Poverty is not merely the absence of food to eat or the failure to meet one’s basic needs. Poverty is also the loss of self-respect and the compulsion to live dependent on others. Yet definitions of poverty have largely confined the matter to a condition of life marked by the lack of food, clothing, shelter and clean water.
As I write this, I can still see before my eyes a young man walking with his visually impaired wife and their two little children held close to him. I can still see them eating what seemed like a last supper, and then, with extraordinary care, making their way along a road crowded with vehicles, the young man holding his visually impaired wife and children close. Though he carried and protected them with the unwavering resolve that no harm should befall his loved ones, were all those efforts, in the end, merely preparations for a common grave in which they would all lie together?
There was a time when social media overflowed with emotional declarations of the sort: Had that family come to me, I would have embraced them and shared with them even half of what I had. But one must sincerely ask how many of those who made such declarations would actually have helped that family had they encountered them in the full intensity and harshness of their circumstances. And even then-for how long? To what extent?
That young man was, at times, blamed and ridiculed even for having married and for bringing children into the world. Advising those who come seeking help, scolding them and dwelling on their weaknesses and shortcomings are all expressions of the sense of superiority and condescension we exercise over them. When we help the poor, we imagine ourselves to be greater than they are. But no one is greater or lesser than another. It is each person’s misfortune that creates the circumstance in which they must stretch out a hand before someone else. If you have never, until now, passed through the experience of poverty, you may count yourself fortunate- for the poverty that has been allotted to so many has not fallen upon you.
No one can carry on the ordinary business of daily life by depending on another person indefinitely. Nor can anyone continue helping another forever. That is why everyone labours, with the sweat of their brow, for their daily bread. Yet the contradiction is this: some toil from dawn until night, and still nothing remains for them. Or rather, their labour is not valued in proportion to what they have given. For some, even a few minutes are worth millions; for others, an hour is worth scarcely ten.
Only one who has experienced poverty can truly understand the weight of another person’s deprivation. Only one who has stretched out a hand before another can understand the helplessness of someone else extending their hand in need. Poverty cannot be wiped away; it can only be endured.
