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I found this on a website i reguraly visit and i think is worth sharing
What do you think about it?
World Statistics
If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:
There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, north and south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be nonwhite
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
The following is also something to ponder...
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of
starvation...you are ahead of 500
million people in the world.
If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep... you are richer than 75% of this world!
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If your parents are still alive and still married . you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.
If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.
Someone once said: What goes around comes around. Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like nobody's
listening. Live like it's Heaven on Earth.
You don't love someone because they are beautiful, they are beautiful because you love them.
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Since moving overseas more than 12 years ago, I have seen some amazing things, and come in contact with some astonishingly awful pain in other people's lives. I have often felt ashamed of the US, who consumes so much of the world's resources and don't make fundamental sacrificial changes to rectify the situation. No wonder some of the world's people see America as selfish, greedy, and self-serving, despite the real good that is done all over the world by Americans, using a small fraction of American money and resources. The US doesn't give to others anywhere near the same percentages of it's wealth as many many other countries regularly do, and most Americans don't know it. The US hasn't even paid it's full share of its UN dues in years.
Yet it is the US that continues to refine democracy and the rule of law, which is used as an example and a beacon of hope in many places in the world. There are many other positives as well of course, so I am not a United States basher, by any means.
One thing I get to do more of here in Thailand is give some of my time to an organization that works with refugees. Many refugees fleeing their home countries end up in Bangkok, because it has comparatively easy entry rules. These people have managed somehow to obtain air tickets, usually giving everything they have to get them...and they're one way tickets. Then they apply for refugee status with the UN and pray for re-settlement to countries in the West. It can take years, if successful at all.
Yesterday I spent time doing psychological assessments of two people as part of their application to the UN for re-settlement. One was a young gay man from Cairo, who had to flee Egypt due to his sexual orientation. The other was a 21 year old man from Sierra Leone who had been forced to become a child soldier at age 13 for 6 years before he escaped. His stories brought violent death and terror into the room so starkly that I had to de-brief with a colleague afterwards before I could write the report. One memory of his had us both in tears. His best friend, who had been in his dormitory at school before the entire school faculty had ben murdered in front of the students' eyes, had stuck together with him through thick and thin for several years of Hell. They were closer than brothers. Then one day, his friend displeased one of the leaders of their group, and he was beheaded without warning with a machete. My client says he can never forget the blood.
Read those statistics again, especially the ones about how lucky we are to be in such blessed circumstances in our lives. The poorest amongst us on the MB are truly rich compared to sooo many others...
"Always forgive your enemies...nothing annoys them quite so much." Oscar Wilde
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