Maintaining Poverty

All of us are born into a specific social class that depends on luck, virtuousness, destiny, or whatever reason you choose to believe. As plenty of people have demonstrated one can move up or down the social class ladder throughout their lifetime or even up and down a couple of times. However, lots of people stay in the class they were born in whether that is because of low self-esteem/confidence, lack of opportunities, vices, bad judgment...again, the list of "whys" can go on and on and is usually case specific or perspective dependent. Moving up the ladder is definitely possible, but it requires a lot of hard work and good timing and opportunities.

I live in a community that lives below the poverty line. Everyone here was born into one of the lowest classes possible, though I'm positive not the lowest due to the number of opportunities there are. Lots of people from my community and throughout the country go to the United States in order to look for opportunities to get them a little higher up on the ladder. Some are successful for a period of time and then come back, use up the money they saved from the States, and return to the same class from which they came. Some stay in the U.S. and might live in low conditions for a resident of the U.S., but they are higher up than where they came from. They send money back home and raise their family members a little too. While I'm happy for them in their climb on the ladder, it saddens me that they seem to only be able to do so with help from the States.

There are some exceptions, for example my health promoter. She is probably one of the most motivated people in my community and I see big things for her in her life. She's got brains and demonstrated to her parents how crucial it was for her to be allowed to study. She started school at a time when most people here weren't sending their kids to school because it meant fewer hands around the house, but she wanted to take advantage. And she studied hard and was able to get a scholarship to go to high school, which eventually landed her a job as a health promoter. She has a steady job, which is something nearly unheard of in my village. From her income, she has been able to pay to go to college on the weekends and will graduate with a Bachelor's degree in business administration in December. Her income has also helped her pay for the internet, allowing her to study other languages on top of English at her university. To say the least she is gung-ho and she's got dreams and I'm sure will follow them.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, is the majority of my community. The reason this came up as a blog topic was because I received a shipment of donated electric toothbrushes from my future brother-in-law who is an engineer at a product design company. Lots of people have toothbrushes here, but they are probably years old and not used with frequency or properly. Sure times are changing and tooth care is improving, but there's still a lot of improvement. Now, I didn't have enough brushes for every kid in my village, so I decided to give them to the poorest of the kids since it is a luxury item and often the poorest are the ones that can't afford toothbrushes. I held a meeting to do a brushing demo (with the health promoter) and to give out the brushes. And to my shock, some of the poorest kids didn't come. Maybe their parents were busy or forgot, but it just reminded me that sometimes people like their own pity party. A lot of people here complain about being poor, but do nothing about it. They don't take advantage of opportunities presented to them, no matter how small or big. They don't have the self-confidence to go out on a limb in order to live a better life.

While this concept is a little mind-boggling to me, someone who tries to take advantage of good opportunities and isn't greedy, but works towards a better education and more wealth, I can't do anything about it. I can invite, teach, demonstrate, provide, donate, and whatever other verbs apply, but if they don't have enough desire, there is no way that I can help. So I'll just sit by watching them scrape enough nickels to buy bread and listen to them complaining about being poor until they get it in their heart's desire to change their own situation.