Blog Action Day…yesterday

Thursday, October 16th

So I woke up pretty well this morning, managed to get into work early (albeit a mad dash to the train, which then sat there for a few minutes, making me feel silly), checked my email and saw that it was Blog Action Day! I went to the site and read up about it and thought that it was a pretty good idea, reaching out to people via blogs to talk about worthy causes. This year, the talk of the town is poverty. However, what I failed to notice when I first loaded the page up – it was yesterday. I had somehow managed to miss the fact it was Blog Action Day – possibly because everyone in the US posted about it when I had gone to bed (at the early time of 10pm). However, to make up for my lack of knowledge, I will talk about it now…albeit that’s easier said than done.

See, I don’t know much about current affairs or keep track of what issues there are in the world today – I know I should, but the most I see is whatever I read on the train or on the Yahoo! home page news list (when I occasionally visit there). Therefore I couldn’t tell you what state the world is in when it comes to poverty (bar the credit crunch, which appears everywhere), and I think that some of you might not be able to tell me either. I don’t feel it would be right at all to preach to anyone about something I don’t know, so I am making it my mission today to try and learn about the poverty issue itself, and educate myself to this worrying situation.

What can you and I do?

If you haven’t already, visit the Blog Action Day website to see how many people have actually taken part – its staggering. If you want to learn more about the poverty situation, or even donate to it, there are a lot of websites about – too many to mention here at least – that you can offer your services to and try to help. One of the first places I visited was poverty.com, which has a list of websites that have useful information about various aspects of poverty, which I found to be very helpful. If your interested in helping the solution, I could recommend you start by looking at the various websites on their list.

However, please don’t forget that there are other worthy causes out there, as well as poverty, that need your help. This month of October is actually breast cancer awareness month at Cancer Research UK, which is the UK’s leading cancer charity. There is also the brilliant website freerice.com, which, for every answer you get right, will donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program, and costs you nothing.

I’m not big on the facts, and I’m not all knowledgeable on the subject, but I do know that a lot of people need help – and you can help them, be it fundraising yourself, or donating a little as £2 a month with a number of charities. The choice is yours.