If you feel you are having a bad day... this should put things into perspective: 
If we could shrink the population of the earth 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, 
(both north and south) 
8 Africans 

52 would be female 
48 would be male 

70 would be non-white 
30 would be white 

70 would be non-Christian 
30 would be Christian 

89 would be heterosexual 
11 would be homosexual 

About 6 people would possess about 60% 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 points are also something else 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 somewhere ... 
you are among the top 8% of the worlds wealthy. 

If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very rare. 

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.


The 1998 annual report of the United Nations Development Program  gave the mind-boggling estimates showing that the world's 225 richest people have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's people (2.5 billion)."

About 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s assets in 2004. One hundred million people in the industrialized countries, it reported, live below national poverty lines. Even in the United States, "between 1975 and 1990, the richest 1 percent of the population increased its share of assets from 20 percent to 36 percent."

20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods. In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.

Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished. According to UNICEF, 30,000 children quietly die each day due to poverty. That is about 210,000 children each week. 10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 and 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

Today, across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on under two dollars a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electricity.

And annual military spending in the world is 780 billion in US dollars.

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