350,000

The economy changes all the time and, depending on where you are, the cost of things are a bit different. I remember when gas/petrol prices were $0.40 a litre. I grabbed a slurpee the other day from 7-Eleven cuz it was stinkin hot and it set me back $3.40. The same slurpee would have cost me $1.20 in Canada (and no, it's not because it's -400º and nobody buys them). That was my first and last slurpee of the year - not paying that much for iced-sugar again.

So what does $350,000 get you these days? Apparently, it's just enough to get yourself a left-hand, sequined white glove that Michael Jackson wore during a 25th anniversary TV special moonwalk. It also happens to be enough to:

- provide clean water to 194,444 people in Ethiopia
- provide 4069 orphaned children in Malawi with day care for a year
- provide 116,666 children in Bangladesh with reading and writing lessons
- provide 10,000 people living with HIV/AIDS lifesaving antiretroviral treatment for one month (or a year's worth of treatment for 833 people)
- provide roughly 951 people in a developing country, who suffer from non-resistant tuberculosis, with 12 months of curative, drug therapy (4000 people die from tuberculosis each day and, with exception to multi-drug resistant strains that are especially high in places like the Ivory Coast, Abkhazia, Thailand and Uzbekistan, we have the cure for it)

I'm just spitting out ballpark figures and not writing some research paper - feel free to look up the exact costs yourself and please resist your hedonistic temptations and invest your $350,000 in something more than a white glove.

And why does it have to be $350,000? What about how we spend $1000? Or $10? Not trying to get legalistic here but it's something we don't stop and consider often enough. At the very least, it's something I need to think about more.


PS - maybe the Hard Rock Cafe plans to use the money to buy 20,000 bibles to be distributed all over the world. If that's the case, then good on them and forget what I said about the glove.