Roots
The face of poverty
By Marifi Jara
QUELIMANE, Mozambique–“I am tired of being poor.”
This is one of the most haunting lines I have ever read. It was written by one of my students, a young man from Lingayen, for a personal essay assignment in our feature writing class then. He would have graduated by now and I wonder how he is doing. It was his face that crossed my mind as I was reading the draft copy of the news a couple of weeks ago about Pangasinan being the poorest province in Region 1.
Truth is, his face – kind and innocent with a tinge of sadness in the eyes but always ready with a rather shy smile – has become the face of poverty for me, even out here in Mozambique, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. (In the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Index list of 177 countries, Mozambique ranks 172 while the Philippines is at 90.)
I have long been intending to write about poverty here, particularly in an effort to reply to a query about it posted by one of our regular contributors in The Sunday PUNCH online forum, Mr. Jose Ceralde. But I must say it’s a difficult topic, because it is depressing.
It would be easy to cite statistics. Like in the last week of August, the World Bank released a report saying it has increased its estimate of the number of people around the world living below the poverty line to 1.4 billion, significantly higher than the 2007 figure of 985 million. But it bears thinking how the poverty line is defined — $1.25 (it used to be just $1!) per person a day. So if you have that, technically you are not below the poverty line. But can a person actually live decently on that covering even just the basics? In the same week, the Asian Development Bank also issued a report about the Asian Poverty Line (slightly higher at $1.35 a day. Yeah!) and the Philippines is said to have about 25.4 million people living below that, which would be about 30% of our total population.
But writing about poverty based on numbers feels distant and somewhat cold to me. In fact, after those two reports that week, there have hardly really been any follow-up news about it. The world was not shaken. Unlike in the recent crash of the financial system in the US – a running story and hogging the headlines for weeks now – which has rippled on to Europe and sending jitters in Asia and elsewhere. Actually, that has in some way been the trigger that finally pushed me to put together something about poverty. It got me to thinking about what impact all that commotion will have out here? Will all that make it even worse?
I don’t think it will push the country further down the HDI index, but perhaps foreign aid money, on which Mozambique and many other African countries depend on, would be cut back. There isn’t much foreign investment here from the west — or the north to use another development jargon — (I hear that doing business here is pretty tough and rough) and so there would not be much threat on employment lay-offs. Employment, as it is, is difficult enough. On more than one occasion, as I am standing either just outside or in the pathway near our gate, I have been approached by people asking if we got a bit of work to offer. Looking at those faces of quiet desperation but with determination – not the same as the somewhat dramatic expressions that most beggars have – makes poverty real and burning to me.
Perhaps that is the same reason why I would like to think of that young man from Pangasinan when I think about poverty. In him, I see a calm resolve to find a way out of his situation. Armed with an education, for which his family has had to sacrifice so much for, he knows he has more choices to make life at least, to borrow his term, less tiring. To me, he is not just the face of poverty, but the spirit of hope.
(Readers may reach columnist at marifijara@gmail.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/roots/
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