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Last week I took my eight year-old son, Nathan, to Chinatown in Los Angeles for Chinese New Year Festivities. I had never seen a real “Dragon Parade” live and Nathan and I got a kick out of the dragons, the floats, and all the streamers.
Most surprising to me was the diversity. Sure, there were lots of folks of Chinese descent, but I’d be surprised if more than 50% of the crowd was Chinese. The rest were all different ethnicities.
As we took the Metro back home, I thought of a parable that Dave Livermore, Executive Director of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and contributor to our upcoming Deep Justice Journeys curriculum, has shared with me. It’s difficult to pin down the origin of this “If the World Was a Village of 100 People” metaphor,1 but the numbers are very illuminating.
If the World Was a Village of 100 People…
The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific.
51 would be male, 49 would be female.
82 would be non-white; 18 white.
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian.
80 would live in substandard housing.
67 would be unable to read.
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation.
33 would be without access to a safe water supply.
39 would lack access to improved sanitation.
24 would not have any electricity (and of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet.
1 would have a college education.
1 would have HIV.
2 would be near birth; 1 near death.
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens.
33 would be receiving—and attempting to live on—only 3% of the income of “the village.”
We have much to celebrate in terms of our diversity, but we still have much work to do in terms of Kingdom justice.
- It appears to be adapted from the State of the Village Report developed by the Sustainability Institute, http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn338villageed. [↩]
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February 6th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Thanks for sharing that,Kara. I haven’t seen that anecdote in a few years. I remember being intrigued by it the first time I saw it. it is such a cool reminder to not see the word through ethnocentric lenses.
Have a good weekend.
February 6th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Great global perspective KP. In these economic times, it has been helpful to me to reflect on the global “least of these.”