Fix poverty by getting to know a poor person

16 October 2014

Anti-Poverty Week suggests that poverty is a thing to be uprooted, extirpated, warred against and conquered.

The image is helpful in suggesting the care needed to identify why people are poor, and the determination and planning necessary to enable them to live with dignity. But it is less helpful if it encourages us to think of poverty primarily as a problem to be solved or an enemy to be destroyed.

We should imagine poverty primarily as people. The abstraction embraces all the people who cannot live a fully human life because they lack the conditions for flourishing. People who are poor variously lack nourishment, shelter, sanitation, medical care, security, education, access to work and the ability to participate in society. Their faces are human but the conditions under which they live are inhumane.

Poverty is not simply about people as individuals but about people in their relationships. People are sometimes born into poverty because of the inability of others to make and sustain good relationships. Living in poverty puts great strain on people’s intimate relationships as well as on their relations to society and their environment. People living in rural poverty strip hillsides of vegetation in order to survive. Suburbs in which people live in poverty may be marked by broken windows and defaced public places.

Living in poverty also hinders people from making connections with society. Some can’t afford to travel in order to find work. If they have no stable home and lack access to computers they will find it difficult to participate fully in education. And if they cannot make these connections to society they easily become isolated and despondent. This is the human face we see in media images of poverty.

To imagine poverty fully, though, we need to go beyond individuals in their personal relationships and see them in the network of relationships that compose a society. When these relationships are healthy we will see ourselves as interdependent with all others in society. So we recognise our responsibility to contribute to the good of the whole society and particularly to people who are disadvantaged. People who are poor are the business of those who are better off. In complex societies governments have the responsibility to order society in a way that respects the dignity of poor people.

Ultimately people will be prepared to accept responsibility for people who are poor only if they know them as persons and not

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Fix poverty by getting to know a poor person

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