"I am married to the president of the United States, and here's our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I'm watching Desperate Housewives—with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife,” quipped First Lady Laura Bush during her amusing star turn at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in May.

 

            While women in this country have the luxury of debating whether ABC’s hit show is a campy satire of suburban life or a sexist portrayal of backbiting women (see the debate online at www.msmagazine.com), the real “desperate housewives” of the world are trying to raise their children in extreme poverty, surrounded by brutal wars, preventable diseases, and the chaos caused by men in and out of government who just can’t get along.

 

            One-sixth of the world’s population subsists on one dollar or less a day, and we, the women of this wealthy nation, can help them. My summer reading this year is “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time,” written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals project, which has set forth an ambitious but doable plan to cut global poverty in half by the year 2015. As I read this book on the train to work, I can’t help but wonder why those of us who can plunk down $2 or $3 for a cup of coffee every morning can’t open our hearts—and our wallets—as we did for the victims of the tsunami last December to ease the pain of so many suffering women and children around the world.

 

Private tsunami donations from the United States totaled $1.2 billion, as of April 28, 2005, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. That tsunami killed approximately 176,000 people. By contrast, according to Sachs, currently more than eight million people die every year “because they are too poor to stay alive.” Every day, 8,000 children die of malaria, and 5,000 mothers and fathers die of tuberculosis. These people do not have to die. “Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty,” Sachs says. What’s more, “the destinies of the ‘haves’ are intrinsically linked to the fates of the ‘have-nothing-at-alls’; if we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on Sept. 11, 2001,” declares U2 singer/global activist Bono in his foreword to Sachs’s book. Definitely something to think about.

 

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) seek to, among other things, reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty, eliminate gender disparity in education, empower women, reduce child mortality, and improve maternal health. What would happen if the women of this and other prosperous nations got behind them? Think what could happen if you donated a portion of your paycheck, rallied other women on your “Wisteria Lane” or city block, organized women’s club and school events to raise money, got your husbands and children involved. “When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion” goes an Ethiopian proverb. Believe that you can make a difference, and you will.

 

            How can you get involved? For starters, visit www.un.org (click on Welcome and then U.N. Millennium Development Goals) to read more about the goals and connect with the various civic organizations that are working towards their realization—organizations like NETAid’s Global Sisters (www.netaid.org/global-sisters/) or Civicus: The World Alliance for Citizen Participation (www.civicus.org) or UNICEF (www.unicef.org).

 

            UNICEF has a “Wedding Gift” program that provides a terrific alternative to predictable (and generally useless) wedding favors. Here’s how it works: you make a donation to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF from a link on its Web site, and UNICEF will send attractive tent cards to be placed on your wedding-reception tables, recognizing the donation you made in your guests’ names.

 

Speaking of weddings, if you know someone who is planning to walk down the aisle this summer, pass along this cautionary tale in our current issue: “Advice for All Young Brides-to-Be: ‘Love Is Irrational . . . Marriage Is Financial: Reflections on the Slow Unraveling of a 20-Plus-Year Marriage.” Then, as counterpoint, read the charming, day-in-the-life account written by two happily married British stock traders, who share “How they make money from their spare bedroom—in their PJ’s.”

 

            For those of you who want to globetrot on a tight budget, we have advice for planning “A Great Summer Escape for Under a Grand.” A daughter’s moving celebration of her dying mother’s joie de vivre, “Smile!” offers a hard-won lesson about the potentially tragic consequences of delayed referrals—and diagnosis—under managed care. In “Single Parenting Is Double the Work,” single moms raising their kids alone get advice from our “Working Mom’s Shrink.” Our “Funny Business” columnist discovered that “Baby’s Just Another Name for Spending Spree!” after the arrival, this spring, of her new granddaughter. “I bathed my daughter in a yellow plastic cylinder. Poor baby,” she writes. “Now we have spa babies.”

 

            No spa babies in the Third World. The poorest of us live lives as pampered as the ladies of Wisteria Lane, compared with the “desperate housewives” of Sudan, or Rwanda, or Bangladesh. Revel in your relative prosperity, grateful for the fact that you don’t have to live on a dollar a day, and try to find some dough to help those who do, won’t you?

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