Much more to poverty than physical and material deficits

RECENTLY I said goodbye to my eldest son before he headed overseas for three months to Nairobi, Kenya. He will be serving in a church called Nairobi Chapel. Part of his time there will be ministry in the slum called Kibera, which houses around half a million residents who earn less than $US1 a day.

As part of his preparation, Sam has been doing some interesting study including a seminar called ‘‘Helping without Hurting’’.

At our last New Zealand general election, one of the key concerns was poverty in our country, and the growing gap between rich and poor. Both our main political parties committed to reducing child poverty which we can all surely applaud, but a question that has been bugging me for some time is ‘‘what is poverty?’’.

We in the West almost always define poverty in terms of a lack of material things: income, housing, food, healthcare or wealth. But as you travel around the globe, you quickly realise that the Majority World most definitely does not define poverty this way . . . for good reason.

In 2000, the World Bank commissioned a study called ‘‘Voices of the Poor’’. They surveyed 60,000 people around the globe, asking the question ‘‘what is poverty?’’.

Here is a small sample of the many answers:

‘‘Poverty is lack of freedom, enslaved by crushing daily burden, by depression and fear of what the future will bring.’’ (Georgia)

‘‘For a poor person, everything is terrible. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of.’’ (Maldova)

‘‘Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be free.’’ (Jamaica)

‘‘If you want to do something and have no power in it, it is poverty.’’ (Nigeria)

For people in the Majority

AAAAWorld, they almost always describe poverty in relation to emotional, psychological, spiritual and relational deficits. They speak of a lack of dignity, of feeling inferior, of their voice not being heard and, of course, of broken relationships.

One of the women speaking at the seminar ‘‘Helping not Hurting’’, describes asking people in Rwanda to define poverty. She noted that 90% of the responses reflected emotional issues in relation to poverty and only 10% described the material or physical realities of poverty. For those of us who have grown up in the West with its relentless worship of the material, we struggle to understand this. We define poverty in terms of low income, poor housing and lacking food, so when we come to find solutions to the problem what do we do? We dish out government money to the poor, build new state houses and we set up food banks. We feel better because we have done something, right? But then we are perplexed (or troubled) when we find that ‘‘poverty’’ keeps getting worse. Didn’t we give you money? Why is there still a problem?

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson star in a lovely (or fascinating) film called The Bucket List. Nicholson plays a very rich man, Edward Cole, who is estranged from his family and tramples over anyone to achieve his goals. Freeman plays a working class man with a terminal illness, who draws up a ‘‘bucket list’’ — things he wants to achieve before he kicks the bucket. With Cole’s help (and money), he achieves much of his list. At the death of his new friend Carter, Cole realises his own desperate poverty and the comparative wealth of the loving, praying, supporting family and church that Carter has. Cole begins to seek reconciliation with his estranged family.

Currently, in New Zealand, we are rightly concerned about the growing suicide figures.

When people talk about poverty around the globe, they use words such as alone, trapped, misery, useless, undeserving, shame.

Above all, a word that gets most used by the poor is hopelessness. There just doesn’t seem to be any way out of this mess. I am in bondage.

I wonder what would happen if we ‘‘focused’’ more on the ‘‘invisible’’ issues that surround poverty in this country? Jesus said, ‘‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’’ What if the greatest need for a child whose mother can only afford one meal a day was to know the truth that they are loved by the one who made them — the Creator?

What if the very money that our Government has been handing out to lowincome working families is actually the problem and not the solution? What if poverty is just as real in Maori Hill as it is in Corstorphine? What if the root of poverty is not financial but spiritual? What difference would that make to our responses to ‘‘the poor’’?

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