This year’s Blog Action Day is dedicated to a world’s very sensitive issue: Poverty.
According to Wikipedia it is defined as:
“A situation or way of life that arises as a result of the inability to access and / or lack of resources to meet basic human physical and mental needs affecting the level and quality of life of people, such as food, housing, education, health care or access to drinking water “
- There we can see that Argentina, Cuba and Spain are in better conditions (less than 2.5%)
- While they are followed by Chile, Paraguay and Costa Rica (no more than 4%)
- The remaining countries are in a second stage (from 5 to 19%)
- And in the end appear Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and the Dominican Republic … with the exception of Haiti that is above 35%.
The problem of these figures is that they are cold, since those who have access to this blog are not on the poverty line, however I would like to take advantage of this post to remind that the cadastre and the GIS technology is made up of people.
I remember one day, that after two hours of mountain road we arrived with our Trimble GPS ProXR to a home where there only had a small bed made of construction wooden remnants and two hammocks made with flour bags and nylon ropes. In the background, there was a child without clothes who was sitting on the ground floor, malnourished, dirty and with a look that I will never forget.
They lived in a protected area, unable to headline their property; they gave us information relating to the cadastral tab and then the head of the family asked me about the possibility of going to live in the city, because they did not support live eating bananas.
I got off that mountain, with the indelible remember of that boy … thinking to myself:
… And what do these people earn telling them that the place where they now cultivate bananas is georeferenced in UTM coordinates?
I would have liked to give something more than my spare shirt even if it had the institution’s logo that he received as if it had been delivered by Santa Claus. I never returned to that place… however that experience changed my way of seeing the cadastre as simple data, but see it as persons, as people.
Just to remind you, that possibly can not carry food to starving children in Africa, but outside of the glass where you are eating your burger there are other kids who are also hungry.
Happy Blog Action Day … out there is something to do against poverty.