What does poverty look like?

Question

I am glad to see the answerers who attacked me are no longer posted. I HAVE lived among people in the W. Hemisphere who subsist on less than$2/day. I also recently pulled out of Appalachian poverty not long ago myself. To me, poverty is when someone who wants your land can just take it. When the child you deliver on the floor of a dirt hut is dead next year because the hailstorm destroyed your crops and your body is too hungry to sustain it. When you raise chickens as a living bank account, to sell when you need money. When a $.50 vaccine costs too much, and leaders die of infections incurred in their daily work. When a stranger can walk into your home and take pictures of your family and you cannot tell them to leave. When you are in a bike accident on Monday and wait in bed at the hospital until Wednesday for a doctor. These are my friends I am talking about, not strangers. I have held them.Thanks for the thoughtful answers. A human face always brings a situation home to the viewer.

oh, yes, and the dogs survive by eating the human excrement on the ground.

Answer 1

Where do you live??

Answer 2

It's sad to say that most of us don't really know what true poverty means. Usually we mean "relatively poor" and not "poverished" or "absolutely poor" when we think of our fellow citizens that are struggling to make ends meet.

The World Bank definition of absolute poverty is living on between $1 and $2 per day. Very few people in rich countries like the UK or the US live on this little little. In contrast, the US defines "relative poverty" as having a family of four making less than 75% of all other families in the country. This level is more like $20,000 per year.

Answer 3

I seem to remember this question surfacing before.

Open your eyes sweetheart and look around you, unless you live in one of those fancy gated communities.

Go to any downtown section of a city or town, you'll see the face of poverty there in the people living on the streets. They may choose to live there or they may not have a choice but that's poverty. Or at least poverty of riches,not neccessarily poverty of spirit.

Look to Africa or any war torn country where people have to live at the end of a gun.

Look at those who are disabled in some way, but who have an 70 per cent unemployment rate that hasn't changed in 30 years, not because disabled people are lazy and don't want to work. Rather society's systemic discrimination holds them back and if it was any other racial group or religious sect there'd be screaming all over the place, but because people are disabled they don't count as real human beings anyway.

Watch the news , you'll see poverty. But you know where you'll see the most poverty and not in wealth, but in spirit, in most governments, too busy to give a real damn about the people who aren't in the socioeconomic status and arguing like children on the playground, now that's a kind of poverty of kindness and compassion we really don't need.

Answer 4

In many ways we have become impoverished in this country without knowing it. Our food and water and air is foul causing us to scramble to pay for health care that will fix what wasn’t a problem a century ago.

China with its industrial pollution and sky rocketing health troubles is a mirror of what we have done to ourselves. This is industrial poverty. We’ve traded easy calories warm houses and cheap transport for our health, the health of the natural world, and the beauty of the world. With 25,000 species going extinct every year at the height of our Industrial Age we do know poverty. ‘Juss don realize it.

Answer 5

when you go to the market and all the things you buy have flys all over it, when you eat you cant because the flys are competing for your food, when the makeshift lanterns mad out of coffee cans have no fuel to burn in them.

When your drinkking water is the same as your sewage water.
When the authorities can comeinto your home and arrest you because some tells them your bad and thats it.

When your food is dogs or frogs, or your dogs litter of puppies

Answer 6

poverty is dirtiest thing to look at.if you want to see it then you can travelled any of the deloping nations, more particularly in the remotest urban corner where the most underprivilage among the population leaves.it looks like the helpless emotions on face of hungry boy or shelterless old guy.

Answer 7

Ghetto

Answer 8

The face of poverty looks like desperation.

Answer 9

Watered down grey porridge in a cracked bowl. Now eat it...it's all you have for the day.

Answer 10

It has a human face come to Africa...