Shop til you drop

In our class today, we had an activity where we would pretend to be rich/poor by drawing amounts of money out of a bag. There were three ranges, the rich that had 2500$, the medium with 1000$, and lastly the poor with only 200$. Having to have picked only 200$, I could only afford the cheapest things and could barely afford an education up to grade 5. My daily food was beans and rice, which I had only once a day. For heat, fuel, and water, I had to collect my own. I had to hack lumber from a nearby forest. I had to collect unfiltered water from a nearby stream for my water supply.

How did it feel to have more or less money than other people in the class?
It felt bad because I had only 200 dollars. I felt poor (not that I'm not already), and you will obviously feel better if you had more money, because you can buy whatever you want with enough money.

How did it feel to see what you could and could not afford at the Global Mall?
I could only buy the cheapest things and not have any luxury items. Two of the five things I got were free and still I didn't have any money left afterward.

How many of you could not afford education? What would your lives be like if you could not go to school?
I could afford cheap education if I didn't buy a luxury item, If I could not go to school, I would've probably tried to get a job, but I suspect that no one would hire me because they wouldn't want a person that was illiterate except the jobs that require strength, even so, they won't hire me because I'm not all that strong. They would rather have someone with better efficiency when the costs are the same.

How would it feel to have to choose between food and health care?
It felt rather awful because it was either better food or better health care and neither of them are that good. They were both cheap and cost more than half of my entire "bank account". I would rather have better food because if you had better food, you wouldn't have such low immunity to viruses because you will be more healthy and it would be less likely to get sick.

How many of you have ever been very sick or gone to a hospital or had friends and family who have? What would your life be like now if you had been unable to get medical care?
My grandma once fell down the stairs. She almost died and the fall affected her eyesight a lot. Now she is half blind and can barely see. If there had been no medical care at the time, I wouldn't ever see my grandma again. Even though she now has bad eyesight, it is good that she's still alive. My life would be very different from now, because usually when I go home, there is only my grandma, because my mother is in Taipei with my brothers and my dad is usually at work.The reason that my grandma had gotten medical care in time was because that my dad was a doctor so he had special privileges.

What were the impacts caused by people with fewer Global Mall Dollars, and what were the impacts caused by people with more Global Mall Dollars?
The impacts caused by the people with fewer money was much smaller than the impacts caused by the rich people. That is because when most rich people demand something of high quality, then the ingredients will have to be made of obtained and to obtain those ingredients, people who are in need of money, will apply for jobs to obtain the ingredients. That is one of the impacts rich people cause. I am not saying that poor people don't do any impact at all, the poor people also caused some impacts, for without them, the rich people would just be normal people with a lot of green paper, which is useless, because there would be no one to obtain the ingredients of an item and there would be no one to put the ingredients together to make the products.

Discuss the fact that roughly one-fifth of all people worldwide survive on less than $1 (U.S.) a day – how does this limit their choices, and what are the environmental, social, and global security implications of this?
They don't have money to buy a lot of food or clothing. They can't pay their house rent and they might live in a bad environment which is unhealthy for them.

When you were choosing what to buy, did you think about the environmental impact? For those of you in the lowest income range, did you have a choice about the environmental impact you produced? If not, how did it feel to not have a choice?
I didn't think of the environmental impact at the time, because I was already poor so I couldn't have gotten anything else if I wanted to live. I felt like I didn't have a choice about the environment impact because those were the minimal requirements for me to survive. It was either buy it or die. So of course I bought it.

(This is all hypothetical)