In one of our sessions, we were asked how we would define poverty. Many of us said something like: when you don't have enough resources to meet your basic needs. Then we read a small excerpt from the book, "When Helping Hurts" by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkart. In this excerpt, the WorldBank did a study where they asked the question "what is poverty" to more than sixty thousand poor people from sixty low income countries. They did this as an effort to better understand the nature of poverty and how to combat it in a way that is beneficial to those who are poor. These are a few of the quotes that were recorded:
"For a poor person everything is terrible--illness, humiliation, shame. We are cripples; we are afraid of everything; we depend on everyone. No one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of." -Moldova
"When one is poor, she has no say in public, she feels inferior. She has no food, so there is famine in her house; no clothing, and no progress in her family." -Uganda
"If you are hungry, you will always be hungry; if you are poor, you will always be poor." -Vietnam
After reading these and other quotes, my eyes were open to the extensiveness of poverty and how people feel who are impoverished. Once I started to understand more about the nature of poverty, I started to understand how hope and dignity play a huge role in all this.
We are driven by our hope. If you want to run a marathon, it's the hope of winning that makes you train for it. Hope is what keeps us going, even when everything around us seems to be falling apart. Without hope, life can be depressing and well, hopeless.
Dignity. When we treat someone with dignity, we are communicting to them that they have value; that they are worth our time and energy. When we show people dignity, it takes interacting with them in a personal, relational way.
So instead of asking "What will I do?" now I'm asking "How will I live?"
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