenge, I would have been watching ten percent of my food budget literally go down the drain.    

6)      The poorest families throughout the world get by on much less than $2 a day for food.

It was challenging enough to have a food budget of $2 a day.  In reality, the poorest of the poor survive on $2 a day total.  That covers food, clothing, transportation, housing…everything.  To make matters worse, that statistic comes from Australia.  Two dollars in Australian currency converts to about $1.25.  That is not a challenge I am ready or willing to try.

7)      It doesn’t take much to make a huge difference for a hungry family.

That’s the good news.  For a family just scraping by, something as simple as a can of peaches could be a source of unimaginable joy.  If you are have enough money to buy food for you and your family, be thankful.  If you have more than enough, be generous.  Give to your local food bank or to an organization that fights hunger worldwide.

On Friday, when it was all over, Jenny took the amount of money we had saved over the week, put it on a grocery store gift card, and handed it to Pastor Craig.  He knew of at least one family that could use it.

But that same night, Jenny, Meredith and I also celebrated by bringing in Chinese food.  We almost spent more on that one meal than we had on food for the entire week.