Derek and Shea in SA

can you describe poverty?

I'm reading this really really great book called "When Helping Hurts".  It is written to the North American church and beggs the question, what the **** should we, the wealthiest people to have ever walked the face of the earth (materially speaking) be doing to serve the poor?  But more importantly it looks at all the things we have done and are doing that have the best intentions but are actually hurting those we are trying to serve.  It all starts by defining poverty.  I found this exercise to be intriguing...

"What is poverty?  Make a list of words that come to your mind when you think of poverty"

The following responses have been taken from a study in the 1990's from the World Bank-the responses listed below are words that the poor used to describe their own situation:

"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

"[The poor have] a feeling of powerlessness and an inability to make themselves heard."  -Cameroon

"Do you see any difference between how you described poverty at the start of this chapter and how the poor describe their own poverty?  Is there anything that surprises you? While poor people mention a lack of material things, they tend to describe their condition in far more psychological and social terms. North American audiences tend to emphasize a lack of material things such as food, money, clean water, medicine, housing, etc... This mismatch between many outsiders perceptions of poverty and of poor people themselves can have devastating consequences for poverty alleviation efforts.

When a sick person goes to the doctor, the doctor could make two crucial mistakes: 1) Treating symptoms instead of the underlying illness; 2) Misdiagnosing the underlying illness and prescribing the wrong medicine.  Either one of these mistakes will result in the patient not getting better and possibly getting worse.  The same is true when we work with poor people.  If we treat only the symptoms or if we misdiagnose the underlying problem, we will not improve their situation and we might actually make their lives worse.

The problem goes well beyond the material dimension, so the solutions must go beyond the material as well."

So how then must we define poverty?