11 August 2006
International Youth Day: team up and take action
Sophie Haydock thinks it's time to realise that we can tackle poverty together.
On Saturday 12 August 2006, all around the world, from Egypt to Ethiopia and the United Kingdom to Uzbekistan, people are coming together to celebrate International Youth Day (IYD). This year the focus of the day is directed at poverty and how we, as young dynamic individuals, can team up and take action to ‘Tackle Poverty Together’.
For me the idea of tackling poverty seems a rather intimidating task. Poverty in my mind is the Everest of issues facing the world today, a huge mountain of complicated problems: hunger, suffering and deprivation. How can we mere mortals ever be expected to make this mountain topple?
For all of us growing-up in western society, poverty is an unavoidable issue - yet so often we stick our heads in the sand. We know poverty exists but we easily become desensitised to how it actually feels for those who wake up each morning feeling hungry. Abi Henshall (pictured, top) agrees. She feels disconnected from the realities behind poverty. For her, it is an issue that is often referred to in clichés: ‘eat up all your tea, there are people staving in Africa’. When she hears statistics such as ‘over 500 million young people, aged 15-24, live on less than two dollars a day’, she finds it hard to visualise what those figures really mean. She says, “I find it sad that the issues surrounding poverty are often spoken about without any real feeling or thought to the people who live it everyday. It is a problem so huge that most people are left with the feeling that their contribution won't make a difference.”
Edmund Cook (pictured, middle) sees poverty as unfair and feels guilty that others don’t have the same opportunities as him. “I haven’t been able to choose the life I’ve been born into and neither have the millions of people suffering from poverty. Whilst I am blessed with the comforts of a middleclass lifestyle: health; freedom; and an education, the disparity between my situation and others less fortunate makes me feel guilty for having so much and taking it for granted,” he says.
It’s important to realise that feeling guilty won’t achieve much in the way of progress. IYD aims to identify young people as a distinct group with specific needs – only then can fundamental changes provide better opportunities.
For John Sanger, one of the most important things we can do is to talk about poverty. He thinks, “that way the desire to sort it out becomes ingrained into the national psyche.” Whereas Matt Wray (pictured, bottom) thinks action is more important than words - “If you are in a position of power, however small, in a band for example, then you can use your voice to say something worthwhile in a way that reaches lots of people.”
It is not enough to say the situation is too big for us to make a difference. That’s why IYD 2006 is highlighting the importance of youth unity to help make poverty history. If we team up and take action now, IYD 2007 could be a very different story.
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I’m a student of English & French at the University of Leeds and the past year of my course has been spent as an English assistant in the south of France. Travelling is important to me, and I’ve spent my long student summers trekking around South-East Asia and more recently Mexico. I volunteer for Oxfam, and last Easter I hitch-hiked to Morocco for Link Community Development. I’m a book-worm and I’ve always wanted to involve myself in writing. I feel strongly about equal rights, especially for women.
