Live Below The Line

No, this isn't a picture of the painting I'm doing, I'm posting to let you know about something I do each year with my family.

We are raising money for Oxfam - so relevant right now with what has happened in Nepal and India.

The idea is to live on £1 a day for 5 days, donating what you would have spent on food to charity (for me, Oxfam), donating extra, and encouraging others to do the same.

Here's where you can donate:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/Procter


So, why are we doing it?

Many, many people in this world don't have enough to eat. We do. Even when we were very poor, we had just about enough to eat, and we always had clean, fresh, cold drinking water. So many people don't. Even if reading this makes one more person think about their neighbour (whether that's the person next door, the person begging at the ATM, the person who has just lost everything in Nepal) and they then do something good, its worth it.

We will be hungry this week. We will have a very restricted diet, with no fruit, as I couldn't afford to buy the fruit after I'd bought the veggies and carbs. Kev will find it harder than me, as he needs more calories than I do. We will go to bed hungry. We won't have the foods we normally do.

But, we have a choice. If we can't do it, we can go out and buy some food, or we can raid the cupboards or freezer for something. As one friend said; we have a freezer, we have cupboards, a fridge, a cooker. We don't have to worry about keeping food fresh.

There was a time in our lives when we were poor - I remember scouring the shelves in the supermarket for reduced items to try to stretch my budget. I remember the shame of having to take stuff back at the checkout as I had overspent and didn't have enough in my purse to pay for the food I'd bought for my children. I remember not paying the gas bill so I could buy shoes for my children. That's a long time ago, though, and this will be a good discipline.

Here's our week's food:

Here's half the potatoes, carrots and onions chopped to make soup for the week:

Here's the split peas soaking to add to the veggies for soup:

Here's the finished soup. I'll be bagging and freezing it into individual portions for the week when it has cooled down:

I've never asked this before; I'd really appreciate it if anyone would repost/tweet/FB/whatever the link to this page, so that as many people as possible can read about what we're doing. Thank you.