MENIFEE -- Life in a Third-World country became less abstract for students in a health class at Bell Mountain Middle School on Friday after a talk by someone who spent two years in Madagascar.

Rich Bowman Jr., the teacher, invited his son, who recently spent two years in Madagascar, to talk about his experiences and give a slide and video presentation so that his students could get a glimpse of daily life in an extremely poor Third-World country.

"I wanted to give my students a little perspective," Rich Bowman said. "From a health standpoint, it was a way to show how we as Americans take certain lifestyles and luxuries for granted.

"This is a way for my students to compare and contrast what it's like here in the United States to a different part of the world -- a way of showing them life on the street in one of the poorest countries of the world."

When the second-period health class started, Jay Bowman, Rich's son, explained that he had recently returned to the United States after having lived and worked as a missionary in Madagascar for two years. A former colony of France, the Republic of Madagascar is an island country located off the east coast of Africa.

Putting up a picture of five or six young children, Jay said that they were all homeless. He added that because at least 50 percent of the people in Madagascar live below the poverty level, parents often encourage their children to start begging for food and money at an early age. In contrast, he said that about 12 percent of Americans are below the poverty line.

On average, the people of Madagascar, or Malagasy, earn about $10 a month, Jay said. He said the country's main agriculture crop is rice, and that it is such a staple of their diet that they eat it three meals a day and occasionally top it with beans or some type of meat.

Children are taught to help plant and harvest the rice at an early age.

The Malagasy also eat bananas, peanuts, coconuts and mangoes, Jay said. A picture of the June bug-type beetles eaten by some people in Madagascar prompted a few comments of "Ewww!" from some of the students.

There are not that many indoor toilets in Madagascar, Jay said. He said that because the people there are so poor, they often go weeks or even months without showers or baths. Many people bathe in the rivers than flow near their villages, he said.

Many of the doctors in Madagascar aren't as well-educated as their American colleagues, and Jay said there is a lot of sickness and death in the country. He said most people buy medicines -- one for headaches and one a universal remedy for just about everything else -- from roadside stands.

Because of the daily hardships, many people in Madagascar look much older than they really are. Giving an example, Jay showed a picture of a 35-year-old woman with two children. When he asked the students to guess how old she was, they said things like "44" or "50."

Jay said the majority of the people in Madagascar don't drive. Instead, they use carts pulled by cows or oxen, rickshaws or bicycles. Others simply walk everywhere they go.

Unlike most Americans, who often have closets full of clothes, the Malagasy children Jay and his companions encountered often had little more than a shirt and a pair of shorts. Most didn't have any shoes.

Jay said most of the Malagasy adults have few, if any, teeth. He said he and the other people on the Church of Latter-day Saints mission often went to schools to teach the children oral hygiene and hand out toothpaste and brushes. When those items weren't available, he said, they taught children how to take care of their teeth with things such as sticks and charcoal.

"Why didn't you bring enough toothpaste and toothbrushes for all the kids?" one girl asked.

"There are about 18 million people in Madagascar, so that would have gotten a little expensive," Jay said.