The following is a speech by Miriam Palmer that she delivered to her Year 6 class. Having lived in East Africa for a long time, and having a mum who is a fair trade enthusiast, she was always going to do something a bit radical in life. Miriam goes to church at St. Michael's Vaucluse where they only drink fairtrade tea and coffee.

Setting the scene. 

Imagine you are a child with 7 brothers and sisters. You wake up in the morning to a two-room mud hut, all your siblings under the same mosquito net. Your oldest sister is 13 and doesn’t go to school anymore.

She helps around the house. In the morning you walk with your brothers and sisters 15 minutes to the closest well where you fill up a bucket, then carry it home balanced on your head.

The whole way your oldest sister is carrying your little brother, only 6 months old. In school, you sit on a bench that is meant for 2 people in Australia but you sit with your five best friends. Your second youngest sister is sick she has got malaria.

Your family is two days walk from the hospital. It will be hard to get her there before malaria kills her. My father borrows our neighbour’s bike and rides her to the hospital. Everyone says goodbye, you hope and pray that she gets the medicine in time.

In Africa, many kids have little food, poor water and medicine is far off and expensive. Children rarely have more that one meal a day. We know our daily intake should be 5 veggies and 2 fruits.

In Africa and many other third world places people would rarely have one veggie and fruit daily. Count how many taps you have in your house. Showers, bathes, washing machines, dish washer, drinking taps, hoses, etc.

The families in many places have no running water in their houses. So they have to walk many km to get water and rarely the water is clean. We can get the medication we need very quickly and is not a problem for us no matter what it is we have.

In many countries they livelong distances from hospitals and the medication is expensive for them. We have great education and lots of teachers to teach us. We have many schools to choose from like private schools and public school.

The places that are in poverty have no choice of school and may not be able to go to school at all. The teachers are poor in knowledge so they cannot help the children very much. They do not have the resources like we do.

We have computers, chalk, textbooks, pens and pencils. They don’t have many of those recourses. In one class there may be up to 100 children with one teacher! In conclusion I believe that poverty is wrong and no one should have to live in bad conditions such as poor food, dirty water, bad education and bad medicine resources.

The richer people should give money or resources to charity. More people should sponsor a child. Poverty is a sad and terrible thing. We need to act now to stop poverty. Make poverty history!