Last night I had the opportunity to attend the Oxfam dinner with our learning community. Before this dinner, I had no idea what I was attending. When I walked into the banquet hall, I was handed a green card and was separated from my friends when I was directed to sit on the right side of the room. I was placed at the High-Income table with 4 other girls. My card said I was a 40 year old doctor living in India with my husband who is a businessman and two children who attend private school.

This banquet not only informed me with statistics about classes and different income groups, but also how people are living and what people are going through. A person truly does not know how good they have it until they have experienced poverty. POverty is extremely common but a lot of people, like myself, are not fully aware of it. I am from a fairly large town in New Jersey and poverty is not common at all.

Every year on Thanksgiving, my family delivers Thanksgiving dinners to elderly people in poverty. It allows me to be exposed to poverty and teaches me to be thankful that my family can provide me a meal on the dinner table every night.

The two girls presenting at the banquet had a lot to say about poverty in our area and really informed the students what it is like for people in need by giving us real situations and real people’s names and circumstances. This dinner was extremely informative and it makes me look at life differently than I did previously.