Poverty
A young boy from a very poor family went with his father to town for the first. In town the boy saw people dressed decently, with nice long panties, shirts, dresses, and shoes. He saw people riding in beautiful cars. The boy and his father passed by a nice restaurant, when they met a satiating smell of food, and saw through the glass window people seated and enjoying good food. The boy, in his tartars, and without shoes, looked straight into his father’s eyes; looked at himself, and again on his father’s face, and asked his father: „Father, are we also people?”
One thing I have always hated is Sin. But I have since learned the other thing to hate. Poverty. With a correct understanding of what it is and what it does to people we would not only hate it but move to action against it.Poverty is not simply having less money than others or lower than a certain expected spending level or not having the means to get food or education or a good place to sleep. These are only its manifestations. Poverty is a situation of total absence of opportunities, accompanied by high levels of undernourishment, food insecurity, illiteracy or poor education, physical ailments, emotional and social instability and hopelessness.
Rather than participate in economic, social and political activities, the individual poor are relegated to social exclusion and denied access to the benefits of development. Because of the uneven distribution of opportunities and employment in poor countries, the poor lack access to jobs with good wages and working conditions, stability, safety and security. The lucky poor are relegated to jobs with low wages and extremely poor working conditions, and of course there is never anything in the form of employment for the unlucky ones.
Unfortunately, we often think that the poor really do not need comfort or that they are used to living uncomfortably. The fact is that they have painfully surrendered to those perpetually trying circumstances because they feel there is nothing they can do to change them. Indeed, creative solutions may be hard to find when one continually suffers from disease and sicknesses and faces premature and often undignified death.
Thus, as if strongly bound by some power, a person in poverty is unable to free himself from it and is often a part of a prolonged weave of conditions of poverty from generation to generation. Ultimately, poverty destroys hope -that mankind’s inner urge and upward flight into the beyond- and leads to severe loss of human dignity.
I have seen people in Africa and Asia living like wild animals, because of poverty. People in such conditions raise many questions - questions that reflect a serious doubt of their own humanity and even the sincerity of people trying to help them out of poverty. They ask questions that suggest their quest for some supernatural intervention but also doubting the love, mercy and even ability of God to remove poverty from them. Although God is always loving, caring, and one ready to provide for humanity, extreme poverty tends to conceal this God’s true nature and portray the wrong image of God - to the poor and the rich alike!
Thus poverty is the other thing to hate. I only hope that, as part of our faith life we will hate poverty in increasing measures and get to do something serious about it!
The author has degrees in Communication and Biblical Studies and is country director of Compassion International in Tanzania
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