However, I'm really not interested in writing another article that lists all the statistics of deprivation: financial, social, cultural, etc.. When I’m back on the reservation, the definition of poverty becomes less distinct. In fact, how we even determine what ‘poor’ is must be called into question. It seems to me that those who ‘have’ are given the authority of determining what should be expected to be ‘normal’. Just how much one has—as far as property, material goods, and money are concerned—determines where one falls on the scale of rich and poor. In developed nations, this is over and above the basic necessities of food, water, and shelter. We draw a line on a chart that creates a delineation of those who ‘have’ and those who ‘have not’ and we each set about the business of trying to get away from that line…preferably above it.
But that line, to me, doesn't make much sense when one really decides to stop looking at charts and definitions and tackles the real and messy adventure of living with people and addressing them individually. A young Navajo teenager told me, a few years ago, how insulted she felt that she was described as poor because she lived in a small three-room house with four or five adults and six children. What wasn't taken into account in this family's evaluation was the fact they didn’t want to be indoors unless they were sleeping. A brush arbor beside the house resting on a dry, arid mesa was where this family cooked and ate together. A sweat lodge in back held numerous sacred ceremonies, and a couple of traditional hogans were accommodations for elder grandparents. The earth was her home, the house only a small section of that home.
She told me she would be miserable living like white people in large, tailored houses; and, indeed, she was when she stayed with me, for a few months the following year, in a two-story farmhouse in Kansas. The definition of poverty is too often created from a single vantage point, and not in collaboration with the ‘defined’.
However, I’ve been in many, many places where misery and squalor abound, where poverty reeks of death, disease, and violence. It’s ugly in every sense—through what one hears, sees, smells, tastes, and touches. There’s no beauty. There’s an absence of dignity in daily life. But this apathy doesn’t necessarily exist in the countries one would expect it the most, the ‘less developed’. Surprisingly, the ugliness of apathy exists to a greater degree in countries where there is great wealth and an overdeveloped welfare state; where people live without a sense of who they are in community and in relation to one another. A doctor and author, Theodore Dalrymple, working in poor areas of London, hosted doctors from India and the Philippines, and together they came to this conclusion about what they experienced among the poor in England:
"By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead, it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning."1
Even the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2001 determined that the simplified definition of poverty solely in economic terms was inadequate. "Economic deprivation—lack of income—is a standard feature of most definitions of poverty. But this in itself does not take account of the myriad of social, cultural and political aspects of the phenomenon. Poverty is not only deprivation of economic or material resources but a violation of human dignity too."2
The confusing part for me is that when one is only concerned with what one lacks, what one has is forgotten. A sense of being deprived sets in and gratitude eases out the back door. The deprivation then becomes spiritual, not material, and that's when the outer symptoms of what we see to be poverty begin to manifest in fast food wrappers and broken glass, destruction and brutality, towards people and property. It gets ugly. When all of life is approached with a fast food mentality—not taking the time for preparing a meal and eating it together—the social and cultural fabric of society falls apart. The beauty is in the time spent—in the process of creating a meal, a relationship, a home. When that’s absent, then caring about those things evaporates.
Lest you think I’m minimizing the pervasive poverty in developing nations, I’ll assure I’m not. The poor are everywhere and in every country, but what makes us truly poor is what I’m attempting to point out.
"'On the whole,' said one Filipino doctor to [Dr. Dalrymple], 'life is preferable in the slums of Manila'. He said it without any illusions as to the quality of life in Manila."3
The British doctor goes on to explain their collective observation:
“Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.”4
I know poverty isn’t really about possession and income because I’ve found joy, happiness, contentment, beauty, peace, and a great deal of wisdom among the poor. Yes, I’ve found suffering, but I also work in one of the wealthiest communities in the state of Texas. Here, the marbled sepulchers which are beautifully botoxed women and tan, fit men are to be seen everywhere. Yet, my community reports shockingly higher than average numbers of suicide, violence, sexual abuse, auto accidents, and addictions. It's just easier to hide that behind the pretty double French doors of a custom-built home. If people there admit the need for help, they’ll drive to another community to seek it out so as not be seen in need.
In places where people still take time for cooking and sharing a meal, keeping communal ties, singing and dancing, telling jokes and stories, sharing in the struggles of daily life, and knowing the dignity of the human spirit, there’s beauty, wisdom, and a glimmer of hope—no matter how meager the resources and how great the suffering. Those who want to ‘help’ the poor serve themselves and the poor better by steering clear of ‘doing for’ and offering, instead, an approach of reciprocity and allowing that each party has something to learn from the other. Acknowledging and honoring that, even in a simple way, also eliminates the destructive hierarchy of presupposed ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
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