globalisation

Ø First World A New World Order with great opportunities and freedoms.

Ø Third World A situation in which a person is likely to lose his/her job and welfare (health, education, pension and the like) and likely to have to cope with draconian national security laws.

poverty

Ø First World The condition in which a person becomes entitled to the dole.

Ø Third World The condition in which a person may starve or be malnourished, and has no entitlements or any form of social recognition of his/her existence.

"There is a vast distance between somebody living in the First World speaking about poverty and somebody, let’s say, from Sri Lanka. Poverty, for instance in Germany, means to have an income only the half of the minimum earnings of a salaried worker. And that will mean you cannot participate in the normal cultural life, you cannot afford things and events your neighbours can. Single women with children, families with a lot of children, elder people without family support, immigrants and other groups are sharing this fate. But they don’t starve, and normally they have a home. That’s a big difference I suppose. And they have a real chance (or their children) to improve their situation. In Sri Lanka, where I stayed for some month (nearly three years ago) in the countryside (near Gampaha, not in tourist resorts), I met poor people and I noticed the difference to European poverty. But it was my first experience as a professor of political science in a Third World country and at that time I had already the age of 56! So you can imagine...."(Quoted from a personal letter of a German professor of political science.)

prostitution

Ø First World A choice, with a guarantee of medical examinations.

Ø Third World The last option, with a very real possibility of becoming a victim of HIV/AIDS.

youth

Ø First World Begins some time at about the age of 14 with the right to live alone, to experiment and explore life; the time a person becomes entitled to the dole, if he/she is not well off.

Ø Third World The time a person becomes aware of the helplessness of the people he/she loves and his/her inability to help; the time a person begins to develop gastritis or some other anxiety syndrome.Ñ

Prepared by Basil Fernando