A tough one:
What aspects of Western culture do you hope to share with your girls and which aspects to you hope they don't adopt? I imagine just like medications, sometimes the cures for extreme poverty might have some serious side effects. Have you found this to be the case? In what ways?
Like most Westerners finding themselves working with extreme poverty, I have had many ideas how to eradicate it. From the beginning, I have realized that I could not/can not solve the problem of world poverty. Yet I believed I could solve the problem of poverty for individuals. I hoped to enable them to learn to fish, and therefore feed themselves for a lifetime.
Notice the past tense in that last sentence. No longer can I say that I have any kind of solution for poverty, even on an individual basis. The causes of poverty, at least financial poverty, are beyond my control.
The basic assumption is flawed in my opinion. The assumption being that to solve the problem of poverty we need to get more money in the hands of the poor. If we can only do that, then all will be well.
Like the question above implies, this usually just brings about more problems than solutions.
Take a middle class Kenyan as an example. Most of them are just one emergency away from poverty. Just one major illness, car accident, loss of job, death of a family member, or some other unforeseen circumstance will see them moved back to the slum.
Money is not necessarily the solution. In fact it could be the problem.
Poverty is not only the absence of money. I don’t have any money, yet poor is not an adjective I would use to describe myself. We need to learn to free ourselves from the clutches of money. As a people we need to understand that there is more to life than acquiring possessions. Life is about life, not material objects. No matter how shinny they are.
What I want to share with the poor here in Kenya is decidedly not an American ideal. In fact it is very much un-American. It is something so foreign to the world, that most cannot get it. So counter intuitive, that we can be forgiven for not getting it.
It is this:
Blessed are the poor.
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