What is Poverty?



Doris, Valarie (daughter) and Grace in front of her home

 Since arriving to Malawi, I (Sarah) have been wrestling with the challenge of trying to understand my role in the poverty I see every day.  In the first month of being here at ABC we had an orientation where we were told that compared to the Malawians we were considered to be like “Bill Gates”.   Intellectually I understood that what we have in material possessions and wealth far exceeds what the typical Malawian would ever expect to have in their lifetime. However, this concept didn’t strike home until Monday, September 26 when
Doris (our house woman) received a call that her home was on fire.  She dropped everything and with Bruce and Vincent (our gardener) raced to her home in the village.  Thankfully her neighbors noticed the smoke billowing from her home and broke down the door to put out the fire before Bruce, Doris and Vincent arrived.   Due to the quick action of her neighbors, Doris only lost a few personal possessions.  Bruce hired a worker and left money for cement to be purchased to fix the front door and address any damages that could be fixed.  Later that day, we drove to Doris’s home to see how she was doing and to make sure that the work was done on her front door.  Despite the fire, Doris was proud to show us her home.  It is a fine home with 4 tiny rooms (2 bedrooms, kitchen and a sitting room).  The size of her entire house is probably the size of our living room.  Even though Doris’s house did not burn down, it was still heartbreaking for me to know that she had lost some things in the fire because she had such little to start with. 

After Doris’s house fire, I experienced several days of heavy guilt for living in a beautiful home furnished with lots of appliances, clothes, and an extreme over abundance of material wealth and possessions.  However, my perception changed when I saw a posting for an article by Steve Saint on my friend's facebook account entitled “Projecting Poverty where it does not Exist”.  Saint writes, “We in the “Wealthy West” have little understanding of “poverty.”… Among people living simply amidst abundant resources, poverty is not measured in annual income or net worth, but in “what I have in comparison to what those around me have. In such contexts poverty is more of an attitude and a mood than an actual state of having or not having something.”  In the book “When Helping Hurts”, a survey of 60,000 poor people from 61 low income countries was conducted around the question of “what is poverty?”  The same survey was also conducted in dozens of middle to upper class North American churches and the results showed that “poor people typically talk in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation and voicelessness.  [However] North American audiences tend to emphasize a lack of material things such as food, money, clean water, medicine housing etc.” (Corbett/ Fink, pp 53). 

Combating poverty is not about the handout but in the attitude of how we treat people who have less than we do.  We will always have the poor among us and God will continue to call us to minister to them.  However, perhaps the bigger call is to treat people with the love of God, dignity, compassion and respect no matter their financial status in life.  

Check out these resources mentioned in the above posting:

* http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/projecting-poverty-where-it-doesnt-exist#.ToQ11M2AQo

 * “When Helping Hurts- How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor and Yourself” by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert