One billion people throughout the world live in severe poverty. As difficult as this may be for adults, it is far worse for their children. What if there were a Program that significantly improved the health and wellbeing of these children? What if it were simple, inexpensive and required little, if any, government or private funding? What if the Program showed them that the only supplies they needed were available natural resources and discarded items?

What if the Program taught the extremely poor how to find and catch fish, hunt and trap edible birds and animals, how to raise crops, how to build a simple solar stove that cooks without wood, and how to build a simple solar still to purify drinking water from the ocean?

A Pebble in the Pond of Poverty Program is a unique, revolutionary, low-cost, and multi-skill-based training Program that requires no government assistance because it is designed to be implemented by the members of the community it benefits. The key to its success is the core group of four to six motivated mothers, which acts as the primary catalyst for improvement in each impoverished community. These women learn the Program’s 12 Simple Survival Skills, 12 Educational Shortcut Skills, and 12 Income-Producing Skills, passing them along to their children with the help of either a special comic book filled with pictures, simple diagrams and photographs, or a DVD that can be viewed on a portable player. These innocent children have no choice but to live in severe poverty, but these heavy chains of poverty will only be broken from the inside, not from the outside. No one should underestimate the motivation, durability, and intelligence of impoverished mothers who want a better life for their children.

My work with impoverished and disabled children started thirty-five years ago when my youngest son was born with a severe neurological disability. Over the last 30 years, I have taught, worked with and performed surgery on disabled and impoverished children in over 80 countries.

In recent years, my focus has been three severely impoverished Mexican slums: Cumbers de Llano Largo and La Frontera, both in the vicinity of Acapulco, and in Mexico City at the largest garbage dump in the world. These areas are home to several thousand families living in abject poverty. Needless to say, the children suffer the most. For example, the children living in the Mexico City garbage dump have gunk crusted on their feet because they have no shoes, and the stench from the garbage is overwhelming. Worse yet, the entire dump was under three feet (one meter) of water following a 2009 flood.

The average hut in a shantytown is occupied by a mother and three children, all crammed into a room that’s about the size of the average American closet. It is windowless, rundown, leaky, and made from scraps of cardboard, wood and plastic. Inside is a dirt floor, usually with no beds, and the gaps in the walls can result in insects and scorpion infestation.

The children have no regular sources of food, clean running water, or electricity. There are no bathrooms or toilets. When available, the children usually eat pieces of tortillas and beans cooked over an open wood fire. High-grade protein is either scarce or nonexistent. The smoke from these open fires often leads to bronchitis and asthma in the children. They wear dirty clothes and have no shoes. In many cases, they have to sleep on dirt floors, which turn to mud during the rainy season. These floors remains muddy and the interior of the huts stay wet until the season changes.

Even when the family has a husband or older son working, there is barely enough money to buy food, clean water, or other essentials.