A Thought

Poverty. This has been something that has been discussed in a class recently. It is interesting to see how explosive a discussion of poverty can be. I have recently finished a book about squatters called "Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World." One of the things brought out in this book is that some of the people who are living in these squatter communities are quite happy. They do not care about property ownership, if offered a title deed they might take it. However, this would mean for some they would have to go deeper into debt. It is easier for them to live in an illegal city than in the legal one.
Many believe those that are in poverty stricken areas hate it there and want nothing more than to move out. While this is true for some, it is not necessarily true for all. I applaud those that have been able to get out of the poverty areas, yet there are those that are still there. It is heart wrenching to see these people in dire need of help. What is the answer for these people?
I have none. The reason I say this is because whatever model I come up with is from an outsider's perspective. I have not been in these communities. I would have an etic approach to all of this. The poor will always be with us. We do need to help, that is obvious. How far can one go without allowing the people to become dependent? This is a question worth pondering.
That part of the post was written about two months ago. Recently I traveled to Honduras with my Church and got to see some abstract poverty up close. While we were there we pondered the exact same question. How to help these people? There was so much that these people needed that it was impossible for us to even begin to scratch the surface while we were there for one week. We just had to think through what could possibly be done. One thought was to buy some land for them so they could be able to farm the land, turn a profit, and live better lives. I, of course, pointed out how this would not help the people.
They would not become self-sufficient as they should. Instead they would become dependent upon the church. The church provided the land, they should be able to provide the money for the crops, and then the money for the tools to harvest the crops. This leads to providing money to help them reach the marketplace to sell the crop. This is a never ending cycle of needing money from the church to do more . The argument could of course be that once they make money, they would begin to pay the church back. Of course, the time for Coffee to grow and be harvestable is a long time. Which makes the money that the church needs to get paid back harder to have all the time. Instead of the money staying in Honduras it would go back to the church which is backing the production. This means the poor will stay poor and the church will slowly recoup the losses. This does not work.
One of the problems I think several of us were having was we were not thinking like they do. While we see a problem with people leaving the village to get a better life and send some money back, they really do not. This is what has always happened, it is in fact the trend for the world. The majority of the world's population is living in the city. Rural outposts like the one we were in are becoming scarce. Some are becoming ghost towns overnight, while more and more squatter communities are rising.
What can be done to help those in abstract poverty like we saw, without them becoming dependent or staying poor? I do not know. Whatever the answer, those who are poor need to be involved and they should not be stereotyped as something ugly. Because the majority of them are not the way many people think they are.