"Only Experienced Poverty is Real"

Two years in the depth of rural Tanzania working for an NGO gives one a perspective on poverty in action. Our clients, a group of farmers scattered across a series of remote villages, struggles to make ends meet as changing rain patterns and a dearth of high-quality fertilizers keep their farms unproductive. After a tough two years working to reverse these struggles, idealism turned into cynicism, hope into disillusionment. NGO workers, in the face of continued poverty, find themselves becoming too quick to blame others, whether it be government absence, unmotivated staff, or refusal for organizations, including their own, to prioritize projects that are realistically feasible rather than glamorous for publicity. 

Many people who never experienced the same thing could have shrugged off such concerns. They would think that the poor are poor for many reasons that are often not in their own control. The government and NGOs solely work for their own interests. And people who think this way would often be right.  The farmers of rural Tanzania are dealt a bad hand that they cannot simply swap out. The government is too busy attracting big corporations to think about small farmers that cannot even be taxed. White-collar workers are too busy adapting to life as the urban middle class to care about villages they left behind. NGOs are too busy listening to the directives of donors to push back against any demands that do not benefit farmers. For all of them, the rural clientele is no more than a medium to ensure and measure their own success. 

But there is an inherent danger in a world that sees the poorest as nothing more than a measuring stick. The danger lies in the disappearance of empathy, of ability to sympathize with plights of others stuck in suboptimal conditions. It makes people focus on how lucky they are for not being in poverty, but makes them forget that poverty can also strike anyone at any time. People begin to assume that the division of wealth is static, where the comparatively rich deserve better standards of living that they are simply born into. The past year has seen the world hit with wars, terror attacks, and natural disasters. In any of these cases, a normal person, perhaps quite well-off, could have been thrust into an event that greatly reduced personal or material well-being. 

In many of these cases, the world remained largely silent. The vast majority do not bother to find out who, and how many people, were newly impoverished by these disasters. People do not give enough attention because the disasters did not implicate them. They are not bothered because they still live their own lives in relative luxury, unperturbed by unfortunate events happening thousands of miles away.  But what if one day, disaster strikes in their neighborhood? Do they want others to pay only nominal attention only to put personal gains above real concerns for the suffering? 

Perhaps now people can look back at the rural Tanzanian farmers, and think a bit differently. The troubles brewing in one part of the world is ultimately linked to the fortunes of all parts of the world. The suffering of a Tanzanian farmer is due to many factors that can easily be replicated in other societies if the conditions are realigned in particular ways. Human developments are fragile, and there are many potential crises and conflicts that can quickly wipe out centuries of progress. When that happens, the suffering of the Tanzanian farmer would not feel distant even for the First World folks living in luxury.

It is all the more reason for everyone, not just a few idealistic do-gooders, to step into the midst of the suffering and live within it for at least a few months. In those few months, they should not spend all their energy being appalled by the dire conditions and handing out money to feel better about the luxuries back home. Instead, they should make every effort to understand what caused this particular society, for reasons big and small, personal and societal, to end up in the unpleasant reality. Only by understanding the underlying reasons can they go home and make sure those reasons are not replicated.

Human progress, in the end, exists as a comparison, in relative terms. A poor person would not know that s/he is poor until s/he has very conscious knowledge of how a rich person lives. Too many people, however, perceive that concept of “poor” and “rich” as black and white, static rather than dynamic, based on the limitations of their own experiences within the short spans of their lifetimes. Only by experiencing and learning the “poor” and the “rich” firsthand, a person can truly hope to find the reasons for the differences and lack thereof.  Without setting out to the most remote of farming villages, this learning cannot start.