Ever since leaving the days of my pre-adolescence naivety I
have strongly believed that the words “rich” and “poor” were relative. You are always richer than someone and you
are always poorer than someone. However,
my views may have been more accurate when I was a kid.
I remember when I was young anyone with a two-story house or
more than one functional vehicle was placed into the category of “well off”
(aka rich) right along with Bill Gates and President Clinton. Rich people could buy whatever they wanted,
go wherever they wanted, and eat as many chips and snickers bars as they
chose. They had no worries in life; they
were rich. While us poor kids envied
their Schwinn bicycles and weekly allowance, we also condemned the rich kids to
lives of spoiled ingratitude and incapacitating weakness. If I learned anything at all from the Boxcar
Children, it was that poor kids always won the fistfights.
As I grew older I found that a lot of those people with
two-story houses and multiple cars described themselves as poor and placed the
magical line of wealth that divided worry-free lives from suffering at some
arbitrary level even higher. I also
became aware of a people group referred to as “the homeless” who lived in
dumpsters and begged for food. I
corrected my naive world view and concluded that it was all relative. Even an aerospace engineer had to worry about
finances; compared to a CEO who just picked out whatever car he wanted
according to his fancy, he could be considered poor. The same way, even a homeless person begging
outside of McDonald’s is rich compared to those impoverished pot-bellied
orphans in Africa.
The World Bank doesn't think like that
though. They place the international
poverty level at exactly $1.25 a day. There
is a definite line and if you earn less than that you are poor. As I began to travel a little bit I started
to wonder if maybe it really was that black-and-white after all and I had only
believed otherwise because I grew up in such a rich country. I’d never met anyone who lived on less than
$1.25 a day. I’d never met a poor person in
my life until I went to West Africa. I’m
not sure poor people actually exist within the States. Even the poorest homeless person lives on more than $450 a year. Suddenly it seemed obvious though; there are a certain number of people in the world who are lacking the necessities of life, somebody out there is the poorest person in the world and somebody is the richest and that's where the scale ends.
Though I was convinced from my travels that there is an
actual black-and-white line between rich and poor, I still didn't necessarily
agree that that line was $1.25 a day. After
all, $1.25 goes quite a bit further here in India than in the States, at least in
some categories. Recently I came across
a definition of poor that came from an actual poor person (not sure why I never
thought to ask one before). “The
difference between poor people and rich people is that poor people are
hungry. If you aren't hungry then you’re
rich.” He wasn't talking about being
hungry between meals, he was talking about being hungry all the time, from
sunrise to sunset, even during and after meals.
Imagine removing all the unnecessary things from your
life. Your vehicle, your washing
machine, your roof and walls, your clothes, your oven, your hose faucet, your
health insurance, and your toilet paper.
Just bare survival. Now imagine
that even with all those expenses gone, living barefoot on the sidewalk, you
still can’t afford to feed your family or even yourself. I don’t mean you can’t buy yourself a
happy-meal, I mean you can’t afford more than one meager portion of plain rice
per day and a small pile of cow dung with which to cook it. Now imagine you have lived that way for
years. Now you are poor.
As far as whether it is ‘better’ to be poor or not or
whether countries like the US who have far less poor people in them are
‘better’ I am not qualified to say. I
don’t have the ability to experience or even understand all the effects and
implications of true poverty; the hopelessness, lack of education, disease, and
everything else inferred by being poor.
I can, however, share a small glimpse I had into what it feels like to
be hungry, not because I couldn't afford food though, it was only self-imposed.
About two months ago I did a 5 day fast while, like the poor
people around me, still working full time.
It was the longest 5 days of my life.
I became extremely lethargic, unable to focus or think straight, void of
all motivation, distant from my surroundings, and by the last day even
dangerously ill. I remember sitting at
the bottom of the stairs up to my hotel room trying to work up the will power
to climb them, thinking that it surely will have been one of the biggest
accomplishments of my life. At least I
had a comfy hotel room to look forward to.
My work isn't even as physically demanding as most of the poor people
here in Kolkata, who carry giant loads of goods on their heads or strain
against rickshaws all day. Imagine every
day exerting yourself to your physical limits but only eating a single bowl of
plain rice; and for years on end! For
billions of people in the world that is just life.
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