Mark Twain liked to say there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Let’s look at three well-cited statistics… 27 million slaves 145 million orphans 1.1 billion without clean drinking water These statistics are paradoxically important and meaningless.  Important because there is a staggering breadth, depth, and inter-connectivity between these issues. Meaningless…

Now that the 2010 World Cup is over and Spain has taken the top prize, I wanted to reflect a little bit on my experience. These thoughts were recorded on June 25, 2010… On the one hand, South Africans have so much pride in the fact that they are hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup.…

Americans throw away around 120 pounds of food each month. Besides being an enormous waste of food, this reflects our general lack of understanding that most of the world’s people barely eat one meal a day. Those with no access to a regular food supply might not even eat 120 pounds of food in an…

Earlier this week I blogged about how we tend to approach poverty in the aggregate, using abstract and enormous statistics. [Original Post] Last month, one of our staff members visited a classroom of 170 orphans and vulnerable children. So many children packed this room, she had to take two photos–and that still didn’t capture all…

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