A family I know lives by picking through the trash of the Guatemala city dump. For me, they are a text book example of how poverty crushes people. To begin with, the family is split because the father has been away from home for the last two years in search of work. For at least a few hours each day, the children - 3 boys and a girl compete with the rats among the “fresh” piles of trash delivered by the sanitation trucks. Usually barefoot, the children clamber among the stinking piles, dodging trucks and bulldozers looking for scraps of metal to sell and bits of food to eat. Even Clara the 4 year old girl takes her turn amongst the stench. All of the children have scabies and intestinal worms. None has been immunized. None of the children were born in hospital, therefore they have no birth records. Without these records, they are ineligible to attend school or to attend the health clinic which is less than a kilometer from their makeshift shack. Two of the boys are addicted to glue sniffing. The glue is sold in tin cans at small shops everywhere. The glue manufacturers refuse to add a simple noxious smelling ingredient that would prevent sniffing because they don’t want to decrease sales. Two years ago one of the children, a baby girl died -- I think from diarrhea. This family’s story is repeated countless times across the developing world, where four-fifths of humanity lives. According to the 1999 World Bank Poverty Report, 3 billion people, half of the world’s population, lives on less than $2 per day. I cannot help but ask myself if we the more fortunate are doing enough to help our neighbors.